Eric, a commercial contractor I work with, runs his shop mostly solo. Every time he brings on a subcontractor he has to build the contract package by hand, and he timed it at 20-plus minutes a pop. Here is the AI employee we built to do that document work for him.
The job that ate his time
Every time he brings on a subcontractor he has to swap the contract number and name, strip the draft watermark, drop initials and locations through the document, save each piece as a PDF, load it into Procore, and push it through DocuSign. He does it himself because there is no one to hand it to.
What we built
So we built him a skill that takes his template, the scope, and the sub’s bid, and assembles the documents. In his words, it drops everything into the Word doc in the right place without wrecking the formatting, then spits out a clean PDF for each exhibit.
Close, not finished, and that is honest
It is close, not finished. Eric’s read after a few weeks was that we need a few more passes to get the Procore and DocuSign hand-off clean. That is what building something real against a messy process looks like. But he is already doing in a couple minutes what used to be a 20-minute slog, and he never had to become the tech guy to get there.
Eric’s build is a good example of which AI employee to build first: a repetitive back-office job with clear steps. When you are ready to build yours, the workshop walks you through it.
Written by Aaron Beauclair, owner of Highmark Ledger in Lincoln and Omaha.