Today, Toronto-based Provision announces the general launch of its purpose-built Scope Agent, which when benchmarked against Claude, proved to be more accurate in scope-of-work for construction than the general-purpose AI tool from Anthropic.
Billions of dollars are wasted every year in construction due to overlooked gaps in scope, and the prices for these scope gaps can add up quickly.
A design error here, an omission error there — and a company can spend up to 20 percent of a project’s total contract amount just in rework alone.
So, what Provision has done is built a specialized Scope Agent that pours through all the plans, drawings, specifications, graphs, and tables to show where those gaps exist before construction begins before the bid ever leaves the office.
To put this into perspective in terms of speed, what would previously take over 40 hours of manually scoping workflows can now be automated within minutes.
“The value of Scope Agent is that it catches what a tired estimator will miss at 11PM the night before a bid closes. Our customers are not looking to replace their senior estimators. They are looking to give them a tool that removes the fear of a missed scope item”
Luigi La Corte, Co-Founder and CEO at Provision
“For the teams we work with, the question was never whether AI could read a drawing. It was whether the output could be trusted on a real bid”
Luigi La Corte, Co-Founder and CEO at Provision
But speed is one thing; accuracy is another.
To test this, Provision benchmarked its Scope Agent against Antrhopic’s Claude on the same set of construction drawings from a live hospital project.
And Scope Agent came out on top in every single category.
These findings can be found in the launch of Provision’s new benchmark report, “Plumbing Scope QA: AI Scope Agent vs. Claude.”
- Scope Agent extracted 145 plumbing scope items at 91.7 percent verified accuracy. Claude extracted 96 items at 72.9 percent accuracy.
- Scope Agent captured 51 percent more scope items than Claude, materially reducing downstream scope-gap risk.
- Scope Agent’s accuracy was 18.8 percentage points higher than Claude’s on the same dataset.
- Claude’s dominant failure mode was fabrication. Eighteen of its 26 flagged rows involved invented drawing marks, manufacturer model numbers, or schedule items that do not appear in the source drawings. Scope Agent produced zero fabricated items.
This is where purpose-built AI tools shine. They’ve been programmed by people who know their industry inside-and-out, whereas a general-purpose tool can be less knowledgeable and prone to hallucinations.
And when it comes to accuracy over human-prepared scope sheets, Scope Agent delivered a 97.01 percent match accuracy on scope item extraction and 96.02 percent subcontractor classification accuracy while the professional human estimator baseline came in at 91.3 percent accuracy.
“A 97 percent accurate scope sheet with full traceability is a document you can put in front of a subcontractor. A 73 percent accurate scope sheet with fabricated model numbers is a liability. That distinction is what Scope Agent was built to solve”
Luigi La Corte, Co-Founder and CEO at Provision
For Michael DeMarie, President of ProWest Constructors, a California general contractor and Scope Agent customer, “A product like this gives us a protocol, and it gives us consistency. I’ve seen roughly a 50 percent savings in the time from award to all the subcontracts being written. On an average $25 million project, going from award to every subcontract issued in 60 days: that’s a really good target for us.”
The first project ProWest ran through Scope Agent was a county job in Santa Barbara that a senior estimator had already begun scoping by hand.
“It saved him three or four days on a project that size, and we noticed four or five items we had missed. We had misinterpreted some of the sheet metal requirements,” said DeMarie. “It was impressive how quickly it did it and how much information was there. It was good enough for me to say, okay, we’re going to incorporate this.”
Today marks the launch of both Scope Agent and Provision’s benchmark report comparing its purpose-built AI tool to that of Claude’s generalized tool.
Scope Agent is available today for general contractors, construction managers, and trade contractors.
Image Source: AI generated with ChatGPT
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
