We built four AI applications in-house over the last two years. Most commercial glaziers haven't built any. Here's why we did, what each one does, and what changed about how we run a 350-project-per-year commercial construction operation.
When my wife Rielly and I co-founded ACG in 2020, we started with the standard commercial glazing tech stack: QuickBooks, Procore, Trello, Outlook, a couple of takeoff tools. By 2023, we hit the wall every growing contractor hits — the human bottleneck. We were turning down work because the bid team couldn't keep up. Submittals were 3 weeks behind. Job costing was monthly, not weekly. We had two options: hire 4-5 people we couldn't afford to onboard, or build software. We chose software.
Sub.ai was the first thing we built. It started as a Twilio + GPT-4 SMS bot that crews could text status updates to. Then we layered RFI generation. Then change order drafting. Then certified payroll. Today Sub.ai handles 80% of crew communication, generates first drafts of RFIs and change orders, and tracks every Davis-Bacon prevailing wage hour on every job. We get 6 hours per project manager per week back — across 12 active projects, that's a half-FTE we didn't have to hire.
Job costing used to be a monthly meeting. Tracey (our bookkeeper) would close the books, we'd review by job, and decisions were 30 days late. jobcost.ai pulls QuickBooks transactions, Procore commitments, and invoice line items into per-job P&L updated daily. Now I know which job is bleeding before the next week's pay app. Variance alerts come within 24 hours of overage.
Most owners run their CFO function ad hoc. We built one. CFO Agent reconciles bank to QuickBooks daily, categorizes uncategorized transactions, flags anomalies (duplicate vendors, off-job purchases, suspicious totals), and drafts owner pay applications in AIA G702/G703 format. Connor reviews and approves. The agent does the work that used to take Rielly + Tracey 12-15 hours a week.
Bid Engine is the biggest one. Architect drops drawings in a shared folder. Bid Engine reads the drawings, identifies glazing scope, pulls relevant unit prices from our historical data, drafts a bid, flags spec questions for Connor. Result: 48-hour bid turnaround on standard commercial plans. The Florida market average is 7-15 business days. That speed alone wins us bids.
Three things. First: we accept more work without hiring proportionally. Revenue grew 4x in two years; headcount grew 1.8x. Second: we make decisions faster. Daily P&L beats monthly P&L every time. Third: clients notice the speed. GCs put us on bid lists they don't put other glaziers on. We win on response time before we ever quote price.
We over-engineered Sub.ai's first version. Started with a complex multi-agent architecture; should have started with one good prompt and Twilio. We under-built CFO Agent's audit trail for the first 6 months. We had to retrofit it. We tried to white-label these tools and sell them — stopped that quickly. They are operational advantages, not products. The minute they're products, they're someone else's competitive edge, not ours.
We're documenting the full stack at acglass.ai. Not because we're selling it. Because the construction industry needs proof that this is buildable. Florida commercial glazing is a $2.4-2.9B/year market. There are roughly 200 real commercial glaziers in the state. Maybe 30 do it well at scale. If even five of them build their own AI stack in the next 24 months, the entire industry gets pushed up the productivity curve. That's good for everyone — GCs, owners, architects, and ultimately the people working in the buildings we build.
Have a Florida commercial glazing project you'd like ACG to bid?
Send Us Plans