We almost sold a construction client on "just throw an LLM at it." Glad we didn't
A construction client came to us with a familiar problem: estimators losing a week or two per project just reading through everything before they could even start pricing. Hundreds of PDFs, CAD drawings, specs, spreadsheets, subcontractor bids that all looked nothing like each other.
The first instinct was the obvious one, feed it all to an LLM, let it read, done. We actually started building that!
It fell apart pretty fast. Construction docs don't read like normal text. A spec sheet references a drawing, the drawing only makes sense next to a schematic a few pages later, and somewhere in there is a quantity that's actual money. An LLM will give you a confident answer whether or not it understood any of that. But in estimating, that's someone's job on the line, not just another failure.
So we split it up instead. Drawings and schematics went through computer vision. Specs and scope through NLP. The subcontractor bids were the annoying part, every one came in a different format, so we used more traditional ML just to normalize them into something you could actually compare. Then a workflow layer on top to keep the whole thing traceable back to source docs.
It's not an impressive demo. But it held up, and that's the part that mattered.
Doc review went from 1-2 weeks to 2-3 days. Package prep came in around 60% faster. Omissions and duplications dropped close to 40%. Subcontractor participation went up about 25%, apparently a cleaner package just gets people replying faster.
The model itself never got smarter. We just stopped treating it like one model's job.
Anyone else in construction, manufacturing, logistics running into this? Curious what you landed on, especially if you started with "just use an LLM" too and had to walk it back.