We delivered an AI Scout for a Commercial General Contractor Hunting Bid Opportunities
AI Scout · Commercial Construction
A commercial general contractor specializing in K-12 school renovations and municipal buildings was missing opportunities because by the time a project hit the public bid boards, the incumbents had already been networking the owner for months. Now an AI Scout wakes up at 4:30 every morning and scours over two hundred sources — municipal council meeting minutes, school board agendas and capital improvement plans, state procurement portals, bond issuance filings, architectural firm project announcements, permit applications for design-phase work, and even local news articles mentioning facility expansions or deferred maintenance budgets. It evaluates every signal against the contractor's criteria: project value between two and fifteen million, within a ninety-mile radius, building types they hold relevant experience in, and owners they haven't been blacklisted by. Opportunities that pass the filter get scored on three axes — win probability based on historical hit rate for that project type, margin potential based on current subcontractor availability in that trade mix, and strategic value based on whether the owner relationship could yield repeat work. By 6:00 AM the CRM has new records for every qualified opportunity: the project name, estimated value, owner contact, design team if announced, anticipated bid date, source links, and a recommended pursuit action — whether to request an invitation, attend a pre-bid meeting, or simply monitor. The system also watches opportunities it previously logged, updating their status when meeting minutes reveal a project got tabled, when an addendum changes the scope, or when a competitor gets shortlisted. The contractor went from reactive — waiting for invitations and scanning bid boards over coffee — to proactive, showing up to owner conversations three months before the project goes public. Their qualified pipeline tripled in the first sixty days and they won two projects they never would have known about under the old process.