Picture a Tuesday morning at any building supply house in BC. A drawing set lands in the inbox for a commercial interior fit-out: hundreds of pages of drawings and specs covering steel stud framing, drywall, insulation, ceilings, and finishing. The contractor needs pricing by Friday. Somebody on your team now owes that project twenty-plus hours of takeoff work: reading the spec sections, cross-referencing the drawings, measuring, counting, and building the quote line by line. And here’s the part we all know but rarely say out loud: the contractor asking for that price has probably never opened the spec book.

That was our Tuesday for years. At Pro Con, our main business is general building materials for commercial and institutional interiors, mostly Divisions 5, 7, and 9, and we run a door shop on top of that. It’s the GBM side of our business where things changed, and I want to share what we did, what the old way was really costing us, and where I think this is all heading.

The real cost of the old way

When we talk about manual takeoffs and quoting, we count the labour hours first. That’s the smallest part of the bill.

The bigger costs are quieter. A quote that takes two weeks loses to a competitor who turned it around in three days, and you never find out why you lost. A firestopping requirement buried deep in Division 7 gets missed, and it comes out of your margin, or worse, out of your relationship with the customer when it surfaces mid-project. And the knowledge it takes to do this work well lives in the heads of one or two veteran estimators. When they’re on holidays, quoting slows down. When they retire — and across our industry they are retiring — that knowledge walks out the door with them.

“We accepted all of this as the cost of doing business. Turns out it was the cost of doing business a certain way.“

What we adopted, and what it actually does

About a year ago, Pro Con started using an AI-powered tool called Nivela on our GBM work. I’ve heard it described as estimating software where you upload specifications and it tells you what can be installed. That’s close, but the reality is simpler and more useful.

The software reads the project documents the way an experienced estimator would. You give it the drawings and the specs, it works through them, identifies the materials the job calls for in Divisions 5, 7, and 9, quantifies them, and produces the foundation of a quote. What used to be twenty-plus hours of reading, measuring, and counting is done in fifteen to twenty-five minutes. It also works like a conversation. Our team can ask it questions — like what the ceiling spec is in the corridors or which walls call for acoustic insulation — and the answers come straight from that project’s documents. That’s a different thing from the general-purpose AI chatbots most of us have tried, which can talk about construction but don’t know your job.

I want to be straight about what it doesn’t do, because honesty matters more here than enthusiasm. It doesn’t replace our estimators, and we wouldn’t let it. Every takeoff still gets audited and verified by a person before a quote goes out the door. The AI does the reading and the counting. Our people do the judgment. That split is exactly why it works.

The results we expected

The speed gain was the reason we adopted, and it delivered. A takeoff that used to eat most of a work week now takes under half an hour, before verification.

What that speed bought us was capacity. Our estimators aren’t doing less work — they’re quoting more jobs. Since word got out about how fast we can turn pricing around, our inbound requests for quotes have roughly doubled. I’ll be upfront that this is my estimate, not an audited number, but the change in our inbox is hard to miss. In a market where every supplier is fighting for the same skilled people, getting more out of the team you already have is the only math that works.

The results we didn’t expect

The benefit I didn’t see coming was this: the technology made our customer relationships better.

Most contractors don’t read specifications. That’s not a knock on them — it’s the reality of how busy they are. It used to mean that when our price didn’t line up with a competitor’s, or with what the contractor expected, the conversation was hard. Now our team can sit down with a contractor and walk them through exactly what the spec calls for and how it drives the price. We can show them the line items, the requirements they didn’t know were in there, and the reason two quotes on their desk aren’t covering the same scope. Those conversations build trust, and customers lean on our product knowledge more than they ever have, because we can back it up on the spot.

“When you can read a full drawing set in minutes instead of weeks, you stop being a price check and start being part of the project team.”

The other change took me by surprise. We’re getting brought into projects earlier. For most of my career, a supplier’s role was to be a pricing agent: one of five phone calls at the end of the process, valued for a number and nothing else. Lately, contractors are pulling us in at the budgeting stage, asking what the documents actually require, where the risks sit, and where there’s room for alternates. That shift is worth more to our business long-term than any single quote.

Where I think this is heading

Ask me to look ten years out and here’s my honest guess.

Same-day pricing will stop being a differentiator and become the baseline. Contractors will send a drawing set in the morning and expect solid quotes from multiple suppliers before end of day, the same way nobody waits a week for an email reply anymore.

The knowledge problem will flip. Today, spec expertise is scarce and sits with a few veterans. Within a decade, every estimator, inside rep, and counter person will have that expertise on tap, and the edge will shift to how well your people use it in front of a customer.

And the gap between adopters and non-adopters will compound. This isn’t like upgrading your phone system, where the laggards catch up with one purchase. Every quote a tech-enabled supplier produces makes them faster and sharper on the next one. Firms that wait five years won’t be five years behind; they’ll be up against companies that quoted ten times as many jobs in the meantime.

The one thing I don’t believe will change is that this is a relationship business. The winners won’t be the companies with the most software. They’ll be the ones whose people spend their hours on customers instead of on counting.

Advice for those still doing it the old way

If you’re skeptical, good. Skepticism is the right place to start. Here’s what I’d suggest.

• Start with one product category you know cold, so you can judge the tool’s accuracy against your own expertise.
• Keep a person in the verification loop from day one. Any vendor who tells you that’s unnecessary is selling something.
• Judge the tool by whether your team actually uses it after month two. Software your people avoid is just an expense.
• Don’t wait for perfect. We didn’t adopt because the technology was flawless. We adopted because the old way was costing us more than we’d admitted.

This also applies if you don’t have an estimator on staff at all. Plenty of suppliers don’t, and it has always meant passing on spec-driven work or quoting it blind. A tool like this is a realistic way in. It lets the team you already have answer contractor questions with the documents in hand and take a real run at work you’d normally let go by, so you can find out whether that kind of value would expand your business before you ever commit to building an estimating department.

The spec books aren’t getting any thinner. The question is whether reading them stays a twenty-hour job at your company after it becomes a twenty-minute one at your competitor’s.