A plumbing contractor's bid desk
Bidding a commercial build means reading 200 pages of specs and pricing every fitting. We built BDP an AI that does both.
BDP Plumbing
BDP Plumbing is a local, licensed plumbing contractor that bids on commercial and residential builds. Each bid starts with a development scoping document — sometimes hundreds of pages — that has to be read closely, interpreted for plumbing scope, and converted into a priced material list and a written bid.
It's slow, error-prone work that a senior estimator does once at most, and never the same way twice. Bids that came in fast won jobs. Bids that took days lost them.
Read the docs. Price the materials. Draft the bid.
We built an AI estimator that ingests the full development document, identifies the plumbing scope — fixtures, fittings, rough-in counts, regulatory specs — and pulls accurate, current pricing for the required materials.
From there, it drafts the bid itself in BDP's format. The estimator opens the bid as a near-final document, not a blank page.
What it changed
Bid turnaround dropped from days to hours. BDP could bid more jobs without hiring more estimators. The estimator who used to spend the morning extracting fittings now spends it pressure-testing the AI's output and applying judgment where it counts — pricing assumptions, project-specific risk, the lines that need a human's signature.
For a contractor that wins on responsiveness as much as on price, the change opened up jobs they couldn't have bid on at all.
“The first one took longer to verify than to generate. The second one took half that.”
Faster, more accurate bids changed what kinds of work BDP could go after. That's the real outcome.
- Client
- BDP Plumbing
- Surface
- Internal estimating tool
- Stack
- Long-document AI, pricing pipeline, bid drafting