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Disrupting the $15 Trillion Construction Industry with Autonomous Agents: Dr. Sarah Buchner
Takeaway
Horizontal RAG is commoditized; the value is in vertical agents that surface discrepancies in highly unstructured trillion-dollar-scale industry data.
Summary
- Trunk Tools applies RAG + agents to construction; one NYC skyscraper alone has 3.6 million pages of contracts, blueprints, RFIs — a stack 3x as tall as the building.
- Construction is a $15T/yr industry where 10% ($1.5T) is rework caused by data discrepancies in unstructured docs — a perfect RAG vertical.
- Custom RAG ingests construction-specific file types (drawings, schedules, RFIs) and answers field questions via SMS/web (e.g., 'door 2,13 number 2 needs power actuated hardware') with cited sources.
- Beyond Q&A, deploys agents to detect data discrepancies and automatically open RFIs to resolve them — keeping humans focused on building, not bureaucracy.
ragconstructionvertical-agents
Original description
Dr. Sarah Buchner, Founder & CEO of Trunk Tools, envisions a future for construction where an army of AI agents works on behalf of our users. We are currently deploying an agent every 45 days: our Q&A agent, TrunkText, is already saving field professionals 1-2 hours every day. We believe that ~$2.5 Trillion of the construction industry can be automated with Trunk Tools. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Dr. Sarah Dr. Sarah Buchner is the Founder & CEO of construction tech startup Trunk Tools. Backed by Innovation Endeavors, Sequoia, Accel, Lightspeed, Index and others, Trunk Tools is tackling the $15 trillion construction industry. Trunk Tools is building the brain behind construction; we're leveraging AI to organize mountains of unstructured data, automate workflows, and build for a better future. Dr. Buchner is a Forbes 30 Under 30 and ENR Top Young Professionals honoree. With deep roots in all facets of construction, Sarah spent her young life as a carpenter in her native Austria beginning at the age of 12. She advanced in the field through various roles, including superintendent, and project manager of increasingly large and complex construction projects. Sarah has earned several post-collegiate degrees in conjunction with her full-time construction career, including a MS in civil engineering, a Ph.D. in data science / civil engineering, and an MBA from Stanford.