Bobyard Moves AI Beyond the Takeoff, Carrying Contractors From Drawings to Estimate, Bid and Submittal

Bobyard, the AI-native software company for the construction industry, today announced AI-prepared submittals and a new connected workflow that lets contractors take a bid from construction drawings to a priced estimate, a client-ready proposal and submittals from within a single product. Until now, that meant estimators moved between takeoff software, spreadsheets, proposal templates and a separate submittal process. 

The release extends the company's AI takeoff, now used across landscaping, electrical, finishing trades, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, into the rest of a contractor’s bid including the paperwork that follows a win.

Bobyard started with takeoff because it is the hardest step in an estimator's day to automate. Reading a set of drawings the way an experienced estimator does takes models built for the job, and Bobyard built its own in-house. The company reports that customers cut takeoff time by an average of 65 percent and submit three to five times more bids per estimator. Once takeoff is fast, the bottleneck moves to everything downstream: pricing the work, writing the proposal and, after the award, assembling submittals. Today's product release is aimed at that downstream work.

“We started with takeoff because if you cannot read the drawings, you cannot automate anything that depends on them. Once our models could do that trade after trade, the next products stopped being separate problems. Submittals took one engineer about two months. That is what starting with the hard problem buys you,” said Michael Ding, founder and CEO of Bobyard.  

The newest piece is submittals. Contractors upload the drawings and project specifications, and Bobyard's AI finds matching products and assembles the submittal package. Submittals are normally prepared after a bid is won, which makes them the first step Bobyard has taken from winning work toward delivering it. Teams can also use submittals on their own, without Bobyard's takeoff.

The Bobyard connected AI Workflow now covers:

• Takeoff: AI that reads the drawings and measures, counts and organizes the quantities by trade.
• Cost database: items, assemblies and folders built once, company-wide, and reused on every bid.
• Estimate table: a customizable table that pulls from the cost database, with custom columns and formulas, tax, overhead, markup and margin.
• Proposal: a branded, client-ready proposal generated from the estimate, with no export to another tool.
• Submittals: AI-prepared from the drawings and specifications, with matching product data.
• Projects and clients: a project dashboard that groups drawings automatically by division and series, and client management with bulk contact upload and notes attached to projects.

The announcement follows a year of expansion: Bobyard has launched landscaping and sitework, a unified 2.0 workbench in April, and mechanical, electrical, and commercial plumbing (MEP), paving, paint, and flooring earlier this summer. With today’s news Bobyard brings AI from takeoff to submittals for the following additional trades: drywall, insulation, doors, and windows. Each trade has its own symbols, assemblies and takeoff logic, and the estimate, proposal and submittal tools now work across the trades Bobyard serves. Estimate Table has since gained a cost database and sophisticated assemblies features. 

Estimating teams are short of capacity. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry must attract about 349,000 workers in 2026, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that real output per worker in construction in 2020 was more than 30 percent below 1970 levels. Bobyard helps the same estimating team bid more work with the people it has, and even help recruit young talent to the field.