"Trust but Verify": How Novo Construction Uses AI to Compare Drawing Sets
Novo Construction leverages the Diffs feature of the AI tool BuildCheck to automatically compare drawing versions on two California projects, replacing the time-consuming manual overlay process and helping project managers quickly identify changes to walls, doors, windows, and more, while assessing cost impacts early. CIO Colin Stoner notes that the tool greatly lowers the learning barrier and emphasizes that the team maintains a "trust but verify" attitude toward AI.
Comparing drawings is often time-consuming and tedious. Novo Construction, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, has turned to an AI-assisted tool to tackle this challenge.
According to its website, Novo uses BuildCheck, software that performs AI-driven drawing reviews for municipal review comments, requests for information (RFIs), and change orders. Now, Diffs, a product under BuildCheck, has helped this builder on two different projects in California, said Colin Stoner, CIO of Novo. Diffs compares drawings against previous versions, helping professionals quickly spot discrepancies, or inconsistencies, in their own drawings.
Here, Stoner discusses with Construction Dive how Diffs helps the builder save time on drawing reviews, the impact of the learning curve on the team, and what the team has learned about AI through this experience.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Construction Dive: How does Novo apply Diffs in its projects?
Colin Stoner:For us, the biggest win is in cost estimation early in the project. Not necessarily during preconstruction, but before construction starts. That's when changes can have a huge impact on pricing—whether it's moving a wall, adding a window, or changing a door type.
In the past, our project managers might have tried to overlay drawings using tools like Bluebeam to see changes. But doing that across hundreds of pages of drawings was clunky and overwhelming.
So now they use Diffs instead, which uses an automated process to immediately use the overlay feature. You can run a 'diff check,' and it will flag issues related to those differences.
Then, if a wall has moved, the project manager can go back to the framing drywall contractor and start getting pricing for that change. Because for us, these changes often have the potential to alter the scope of work we've contracted for.
That's been a really big win for us: being able to stay ahead of the curve as drawings evolve. The key is saving time by not having to manually find all the changes. It greatly simplifies the process.
What has the learning curve been like with Diffs?
In the past, when changes had to be identified manually, the learning curve was quite steep. But now, because it runs an AI check to identify changes, just like an initial drawing review, it only flags any issues.
Now, you just go through, review the flags, or dismiss them. There are many changes that aren't relevant, so you just dismiss them. What matters more is having a log and being able to quickly capture those changes.
You can still click on a flag. It will highlight all the changes on the relevant drawings. So now, the friction of the learning curve is very low.
What have you learned about AI through using this tool?
Honestly, it's just an addition to what BuildCheck already does.
It's not that BuildCheck couldn't do it, it just doesn't have these features yet. But in terms of what we can achieve now, they complement each other.
As for changing how our team views AI, I think the biggest thing is that it has made the team more trusting of AI in many ways. At the same time, whether it's content I push to the team or content from our vendors, I always make sure to 'trust but verify.' That's the key rule here.