Toronto-based Provision has launched Scope Agent, an AI system that reads construction drawings and specifications and extracts a complete, traceable scope of work automatically, marking a new push to solve one of preconstruction’s most persistent and expensive problems.
The tool addresses what’s known in the industry as a “scope gap,” the missed or ambiguous items in a bid package that later surface as change orders and blown budgets. According to the Construction Industry Institute, rework tied to these gaps costs the U.S. construction industry $15 billion a year, with design errors and omissions cited as a leading cause.
The problem has grown more acute as contractor revenue climbs; ENR recently reported that Top 400 Contractor revenue rose 11.8% in 2025 to $671.4 billion, driven largely by a surge in data center work, even as estimating departments have stayed largely flat.
On Provision’s internal validation dataset, measured against human-prepared scope sheets from real projects across North America, Scope Agent delivered 97.01% match accuracy on scope item extraction and 96.02% subcontractor classification accuracy.
For comparison, Provision ran the same exercise with a professional estimator working to a fixed time budget; the human baseline came in at 91.3% accuracy and took roughly four days per project, while Scope Agent returned a first pass in a fraction of that time.
Alongside the launch, Provision released a benchmark report comparing Scope Agent to Claude, the general purpose AI model from Anthropic, on plumbing scope extraction from the same set of drawings on a live hospital project. Scope Agent extracted 145 plumbing scope items at 91.7% verified accuracy, while Claude extracted 96 items at 72.9% accuracy, a gap of 18.8 percentage points.
Provision says Claude’s dominant failure mode was fabrication: 18 of its 26 flagged rows involved invented drawing marks, manufacturer model numbers, or schedule items that don’t appear in the source drawings. Scope Agent, the company says, produced zero fabricated items.
The company attributes the gap to three design choices behind Scope Agent, including how it decomposes drawings element by element rather than reading them as flat pages, how it builds a graph of relationships between drawing elements to surface conflicts rather than silently absorb them into a line item, and how it has estimating business logic built directly into the system so its output mirrors how a human estimator actually reasons through a package.
“For the teams we work with, the question was never whether AI could read a drawing. It was whether the output could be trusted on a real bid,” said Luigi La Corte, CEO and founder of Provision. “A 97% accurate scope sheet with full traceability is a document you can put in front of a subcontractor. A 73% accurate scope sheet with fabricated model numbers is a liability.”
The launch comes with two customer proof points already in place. EllisDon, one of Canada’s largest general contractors, used Scope Agent output to issue a formal addendum on the New Brunswick Museum project, what Provision believes is the first documented case of AI-generated scope flowing directly into a bid package at a top-tier GC.
On the U.S. side, California-based ProWest Constructors says it has cut the time from contract award to fully issued subcontracts roughly in half since adopting the tool, and is now scoping projects at the bid stage, something it says it could never do manually inside a two-week bid window.
“Scoping has always had elements of both art and science, so every estimator ends up doing it their own way,” said Michael DeMarie, president of ProWest Constructors. “A product like this gives us a protocol, and it gives us consistency. I’ve seen roughly a 50% savings in the time from award to all the subcontracts being written.”
DeMarie pointed to a county job in Santa Barbara as an early proof point, one a senior estimator had already begun scoping by hand before the team ran it through Scope Agent.
“It saved him three or four days on a project that size, and we noticed four or five items we had missed. We had misinterpreted some of the sheet metal requirements,” he said. “It was impressive how quickly it did it and how much information was there. It was good enough for me to say, okay, we’re going to incorporate this.”
La Corte, meanwhile, said the goal isn’t to replace experienced estimators but to give them a safety net. “The value of Scope Agent is that it catches what a tired estimator will miss at 11 p.m. the night before a bid closes,” he said, adding that customers don’t look to replace their senior estimators, but to give them a tool that removes the fear of a missed scope item.
Scope Agent is available now for general contractors, construction managers, and trade contractors, with demos available through Provision’s website.
Featured image: Courtesy of Provision
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
