AI-Assisted Solutions to Enhance Productivity

YARDZ (www.yardz.com) is a software platform geared to help construction companies and general contractors efficiently manage rented or owned construction equipment and other assets. The software enables users to automatically track where an asset has been and where it currently is, who has it, and when it is scheduled to be returned. It also provides the status and terms of all rental contracts, as well as associated checkout notes to indicate damage and repair.

A utilization log can track fuel, hours, and mileage and set up automatically triggered maintenance events based on day, weeks, months, years, miles, or operating hours. Team members can upload photos and documents taggable with keywords, for reference. You can set up geofences on all your projects and equipment yards, enabling telemetry data to automatically update current locations and location history.

A Monday morning email to all team members lets them confirm possession of the tool or asset tracked to their possession.

YARDZ includes several customizable, pre-built forms and the ability to build your own forms and allows you to create an unlimited number of permission groups which can limit or grant access to specific functionality and features.

Pricing: per monthly fee, with three plans available scaled by number of user accounts, limited or limitless projects, and availability of advanced features.

Pricing format: per recording license per year

Workyard

Workyard construction workforce management software (www.workyard.com) is a job scheduling and time tracking solution that enables contractors to track the GPS location of crew members and the time at their various jobs in the field and when on the move. The software, which facilitates job scheduling and time tracking by project, proximity, and person by day or week and includes an employee mobile job scheduling app, provides employee arrival times, departure times, and precise addresses and issues smart alerts to surface potential timecard mistakes.  

The employee scheduling app, available to run on iPhone, iPad, and Android, gives dispatchers the ability to immediately notify team members of any new jobs or changes in job schedules as well as check live progress and employee locations. Employee checklists tell each team member what needs to be done where and when. Workers can tag hours to projects and tasks via their phones.

The precision and reliability of the GPS tracking system is leveraged to minimize data input required by the crew in the field, with the capture of site arrival, departure, miles driven, and time per job largely automated, giving the contractor an accounting of every minute worked. 

Workyard automatically displays real-time labor costs down to individual tasks by each employee and crews can be organized/segmented with color-labeled filters for easy accountability. 

Approved reporting can be synced to integrate with Quickbooks and other popular payroll processing software.

Pricing: per user, scaled by area code. Free 14-day trial. Workyard also offers free construction templates at www.workyard.com to customize, download, and print, available in PDF, Word, and Google formats. Options include standard contractor agreements, subcontractor agreements, and 1099 contractor agreements and estimate, proposal, bid, quote, invoice, work order, employee schedule, equipment checkout, and punchlist templates.

Fin

Fin (www.intercom.com/fin) is a natural language AI bot powered by a mix of large language models—including OpenAI’s GPT-4, a proprietary machine learning technology—to resolve customer questions. Fin can hold complete support conversations with customers in plain English (multilingual capabilities coming soon), providing accurate answers based on a company’s existing support content, with no straying off topic.

When Fin does not know the answer, it says, “I don’t know” and passes the question off to a member of your human support team, asking clarifying questions before handover. According to the developer, Fin can answer up to 50% of customer queries instantly and accurately.

The bot, for which no set-up is required, instantly learns everything it needs from your existing support articles, providing answers based on your support knowledge base. Fin also links to source materials, enabling customers to dig deeper if desired.

The Fin Conversations Inbox lets you easily monitor all of Fin’s responses. You can create custom answers to your most important questions and Fin will prioritize them over its AI answers.  

Pricing: 99 cents per resolution (i.e. resolved conversation) plus an active Intercom plan (Starter, Pro, or Premium) scaled by included features. (Intercom is an AI powered automation-first customer service platform that provides a seamless customer experience across automation and human support.) You can sign up for a 14-day trial for Fin by visiting Intercom.com and clicking “Get Started” and proceed from there.

Rillavoice

Rillavoice speech analytics software app (www.rillavoice.com) records conversations from tablets, phones, or headsets or face-to-face and transcribes them into text and uses AI to capture insights that can help improve customer service and sales.

The app is designed to enable sales reps to increase conversions of pitches into sales by analyzing which pitches have worked for a company’s top performers and then sharing the pitches and techniques with the company’s other reps. This capability lets business sales teams members try out several different pitches and, based on the derived analytics, see which works best. Rilla is fully compliant with all audio recording and privacy laws in the US and Europe.

Pricing format: per license per year.

Patti Feldman writes articles and web content for trade magazines and manufacturers of building products. She can be reached at [email protected].