A mid-sized practice running four active construction administration jobs agreed to let us follow one workflow for six weeks before and after adding an agent to it: RFI tracking. Not project selection, not marketing, not billing. Just the daily grind of logging, routing, and closing out requests for information, because it is the task most architects describe as the most annoying and the least optional.
The Old Version of an RFI Morning
Before the change, RFIs arrived by email, by the contractor's software portal, and occasionally by a phone call that someone wrote on a sticky note. A project architect started most mornings by checking three places, copying anything new into a shared spreadsheet, and guessing at a due date based on the contract's response window. Numbering collided when two people logged an RFI at the same time. Overdue items were caught by memory, not by the log, which meant they were caught late.
None of this was incompetence. It was four sources of truth for one task, run by people who also had drawings to produce that day.
The Log Rebuilt Around One Inbox
The agent was pointed at the shared project inbox and the portal export, not given a new place to check. It pulls the subject, the referenced drawing or spec section, the contractor's question, and the date received, then assigns the next sequential number itself so two people can no longer collide on one. Due dates come from the contract's stated turnaround, calculated automatically instead of estimated.
The log itself did not change format. It is still the same spreadsheet the practice already used, populated by something other than a person's memory of having seen an email that morning.
Where the Architect Still Signs Off
The agent drafts nothing that answers a technical question. If a contractor asks whether a beam can be substituted, that answer still comes from the architect or the engineer of record, in the same review cycle as before. What changed is that the question reaches the right desk with the right attachments already pulled, rather than sitting in an inbox until someone has time to route it by hand.
A firm handling its own structural work would need to build that boundary differently. This practice keeps engineering separate, so the agent's job stopped at logging and routing, which is exactly where the practice wanted the line drawn.
The Speed Nobody Mentioned Beforehand
Asked what improved most, the office manager did not point to response time. She pointed to being able to search the log by drawing number and get every related RFI back in one query, something the spreadsheet technically allowed but nobody had the patience to filter by hand under deadline.
That is a small thing. It also turned out to matter more than the turnaround-time number everyone expected to talk about, because it changed how a dispute over a change order got resolved. When a contractor claimed an RFI had gone unanswered for three weeks, the office manager pulled the full thread in under a minute, timestamps included, instead of reconstructing it from memory and a stack of printed emails.
What Got Slower, Not Faster
The first ten days were rougher than the pitch implied. The agent needed to be taught the practice's own abbreviations for drawing sets, and it mis-numbered two RFIs against an older contract that used a different response window than the practice's current template. Both were caught in review, not by a client, but they cost time to fix and to explain to the team.
A practice expecting a smooth first week should expect this instead. The correction work front-loads into the setup period, not because the agent is unreliable, but because it starts out knowing nothing about how this particular office phrases things.
By week three, the corrections had mostly stopped, the log had not lost an RFI to a missed inbox check in that period, and the project architect who used to start her morning triaging three inboxes was spending that time on the drawings instead. Nobody called it transformative. They called it one less thing to remember, which is closer to what most practices actually need from a first project.