A new AI-enabled tool can cut the amount of time spent checking typical Gateway 2 submissions by 73%. The tool has been developed by OptimaBI with input from the Cast consultancy.
OptimaBI has taken more than a year to develop the tool, called Truelens, and bring it to market. OptimaBI was founded by Felipe Manzatucci, whose background includes a 20-year stint with Skanska. He tells CM Digital: “Truelens is an AI-assisted compliance checking tool designed to support Building Safety Act submissions.
“It checks design information against building regulations, against the Building Safety Regulator’s (BSR) expectations, and against any defined compliance criteria that the design team or the project team wants to apply. The tool highlights the gaps, inconsistencies and potential risks in a design submission before it is submitted.”
Manzatucci emphasises: “The key thing is that it does not make decisions on behalf of the professionals, nor does it replace their judgement.”
During the tool’s early adopter phase, the submissions checked by Truelens ran to an average of 8,800 pages – indeed, one of the submissions was 12,500 pages. “You can’t expect a design team to be able to go through all that information in a short period of time with limited resources and not miss things,” Manzatucci says.
“The key thing is that it does not make decisions on behalf of the professionals, nor does it replace their judgement.”
Measurable benefits
“Truelens saves 73% of the time spent on compliance checking,” he states, before adding further detail. “A human will take 10 days to check the document – Truelens will take an hour. But, even with Truelens checking a submission, we still expect the experts to spend time reviewing what the tool has told them.”
It’s likely more than one person will review the submission and act on the tool’s findings or suggestions, Manzatucci notes. “There’s going to be a principal designer leading the way. There’s going to be a bunch of structural engineers, who need to speak to each other, so that adds more time back into the whole process.”
He offers another measurable benefit: “With designers, we’re finding a cost reduction of 65%, simply from the fact that the engineer or the expert is spending far fewer hours checking the submission.”
Lilly Gallafent, COO of Cast, got involved with the development of the tool early on. She reminds CM Digital that the tool checks every part of a submission with equal rigour – something a human may not do. “It’s about completeness of review. You are asking people to confirm that 12,000 documents comply with the building regulations, which is a very complicated piece of legislation,” she says. “Someone might recognise that Part L is a difficult one, so they’ll check [the submission in respect of] that very thoroughly, but Part T isn’t so difficult, so they don’t check that.”
How Cast got involved
Gallafent had worked with Manzatucci before and leapt at the chance to help with the development of Truelens. “It became very obvious, as far back as 2022, that the Building Safety Act was going to change the way that we deliver projects. Our job is to get a job for a client from acquisition through to construction to a timeline. And obviously for HRBs, that was going to change,” she says.
“The industry’s started to get to grips with Gateway 2 – now’s the moment to go public and recommend that people start using this tool and saving themselves time.”
“I became very active in working out what that meant. We did one of the very early Gateway 2 applications and we got stuck in the quagmire. Things have definitely improved since then. But as a business, we provide professional services to people who build things – we need those people to actually be building things [rather than having their submissions delayed for months at the BSR].
“We spent a lot of time looking around, asking: ‘How can we unlock this process?’ We came at that from two angles, one of which was working with industry via Build UK and the Construction Leadership Council to make sure that everyone actually understood what this piece of legislation was about, and what a Gateway 2 application should actually look like.
“Part two was: ‘Now we’ve got a grip of what a Gateway 2 application is, why are we having human beings review 12,000 drawings against a set of extremely complicated regulations?’ It seemed to us a logical step to use an AI tool to make sure that we’ve got our submissions right.”
Cue the relationship with Manzatucci and OptimaBI. “Felipe mentioned the tool. We became one of the early adopters, helping to trial the tool and make sure that it would do what our clients and other applicants actually wanted it to do.”
Not just for the supply chain
Gallafent declares: “The industry’s started to get to grips with Gateway 2 – now’s the moment to go public as a partnership and recommend that people start using this tool and saving themselves time.”
Manzatucci observes that it’s not just the supply chain that can benefit. “We want to do an exercise with the BSR. We want to analyse how much time the regulator can save carrying out checks by using Truelens.”
Gallafent adds: “I think there’s an opportunity around the other accompanying documents, potentially around Gateway 3 compliance. We see this as the start of a journey, not the end. It’s a tool with so much potential, and we can see it being used all the way through that regulatory journey, and we’re working with Felipe on that at the moment.”
Cyber security and tech questions
Naturally, Manzatucci faced queries about cybersecurity from Cast and other early adopters (including several tier-one contractors).
Client and project data is stored on Digital Ocean infrastructure with OptimaBI’s primary production server in London. All data remains within the EU/UK jurisdictions to ensure compliance with regional data protection regulations.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Via APIs, Truelens can integrate with major BIM platforms and common data environments, including Aconex, SharePoint and ProjectWise.
