Start up lowdown: BuildWellAI’s compliance safety net

Ben Smallwood: Construction compliance is really difficult to manage. So many regulations are constantly changing, making it hard for both building companies and regulatory bodies to maintain consistency. We help make compliance easier and faster. 

Much has changed regarding what compliance means in our industry, and the systems most firms rely on to evidence it haven’t caught up. Gateway sign-offs, the golden thread, the duty to show rather than just asserting that a building is safe – all of it depends on capturing accurate information on site and keeping a record that stands up later.

In practice, that still runs on photos stuck in someone’s phone, notes written up days after the fact, and pdfs nobody can find when it matters.

BuildwellAI builds tools that help competent professionals do that work faster and with a cleaner audit trail: onsite capture that turns an inspection into a structured report, camera-based monitoring for live sites, and compliance checking against the drawings and standards that actually apply.

The principle behind all of it is that the AI is a safety net for competent professionals, not a replacement for their judgement.

We deliberately don’t lead with the AI and ask a person to sign off whatever it produces. Do that, and you get automation fatigue, where people fall asleep at the wheel and defer to the screen instead of thinking for themselves. The professional stays the decision-maker. The AI is there to catch what a long day, a tired eye, or a missing drawing might let slip. That keeps people at the heart of compliance rather than pushing them to the edge.

We take building safety too seriously to rush a product onto live sites, so we’ve put the technology through an extensive testing cycle first. We’re now opening the next phase of pilots. Across our products,  BuildwellCHAT, BuildwellEYE and BuildwellINSPECT,  we’re engaging with a range of companies that can already see what the technology does for them. We are welcoming discussions from new companies to pilot our product. 

I’m comfortable talking publicly about the project even though we’re still at the piloting stage, because of the way we’ve built it: the professional does the thinking and the AI sits underneath as a safety net, not the other way round. We know how important it is to get this right. We’re deliberately avoiding the trap where the AI leads and people wave it through; that’s where mistakes get missed.

My background is in building control. I’ve worked across the sector for a number of the main warranty and inspection providers, most recently as major projects business manager at Premier Guarantee. The point of the company, really, is that it’s built by someone who has done the compliance job, not by technologists guessing at it from outside.

Badreddine Otky, our CTO, has worked internationally across a range of internet-of-things projects, including, memorably, fully automating a mushroom farm.

Jad Tounsi, our AI lead, has worked for government organisations internationally to help them gain insights previously beyond their reach.

Tom Alberto, our operations lead, has a wide range of experience across different industries to produce automations, as well as a background in philosophy that helps our models create true insight. That kind of engineering is exactly what sits behind our intelligence layers, so the company’s technical foundation is built by people who understand real systems in the physical world, not just ideas on a screen. 

We’re well-funded and see opportunities to collaborate with the right partners regarding the offering we give our customers.