Hey {{first_name}},
I'm a construction project manager. I've been using AI tools on my projects for the past year — not to replace judgment, but to eliminate the blank-page problem that kills 2 hours of every change order day.
This newsletter is where I share what works, what doesn't, and what I updated when it didn't work.
Issue #1 is the honest origin story.
WHY I BUILT THESE TOOLS
Construction PM software is built by people who have never waited on a concrete pour.
The project management platforms are either bloated enterprise tools that take six months to implement, or simple trackers that don't understand what a schedule of values actually is. The AI tools are worse — they'll write you a "professional change order" that no owner or GC would recognize as real.
I got tired of it and started building my own.
Not a platform. Not an app. Just a set of AI prompts — carefully engineered from real project experience — that I paste into Claude whenever I need to:
Price and document a change order (including the backup documentation checklist most PMs skip)
Analyze a subcontract for the clauses that will bite me in month four
Draft a delay notice or cure letter that protects my position without blowing up the relationship
Write an owner report from rough field notes in under 10 minutes
The first time I used the Change Order Builder on a real CO — a directed change on a public works job, owner disputed the time impact — it produced a cost breakdown I would have taken two hours to build manually. I sent the CO that afternoon. The owner approved it three days later, including the time impact.
That's when I knew this was worth sharing.
WHAT THE PM EDGE IS
This newsletter — weekly, free — is where I share:
Real lessons from using these tools on actual projects (vague enough to protect the job, specific enough to be useful)
Updated prompts when I refine them based on what the field teaches me
Construction AI news worth knowing — what's actually being adopted, what's marketing noise
The PM Toolkit — the four prompts I use most — is available at https://jessgregg.gumroad.com/l/pmedgetoolkit for $49. It includes lifetime updates, meaning every time I improve a prompt from real project use, you get the update automatically.
But the newsletter is free. Start here.
INDUSTRY PULSE
Three things from this week in construction AI:
• Construction AI adoption doubled in 2026 — 38% of contractors now report measurable business impact from AI tools, up from 17% a year ago. The holdouts are running out of time to catch up. (Construction Owners Association)
• AI estimating is getting scary accurate — Quantity takeoffs that took estimators a week are being completed in minutes at 95% accuracy with the current generation of plan-reading tools. The estimating department is being restructured at firms that moved early.
• Document review is the underrated use case — RFI and submittal processing, contract clause extraction, and pay app verification are where mid-sized GCs are finding the fastest ROI. No job site cameras required.
I'll be in your inbox next week with a specific lesson from a real project — something I changed in the prompts and why.
If you know a PM who's still writing change orders the hard way, forward this to them.
— Jesse
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