01Documents that change

Two hundred pages, three changes that matter

Specifications get reissued. A designer sends revision C, and somewhere in two hundred pages a material has changed, a tolerance has tightened, or a clause has been added that puts a cost on you. Finding those changes has traditionally meant somebody senior reading both versions side by side for an afternoon, and when that gets skipped, the change is discovered on site, the most expensive place to discover anything.

Contracts carry the same problem with higher stakes. The version you are asked to sign is rarely the version you sent, and the difference between them is where the risk sits.

02What we built

Comparison and review, built into APSIS

Agency AI builds the AI inside APSIS Business Components, a construction software platform. Two of its capabilities deal with documents that change.

Specification comparison takes the old version and the new one and reports what actually changed. Contract review takes the contract you sent and the contract you got back, and finds where the risk has moved. You can then ask it questions in plain English about what a clause means for you.

03How it works

Two independent passes

A page can look identical and read differently, and it can look completely different because a paragraph moved and reads exactly the same. So the comparison runs two ways at once. One pass looks at the pages as pages and catches anything moved, added or removed. The other reads both versions as language and catches the changes that do not look like anything: a material substituted, a figure altered, a requirement that used to be optional.

Each pass reports on its own, so the team can see what has finished and what is still running. A comparison can be re-run, and the new attempt keeps a link to the one it replaced, so there is a history rather than a mystery. When someone corrects what our AI found, the system keeps what the AI said, what it was changed to, and who changed it. On a specification that record matters, because it is what you will be arguing from later.

04Contracts

Answers that arrive with the clause

Contract review compares what you sent against what came back, and adds something the specification side does not need: you can ask it questions. What is our liability if the programme slips. Does this cap our exposure or theirs. What changed about payment terms. Every answer comes back with the part of the document it came from, so the reader is looking at the actual clause rather than trusting a summary.

That sourcing is the whole design. Nobody should make a contractual decision on an unsourced opinion from software, and an answer with the clause attached is a shortcut to the paragraph that needed reading. Corrections are recorded against the specific clause, so a note that our reading of clause 14.3 differs survives, with the name of whoever made it.

05The result

Changes caught at review, not on site

Every change in a reissued specification has a price, and the price rises the later it is found. Caught at review, it is a conversation and possibly a variation. Caught on site, it is rework, delay and an argument about who should have spotted it. A clause read before signing is a negotiation; the same clause read after signing is a loss.

None of this replaces the reviewer. It puts the differences in front of them in minutes, so their hours go on judging what the changes mean rather than hunting for them.

See how the same platform reads drawings and schedules →

06The wider platform

One platform, ten capabilities

Comparison sits alongside drawing and schedule extraction, procurement document processing, estimating and quoting, bid writing and document search, all built by Agency AI into APSIS over more than a year. They run on the same foundations and work together: a specification compared in one place can be questioned in another, and a change found in a reissue can be priced against the bill it affects.

Read how we build the AI inside the platform →

07What it does

How it works in practice.

Two ways of lookingOne pass sees the pages, the other reads the words, so a moved paragraph and a swapped material are both caught.
You can see it workingEach pass reports separately, so you know what has finished and what is still running.
Answers come with the clauseAsk a contract a question and get the part of the document the answer came from.
Corrections stickWhat our AI found and what a person changed it to are both kept, against the clause and the name.
Next

Start with one process.

Tell us where your team loses the most time. We will tell you honestly whether AI pays there, what it takes to build, and what we have already delivered for businesses like yours.