Charlie for Contractors
Charlie knows your trade — the codes, the specs, the labor tables, the coordination points. Available every hour of every day. Never on the phone. Never off the clock.
01 — The Problem
Daily reports. Certified payroll. RFI logs. Change order tracking. Every one of those is billable hours you're burning on administration instead of the work.
What's the bend radius on that conduit run? What's the Davis-Bacon rate for your county? What's the spec for that fitting? You know the answers. You shouldn't have to say them again.
Decades of job-site experience, trade knowledge, and project history live in people's heads. When they leave, it's gone. There's no system for capturing what your best people know.
02 — What Charlie Does
Charlie connects to the systems you already run — project management, accounting, scheduling — and handles work on both sides of the trailer door.
Office Side
Charlie handles the back-office load that falls to whoever can squeeze it in — which is usually the foreman or the owner on evenings and weekends.
Prevailing wage and certified payroll guidance — Charlie knows WA and OR prevailing wage rules cold and answers by voice: classifications, fringe rules, filing deadlines. WH-347 generation is scoped per deployment.
Job cost tracking — every receipt and expense captured live today by photo and voice, queried from the field; estimated-vs-actual job costing is in build now.
RFI drafting and submittal tracking — Charlie pulls the relevant spec section, drafts the RFI, and tracks the response log so nothing falls through.
Daily reports and meeting minutes — formatted and sent automatically at end of shift. No one has to write them from memory at 7 PM.
Change order documentation — Charlie logs scope changes, attaches supporting data, and formats the CO package to your GC's requirements.
Field Side
Your foremen and leads get a voice-activated assistant that knows the job — no typing, no digging through plans, no waiting for an answer.
Voice-activated, hands-free — works on a phone in a glove. No keyboard required. Ask the question out loud, get the answer in under three seconds.
Real-time plan and spec access — Charlie has read every drawing and spec in your project management system. Ask about any detail on any sheet.
Material lookups and substitution guidance — spec-compliant alternatives when a specified product is unavailable or backordered, with the backup documentation to justify the swap.
Safety and OSHA reference — procedure, PPE requirement, incident documentation — Charlie handles it in real time, on the spot.
Photo and voice note logging — field observations captured with context and auto-synced into the job record.
Your Trade Specifically
Charlie isn't a general construction assistant. He's trained on the specific technical knowledge your trade requires — code references, labor rates, coordination standards, and the stuff that used to live only in your lead's head.
Trade-specific code and standard references — NEC, NFPA, IMC, IPC, SMACNA, AWS, ACI — whatever governs your work, Charlie knows it and can cite it.
Installation sequences and coordination checklists — the order of operations for your work relative to other trades, updated based on your actual schedule.
Labor unit and production rate guidance — Charlie knows the NECA, MCAA, and PHCC labor tables and can compare them to your actuals in real time.
Apprentice and journeyman support — field questions answered immediately, without interrupting a lead. Consistent information across your whole crew.
03 — Trades Charlie Knows
Charlie is deployed and configured for your specific trade — not a generic construction AI that doesn't know the difference between a P-trap and a vacuum breaker.
Don't see your trade? Charlie can be trained on any specialty. The knowledge base is built custom for every client during onboarding. If it's in a spec book, a code manual, or a labor table — Charlie can know it.
04 — Prevailing Wage
Prevailing wage compliance is one of the most time-consuming and liability-heavy requirements on public work. Charlie puts the rules at your crew's fingertips — by voice, from the field.
Charlie knows certified payroll cold — weekly submission requirements, classifications, what auditors look for — and answers from the field. Automated WH-347 generation from your time data is scoped per deployment.
Ask Charlie how prevailing wage works on your project — WA L&I and OR BOLI rules, public works thresholds, Intent-to-Pay filing, apprentice ratios — and get the correct answer by voice. Determination-rate lookups are scoped per deployment.
Charlie understands fringe benefit credit — cash versus bona fide plans, disclosure requirements — and answers before a misstep gets made. Annualized fringe tracking is scoped per deployment.
Every field note, safety observation, and daily report Charlie files is timestamped and exportable — a record that's there when questions come. Payroll-record archiving is scoped per deployment.
05 — The Office Manager You Never Had
For a specialty contractor with 5 to 20 employees, an office manager is the difference between a business that runs cleanly and one that runs on panic. Charlie fills that role around the clock.
"Most foremen are doing $80-an-hour work and $35-an-hour paperwork simultaneously. Charlie doesn't fix the foreman problem — he takes the $35-an-hour work off his plate so the $80-an-hour work gets done right."
Robert Neeper — Ground Up AI
06 — The Knowledge Problem
of construction knowledge walks out the door at retirement — never documented
average cost to retrain an experienced tradesperson vs. keeping institutional knowledge on site
per day lost by foremen answering questions from crew that have already been answered before
The most valuable asset in a specialty contracting business is the knowledge that makes the work go right the first time. The right bend radius. The right installation sequence. The product that always fails in three years and why. The inspector in that county who looks for that specific thing.
That knowledge lives in people, not systems. When those people retire, get poached, or go out sick — the business slows down or makes expensive mistakes.
Charlie captures it. During onboarding, Ground Up AI structures your institutional knowledge — trade standards, job history, internal procedures, and proven approaches — into Charlie's knowledge base. It's available to everyone on your team, on demand, consistently, without having to interrupt your best people.
07 — Scales With You
Charlie is priced by company size, not by seat. Every employee on your team has access. A one-time setup fee to get you deployed, then one flat monthly subscription — that's it.
08 — No New Platform
You don't adopt Charlie instead of your current software. Charlie is built to work across the systems you already run — every integration documented and mapped during onboarding. Your crew doesn't have to learn anything new except a voice command.
09 — Built By a Super
Robert started as a carpenter laborer and worked his way to Senior Superintendent over 40 years in the field. He knows what it actually costs when an experienced foreman spends two hours on certified payroll instead of managing the work. He knows what a missed wage determination does to a final billing. He knows what happens when the guy who knows everything leaves and nobody captured any of it — because he's watched it happen.
Charlie was built to fix those specific problems. Not by a software company trying to sell seats, but by someone who ran the work and got tired of watching good contractors leave money on the table doing work that a system should handle.
Ground Up AI is a small company with no sales staff and no outside investors. Every client gets Robert's personal attention through onboarding and direct access through the engagement. If something isn't working, you call him directly.
Ground Up AI
If your trade is on that list,
let's talk this week.
Tell us your trade, your headcount, and the biggest time sink you're dealing with. We'll come back to you within one business day.
© 2026 Ground Up AI · Built by a superintendent · groundupai.io · Security & Compliance