Meet your new employees: Field Materials AI automation agents

Field Materials started in 2022. For more than four years, we've worked toward one thing – the best procurement software in construction. AI-native, cutting-edge and easy to adopt.

We've launched 8 modules, integrated with 12 major construction ERPs, made the platform work across 16 trades, and rolled out across 32 U.S. states and four countries. Field Materials now processes more than $2 billion in material purchases a year.

Those of you who trusted us early, when the product was young, thank you.

Now we're launching the biggest thing we've built. So big that everything we've worked on so far seems to be the foundation for it. It will transform the whole industry.

Field Materials has launched AI automation agents – and for the first time, AI can actually do the work we used to hand to employees. Not assist with it but own it end-to-end.

What agents can do for you

Agents live inside Field Materials. You can instruct them to perform a specific task in plain English. Assign agents to handle specific orders or invoices, message them, and see a full audit trail of what they did.

To get the job done, they may ask your team clarifying questions and collaborate with other agents. When a decision needs a person, the agent stops and waits for your input either as a message or response to a kickback.

Here are some tasks that Field Materials automation agents can handle:

• AP invoice processing.
• Field requisitions: approving and submitting orders.
• Replenishing inventory when stock runs low.
• Flagging risks, e.g., exceeded budgets, high-dollar orders, or expiring discounts.
• Grouping invoice into overhead, subcontracts, rentals, etc.
• Generating weekly reports, e.g., rentals expiring that week.

With these capabilities, you can take on more projects without adding back-office headcount. The people you already have can now spend their time on tasks where their judgment actually matters.

Field Materials automation agents are fundamentally different from the agents built on foundational models (e.g., Claude) that construction ERPs and project management suites recently launched.

First, they don't hallucinate and are deterministic. Second, they have construction procurement skills to do quote analysis, process order deliveries and supplier invoices, and run prefabrication and inventory workflows. Third, they're integrated with the major construction ERPs and have skills to read relevant data like project budgets and write back data like POs and AP invoices your staff used to enter by hand.

Finally, the new automation agents have the skills to read and interpret supplier documents. This is possible because of the data extraction agents that we developed over the past 4 years. These agents were trained on documents from over 25,000 suppliers and are experts at reading a wide variety of procurement document types such as concrete delivery tickets or electrical switchgear quotes.

Big moment for construction

The whole industry is facing a tectonic change in its workforce demographics, with as much as 41% of the current workforce retiring by 2031. Contractors are pressured to find new talent quickly and train it.

Yet a lot of tribal knowledge is locked in the heads of existing aging employees: from how they estimate jobs to operational know-how of budgeting, purchasing, and AP processing.

And there’s another thing: the scale of projects in construction is getting massive. Demand is growing. New data centers, power generation, and infrastructure projects – they are huge and increasingly complex. Humanity hasn’t built much like these. At least not this many, not all at once.

Such times demand changes from construction companies: better operational efficiency, more digitization and automation – and fast.

These two factors – the aging workforce and an unprecedented scale of projects – put a lot of strain on construction companies. The new AI agents we’re launching represent a perfect solution for such times. 

They store contractors’ operational know-how in their logic, preserving the knowledge for future generations of workers. They provide the digital and automation tools modern projects demand. They also solve the workforce shortage problem by providing digital workers on demand.

We always believed you could automate most of procurement and AP work, not just assist with it. Today we're shipping the product that does it. Just like when field workers got bulldozers instead of shovels to make their work 80% more efficient. Our AI agents are the modern bulldozers that procurement and AP staff need – the tool to makes the back-office work 80% more efficient.