What an AI plan scan does with a plan set — and why its output is a draft that a human estimator still has to check.
BidSync Engineering
BidSync AI
Every heavy-civil estimator knows the routine: open the plan set, set the scale, and spend hours tracing lines and counting structures. It is also where consistency slips between estimators.
BidSync AI sends each PDF page to the AI provider configured for your company and asks for the quantities it can read, framed for the trades you selected. Each returned item carries a 0–100 confidence score and the sheet and page it came from. When the page has a text layer and the quantity appears in it, the item is marked as grounded in the sheet text; scanned sheets without a text layer never are. A run scans up to 10 pages by default, and says so when it stops early.
The output is a draft. The estimator confirms, corrects or deletes each line before it goes into the cost breakdown. That review is also where site knowledge — wet ground, a haul distance nobody measured — gets captured.
A draft list of callouts and quantities is a starting point to check against the drawings rather than a blank sheet. We do not publish a time-saved figure: it depends on the plan set, the scan quality and the reviewer.
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