New York, NY, June 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Trunk Tools today announced Cortex, a new AI intelligence layer built specifically as the “brain” of construction. Developed over four years from live construction projects with some of the largest and most respected U.S. general contractors, Cortex is designed to read, interpret, and structure data from construction drawings: a capability that until now has been a fundamental barrier to AI adoption in the industry.
Cortex is also designed to function as a unified intelligence layer across project documentation beyond blueprints. As AI tools have proliferated in construction, two gaps have persisted: the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with experienced workers, and document workflows that have remained largely manual. Existing tools can search text in PDFs, store files, and support markup. Reading a drawing — including understanding all objects and symbols, detecting what changed across multiple versions of a drawing, judging what those changes mean across trades, and determining how an object on a sheet connects to the broader project record — has remained out of reach.
With Cortex, teams can interpret drawing data against the full corpus of project documentation: specs, RFIs, submittals, schedules, and change orders. The platform is designed to provide all associated data and documentation when clicking on an object or symbol in a drawing, making it possible to visually browse and navigate the connections and impacts across the corpus of project documents. Additionally, it can identify changes in revision bulletins, including those that fall outside revision clouds, a common source of missed changes and downstream rework.
Cortex powers a suite of workflow agents beyond the Drawing Revision Agent and Visual Browsing offerings, including an RFI Prevention, Drafting, and Impact Analysis Agent, a Bid Analysis Agent, and Submittal Register Agent, Submittal Review Agent, and more. All of these reduce time spent on document-heavy tasks, surface schedule risks earlier, and flag potential rework before it reaches the field. Cortex reflects four years of training on the document types and failure patterns specific to commercial construction, an approach that produces a different class of tool than AI systems that are simply wrappers on top of off-the-shelf foundational models.
“What we’ve built with Cortex isn’t just a better AI tool; it’s a new architecture for how construction gets done. We’ve gone from agents that assist individuals to agents that work together, sharing context and acting without waiting for a human to connect the dots,” said Dr. Sarah Buchner, Founder & CEO, Trunk Tools. “For the teams using it, that means fewer hours buried in documents and more hours making decisions. It means catching a missed change before it becomes a costly error. It means a new project engineer or assistant inheriting institutional knowledge that used to only exist in someone else’s head. Cortex is built to make great builders better, and to make every team run like your best one.”
As the U.S. faces a $3.7 trillion infrastructure investment shortfall, a housing deficit measured in the millions, and rework costs running close to $2 trillion annually, the pressures on builders have never been more acute. Nearly 17M infrastructure and construction workers are projected to leave their jobs over the next decade, and roughly 40% of today’s skilled trades workers are already over 45. A December 2025 Dodge Construction Network and CMiC survey found that 87% of contractors expect AI to meaningfully reshape construction, but only 19% have adapted their workflows to it. The industry has been asked to do more with fewer experienced hands, faster, and with less margin for error than ever before.
Available today, Cortex powers five new AI agents, each purpose-built for the construction workflows where the intensity of the document grind does the most damage. The result is a single connected system capable of absorbing the tedious, high-volume work that has long posed risks for worker morale and the success of projects alike.
“Partnering with Trunk Tools allows us to apply AI where it matters most, tackling complex, high‑impact challenges that have traditionally lacked clear solutions. Drawing review is a prime example.” said Heidi DeBenedetti, Chief Operating Officer of Gilbane Building, one of the nation’s largest builders by revenue and volume. “What sets them apart is their ability to translate advanced technology into tools that perform reliably in the field, on active projects, and under real-world pressure.”
For Cleveland Construction, which is expanding its national presence in tandem with an expansion of its technology strategy, Trunk Tools helps address the experience gap directly. Senior Vice President of Operations at Cleveland Construction, Elliot Christiansen, says, “Our design and trade partners notice when we’re on top of our core processes. The reality is that today’s jobsite runs on the judgment of a 25-year-old project manager making decisions from six in the morning to six at night on document stacks that would dwarf the building they’re putting up. That person is catching things earlier and communicating with more confidence in part because of our use of Trunk Tools. And it’s showing up in the relationship with our clients as we win repeat business with them. That’s why Trunk Tools matters.”
Agents now available on the Trunk Tools platform, powered by Cortex:
- TrunkReview: Drawing review with patent-pending change narrative generation and bespoke models trained on 2D drawings. A 20-sheet bulletin is reviewed with written change narratives in under five minutes, including changes the architect didn’t cloud.
- TrunkBrowse: Enrich existing 2D drawings with the full context of the job. Click on a sink and instantly see all open RFIs, submittals, the spec, and more, so teams who live in the drawings never have to leave to find what they need.
- TrunkRFI: Prevention of unnecessary RFIs already answered in project docs or previous RFI responses, auto-drafting of necessary RFIs, and impact analysis that turns a design team response into a recommendation, a summary of trade and schedule impact, and next step tasks.
- TrunkBid: Bid analysis for apples-to-apples comparison of trade partner bids against the scope of work requirements and all other received bids, accelerating buyout for preconstruction teams.
- TrunkRegister: Reads entire spec book, builds a submittal register, and writes it back to the project management system in minutes, eliminating 30+ hours of preconstruction work per project.
Previously released agents have significant performance enhancements thanks to Cortex:
- TrunkText: Performs simple lookup, multi-document research, and complex tasks involving data across the entire corpus of project documentation so field and office teams get accurate answers from thousands of pages in seconds. Customers save an average of 36 minutes every time they use it.
- TrunkSubmittal: Now 71% faster, covering nearly every submittal type, automatically associates all relevant specifications and RFI responses with the review (even when these are not tagged in the source system), and is embedded directly in Procore and Autodesk Forma as a workflow step. Over the last 12 months, the median TrunkSubmittal user has seen their submittal cycle time reduced by 74%, and the number of “stuck submittals” requiring more than 60 days for approval has dropped from 42% to 2%.
Today’s launch marks an inflection point Trunk Tools has been building toward since its founding: from a single agent that answered jobsite questions, to a connected platform that reasons across an entire project, hands work between agents without human intervention, and compounds institutional knowledge across every job.
In Buchner’s view, there’s no question AI is already reshaping the industry: “The construction industry shapes our world. We owe builders the best tools available to be as effective as possible, while delivering safer, more efficiently-run jobsites. Our conviction is this: construction needs a system of action. Our partners help us build that — not in the abstract, but in the dirt, on real projects, with AI that hits the problems that matter the most.”.
About Trunk Tools
Trunk Tools is the AI-powered platform transforming how construction teams work. Built by construction professionals for the realities of the field, Trunk Tools develops purpose-built AI agents — powered by Cortex, the construction industry’s most robust AI intelligence layer — that absorb the document grind across the full project lifecycle so teams can focus on the decisions, coordination, and judgment that move projects forward. Founded by CEO Dr. Sarah Buchner in 2021 and headquartered in New York, NY, the company is deployed on hundreds of active jobsites across the U.S. Trunk Tools’ customers include some of the largest and most respected general contractors in the United States, including Gilbane, Suffolk, HITT, DPR, Harkins, Consigli, Torcon, McGough, and Cleveland Construction, across project portfolios totaling billions of dollars in active construction volume. For more information, visit trunktools.com.
Media contact:
trunktools@methodcommunications.com
