AI auto-takeoff: what it does and how you check it

Every takeoff vendor is selling AI this year, and most of the claims are unfalsifiable. Here is exactly what ours does, where it helps, and where it does not — so you can decide whether it is worth the plan.

What happens when you run AI auto-takeoff?

You open a project with a plan in it, ask for an auto-takeoff, and Claude reads the sheet and proposes takeoff geometry: boundaries, areas, counts, the things you would otherwise trace by hand.

The important part is the next step. Nothing is applied to your project until you accept it. You see the proposal, you look at it against the plan, and you take it or reject it. That is not a safety blanket bolted on afterwards — it is the design, and it is why we can offer this at all on work where being wrong costs real money.

Runs are metered as credits, debited after a successful run, so a failed attempt does not cost you.

What is AI auto-takeoff good at?

Repetitive tracing. Sixty parking bays, forty pits, a long run of kerb. This is where the time actually goes on a takeoff, and it is tedious rather than difficult — which is exactly the shape of work a model does well.

Getting you to a first draft. Starting from something and correcting it is faster than starting from nothing, especially on a sheet you have not read yet.

Consistency across sheets. It does not get bored on sheet six and start rounding.

What it is not good at

Deciding what matters. A plan contains a hundred things that could be measured and about eight that belong in your price. That judgement is estimating, and it is still yours.

Bad scans. A photocopied fax of a 1998 drawing is a bad input for a model, exactly as it is for a person.

Anything the drawing does not say. If the existing levels are not on the sheet, no amount of AI invents them. You need a survey, contours or spot levels from somewhere real.

Knowing your business. Bulking factors, haul distances, what you do with surplus material and what your plant costs — none of that is on the drawing.

Why we will not say "one-click"

Vendors in this category publish accuracy figures of 95 to 98 per cent. Independent testing of AI takeoff tools has generally landed lower on complex jobs, and the gap between the two numbers is the reason we do not quote one.

Here is the arithmetic that matters. On a job with a $400,000 earthworks component, a 3 per cent error is $12,000 — usually more than the margin. So the useful question is not "how accurate is the AI", it is "how quickly can I see what it did and fix it". We optimise for that: a proposal you can read, against a plan you can see, that you accept or reject.

If a competitor's demo goes from PDF to final quantities without a human looking at anything, ask them what happens on revision C.

The bigger version: let your own assistant drive

Auto-takeoff is Claude working inside the app. The other direction is more interesting: the whole app is exposed to AI assistants through a 22-tool connector, so you can sit in Claude or ChatGPT and say "open the Riverside job, add a pad at 42.5 and tell me what that does to the cut". The assistant opens the project, makes the change, and you watch it happen in your browser tab.

That is covered properly in Run your earthworks takeoff from Claude or ChatGPT. As far as we can find, no other earthworks takeoff tool can be driven this way.

What does AI auto-takeoff cost?

AI auto-takeoff is part of the AI plan at US$99 per user per month, which includes credits each month; runs are metered so cost tracks usage. Pro at US$39 is the plan without it — full volumes, unlimited sheets and exports, all traced by you. Current details are on the pricing page.

Plenty of estimators are perfectly well served by Pro. The AI plan pays for itself if you are pricing enough jobs that the tracing hours are the constraint.

Try it on a plan you already know

Run it on a job you have priced by hand, and compare. You will learn more in twenty minutes than from any accuracy claim, including ours. Start at takeoff.sitesai.net, or read Cut and fill from a PDF plan in about ten minutes for the manual workflow first.