When NOVO Construction adopted OpenSpace in 2017, the goal was straightforward: create a complete visual record of every jobsite without adding work for field teams. Over the next nine years, that approach became standard across the company. Today, OpenSpace is used on every substantial project—more than 100 active jobs—and that consistent visual record has become the foundation for NOVO’s next step: AI agents that automate project work.
The challenge
Turning years of visual data into something more
For nearly a decade, OpenSpace has been part of NOVO’s standard way of working—not simply an application teams are asked to use, but the company’s consistent process for documenting projects from groundbreaking through closeout. New team members learn it from day one. Project teams rely on it for QA/QC, owner communication, warranty documentation, and routine site walks.
That consistency created something more valuable than documentation: a rich visual history of every project.
The next evolution was how to put that history to work.
When CIO Colin Stoner attended the OpenSpace Customer Advisory Board in early 2026 and saw the company’s vision for AI agents, he immediately recognized the opportunity. Rather than starting from scratch, NOVO already had years of organized (tagged, located) visual information captured through the same repeatable workflows across hundreds of projects.
Instead of asking, How can we use AI? the team asked a more practical question:
What repetitive work can AI take off our project teams’ plates?
The solution
Building an AI agent around an existing workflow
NOVO chose one of the most time-consuming recurring tasks on every project: the weekly owner report.
Preparing the 10-to-15-page update meant gathering photos, organizing them, matching previous viewpoints, and formatting everything by hand—a process that could consume most of a workday.
Working alongside the OpenSpace product team, NOVO’s field staff turned an existing weekly routine into an AI-powered workflow. Their regular capture locations became Points of Interest pinned to project drawings. Using those locations and NOVO’s existing OpenSpace imagery, the AI agent automatically selects the right photos, recreates consistent viewpoints from week to week, and drafts report copy in NOVO’s own format.
The result is a report that’s already 85–90% complete before anyone begins reviewing it.
Instead of spending hours assembling slides, project teams spend a few minutes refining the final report—freeing time for RFIs, submittals, architect coordination, and solving problems in the field.
When I saw our first AI-generated report, it was pretty much exactly what I would have put together by hand—just without the hours it used to take. Working with OpenSpace on it has been really collaborative; they’ve been out to the site multiple times to help us fine-tune the format until it matched what we needed.
For CIO Colin Stoner, that’s exactly the role AI should play: augment his experienced builders and free them up for higher-value work. It’s a distinction that shapes how he thinks about AI more broadly.
Imagery on its own only tells you so much. What makes an agent actually useful is combining what we capture with everything else we know about a job—the scope of work, the contracts, the labor hours on-site. That’s the direction we’re headed next: agents that can look at a photo and tell you whether a subcontractor’s invoice actually matches what’s built.
The results
Saving time today & creating what’s next
The first AI agent quickly proved its value. Within weeks, NOVO was ready to roll it out to a second project, with broader deployment planned across the company.
For Senior Project Manager Jacob White, the opportunity extends well beyond a single workflow. As AI becomes part of everyday construction operations, consistent project data will become an even greater advantage.
If you’re not doing it, you’re being left behind. Clients are increasingly expecting clean, well-organized project data, whether or not they explicitly ask for it. The agent already gets us 85 to 90 percent of the way on our weekly report—our team just polishes it before it goes out.
The owner report is only the beginning. NOVO is already exploring what comes next, including AI workflows for payment verification that compare visual progress with subcontractor invoices, and visual punch lists that turn a site walk into drafted, routed punch items. For NOVO, it’s a glimpse of a future where AI takes on more of the repetitive work—giving project teams more time to focus on building.
To see what’s possible with OpenSpace AI Agents and APIs, click here.
