National contractor Cleveland Construction has deployed 10 custom AI agents through Box AI Studio, transforming how construction teams handle everything from contract analysis to safety compliance, and speeding up contract review time by 99%, among other wins.
Specializing in general contracting, construction management, design-build, and self-performing walls and ceilings services, Cleveland Construction has been a family-owned commercial construction management firm for four-plus decades. These down-to-earth roots don’t hold the firm back from being a major technology innovator in its field. The custom AI agents Cleveland Construction has rapidly developed through Box AI Studio and Box Hubs have transformed how construction teams handle everything from contract analysis to safety compliance.
The company’s innovative approach demonstrates how construction firms can leverage AI to eliminate manual document processing, with a Contracts Agent reducing review time from up to 8 hours to just 2 minutes. And this is only one of the new AI agents Cleveland Construction has put to work.
Cleveland Constructions top benefits from adopting Intelligent Content Management so far:
- 99% faster contract review: Contract analysis reduced from 4 to 8 hours to just 2 minutes using a custom Contracts Agent, freeing project managers to focus on building rather than paperwork
- 10 specialized AI agents deployed: From safety compliance to bid leveling, the firm built targeted agents through Box AI Studio that address specific construction workflows
- Adoption through demonstration: Success came not just from building agents, but from hands-on training where leadership showed teams how to solve real problems with simple, one-sentence prompts
The document overload crushing construction productivity
Cleveland Construction faced the same challenges plaguing the entire building industry:
- Projects generating hundreds of thousands of files
- Estimating departments sharing documents with thousands of subcontractors
- Field teams struggling to access critical information from job sites
Field work is status quo for construction firms, but there’s always been a division between work that can be done onsite and work that can be done in the office. As Sr. Vice President of Operations Elliot Christiansen describes: “When you were in the office, accessing our internal drives was easy through our network. But if you were working on a job site or anywhere else, you had to log in through Citrix, through a remote desktop, and it was extremely cumbersome.”
At Cleveland Construction, project managers were spending 4 to 8 hours manually reviewing each contract to extract 50 critical data points before construction could even begin. Estimating teams struggled with file-size limitations when distributing bid packages. Safety managers couldn’t quickly reference compliance documentation. The construction industry’s paper-heavy processes were creating bottlenecks at every stage.
From file sharing to intelligent automation
Cleveland Construction’s transformation began with simple cloud storage from Box, enabling teams to share files far more easily with employees in and out of the office, along with contractors, partners, and customers externally. This was just a foundation for the real change: implementing Box AI Studio and Box Hubs.
The ability to use Box AI on files was a good start, but as Christiansen says, “Some of our projects have hundreds of thousands of files by the end of the job.” A 17-year veteran of Cleveland Construction with a deep understanding of the needs of his staff, he set about creating specific Box Hubs for every construction project, automatically syncing the content with Autodesk and creating archive folders.
The ability of a Box Hub to search everything at once makes it a lot more user friendly.
But these Box Hubs also became the foundation for the firm’s AI agent deployment.
Ten agents transforming construction workflows
Next step: custom AI agents designed for the firm’s precise needs. Cleveland Construction’s agentic AI journey started with a “Contracts Agent” based on Box’s template library. The results were immediate and dramatic.
Prior to adopting Box AI, the standard protocol for a new project was for a project manager to manually create a binder and then apply 50 standard questions to the materials. Christiansen added those 50 questions to a Word document, found a typical PDF contract, and put them both through the custom Box AI Contracts Agent. He describes how “I said, answer the questions in the Word document. And I just hit enter, and it answered them all.”
This success sparked rapid expansion. Today, Cleveland Construction runs eight specialized agents, including:
- Contracts Agent: Extracts retainage rates, notice provisions, and change-order markups
- HR Agent: Answers employee questions based on their salary or hourly status
- Safety Agent: Prioritizes the company safety manual, then references OSHA guidelines secondarily
- Talent Agent: Searches resume databases to find things like “a superintendent with at least five years of experience with this type of construction in these states”
- Scope-Writing Agent: Reads plans and specifications to generate subcontractor scopes
- Bid Checklist Agent: Ensures all required elements are included in proposals
- Bid Leveling Agent: Compares multiple bids and identifies missing components
They’re also working on two specialized operations agents:
- Forms Audit Agent: Will identify missing daily reports or failed inspections lacking follow-up
- Progress Report Agent: Will synthesize daily job reports into client-ready summaries
The future of construction intelligence
Cleveland Construction is now preparing for an ERP migration in 2026 that will sync all invoicing back to Box, enabling AI-powered analysis of historical spending patterns.
For instance, the company operates in both Ohio and Florida, and dumpster rates might be very different in those two places. With Box AI, Christiansen can quickly pull relevant invoices from both places to analyze the unit rate and budget for a project.
Looking ahead, he envisions using Box Automate to enable agents to work together — extracting data from financial reports, populating spreadsheets, and generating work-in-progress summaries that currently take project managers “two hours to a whole day.”
Cleveland Construction’s journey from manual document processing to intelligent automation shows what’s possible when construction firms embrace AI-powered content management — and they’re just one of many builders transforming their operations with Box. Read about other Box construction customers like W.T. Rich Company and American Homes 4 Rent.
