For civil, structural, MEP, environmental, and architecture firms doing $2M–$30M.

The average $10M engineering firm is leaking $240K–$340K a year.

Engineers chasing code clauses in PDFs. Proposals that eat 32 hours each. Principals losing track of which project is on fire. RFPs that go quiet after submission. We find the leaks — and stop them.

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Tell us where your week actually goes. We email back one prescribed fix, with the math run on your own numbers. No setup fee, month-to-month, built on the software you already pay for.

Modeled on AIA, ACEC, OpenAsset, and Monograph A&E benchmarks. The math is below.

AI agents for engineering and architecture firms across the United States

Sanders AI is built for the engineering and architecture firms that quietly do the work — civil, structural, MEP, environmental, geotechnical, and architecture firms doing $2M–$30M in annual revenue. We serve firms nationwide and are headquartered in the Birmingham, AL metro.

Engineering culture is referral-driven, not call-volume-driven. The leaks live in different places than they do in a home-services shop or a manufacturing job shop. They live in the research hours engineers spend digging through IBC, ASCE 7, ACI 318, AISC 360, ASHRAE 90.1, and your firm's own prior-project archive. They live in the 32 hours per RFP that OpenAsset benchmarks have documented across the AEC industry. They live in the principal who is supposed to be reviewing six projects this week and only has time for three.

The dollar numbers below come from AIA, ACEC, OpenAsset, Monograph, and Snaptrude benchmarks for a $10M-revenue A&E firm with roughly 25 chargeable engineers and architects. Scale them to your firm size.

Where the money goes

Four leaks. Every firm has all four. Most principals only see one.

AIA + ACEC + OpenAsset benchmarks
$10M A&E firm baseline
01 / Code & spec research

$95K

Your engineers spend 5–15 hours a week digging through codes and prior-project archives.

IBC clauses. ASCE 7 load tables. ACI 318 reinforcement. AISC 360 connection details. ASHRAE 90.1 energy. Plus your firm's own standards library and the way you handled that same detail three years ago. All of it lives in PDFs and folders — searched manually, one tab at a time. The single biggest unbilled time-sink inside an A&E firm.

What we ship The Document Copilot indexes your code references, standards library, prior submittals, and project archive. Engineers ask in plain English, the agent returns the source clause with file name and page — the engineer-of-record verifies before relying on it.

02 / Proposal drafting

$85K

OpenAsset says the average A&E proposal eats 32 hours. You write 40 of them a year.

That is 1,280 hours of senior-staff time per year — at blended A&E loaded rates around $135/hour — sunk into proposals before a single one is awarded. RFP win rates in the AEC industry sit around 25%. The other 75% of that time is dead weight. The bottleneck is not strategy. It is the typing.

What we ship A proposal-draft agent assembles the first draft from your firm boilerplate, prior project sheets, resumes, and the RFP's own scoring criteria. Your principals edit, not write from scratch.

03 / Project status visibility

$60K

Your principals are running eight projects and can name the status of three.

Project managers spend ~4 hours a week each on client status updates — emails, calls, meeting recaps — instead of design review. At 8 PMs and $95/hour loaded, Monograph's A&E benchmarks model that as $146K of theoretical PM time per year sunk into status comms. The Project Status Agent recovers about 45% of it.

What we ship The Project Status Agent pulls weekly status from your PM software, drafts the client update, and routes anomalies (red flags, missed milestones) to the responsible principal — so the PM only spends time on the projects that need a human.

04 / Stalled RFPs

$50K

You submit a proposal. Six weeks of silence. Then the project disappears.

A&E sales cycles run months. Procurement contacts get pulled into other priorities, projects get repackaged, owners reorganize. Most firms do not have a follow-up cadence past submission — and there is no junior partner with time to babysit 30 open pursuits. Per Salesfully's follow-up research, 80% of B2B deals are lost in the gap between first contact and the close.

What we ship The Sales Closer runs a structured nurture cadence on every submitted-and-quiet proposal — every outbound message reviewed and approved by a firm partner before it sends. Reactivating one stalled pursuit usually pays the year.

Add it up
$10M A&E firm · annualized · point estimates

Add it up. Your code research, your proposal pipeline, and your principal time are leaking $240K–$340K a year.

$240K–$340K

Code & spec$95K
Proposals$85K
Project status$60K
Stalled RFPs$50K

That is the median for a $10M A&E firm. Yours is probably different — bigger on the proposal side if your studio chases more RFPs, bigger on code research if you run a heavy structural or MEP load. The free 10-minute review finds out where.

Get your free 10-minute review →

Tell us where your week actually goes. We email back one prescribed fix, with the math run on your own numbers. No setup fee, month-to-month, built on the software you already pay for.

PE-sealed deliverables & scope of practice

EOR-only

AI assists the engineer-of-record's research and documentation work. AI does not seal drawings. AI does not make engineering judgment calls.

Every agent is designed around the engineer-of-record. AI never replaces PE oversight, NCEES rules on practice, or your firm's professional responsibility.

Sanders AI agents inside an engineering firm are scoped to research retrieval, code and standards lookup, prior-project recall, proposal drafting, client status communication, and proposal-pipeline follow-up. That is the entire menu. AI does not seal drawings, does not stamp calculations, does not make load or system selections, does not replace PE oversight, and does not act as the engineer-of-record. The licensed PE reviews, edits, and takes professional responsibility for every output that touches a sealed deliverable. State-board rules on the unauthorized practice of engineering apply unchanged. We design the workflow that way on purpose — and we say so in the engagement letter.

What the free review gets you

One prescribed fix, quantified against your own numbers.

Total client time: ~10 min
Delivered by email
01 / A 10-minute intake by text — no call needed
Included
02 / The single highest-value fix for your business, named and scoped
Included
03 / The math behind it, run on the numbers you give us
Included

If the fix is worth building, we build and run it for a flat monthly fee. If it isn't, you keep the analysis.

After the review

If you want to keep going, one flat monthly fee, all-inclusive.

Recurring engagement
One invoice. No API surprises.

The free 10-minute review is the door, not the destination. If your report points at agents worth building, the next step is a recurring engagement. There are two tiers: Sanders AI Agents — a subscription that covers the agent you need, every model token, every vendor subscription, every iteration, every key, and ongoing tuning. And Chief AI Officer — a fractional executive engagement for firms that want a partner across the whole AI stack, not just one agent.

One flat monthly fee. One invoice. Sanders AI holds every key, every subscription, every model — you never get a surprise OpenAI or Anthropic bill, because that infrastructure sits on our side. No project handovers, no "client owns the keys, we exit" — this is a recurring partnership, structured the way every other professional service your firm pays for is structured.

Pricing runs from $500 to $20,000 a month, depending on how much you want built.

The fine print

Outcomes vary by firm. We don't guarantee any specific outcome, revenue, or savings.

Common questions

What engineering and architecture principals ask before they book

Can the Document Copilot search our internal standards library and prior project archives?

Yes — that is the primary use case. The Document Copilot is built against your own document set: firm standards, CAD/BIM detail libraries, prior submittals, proposal boilerplate, lessons-learned files, project closeout binders. We ingest the content you point us at, the agent retrieves it under question. It quotes the source document by file name and page, so an engineer or architect can verify what it returned before relying on it. It does not write to your standards library — it only reads.

How does the Document Copilot handle code references like IBC, ASCE 7, and ACI 318, and AHJ-specific amendments?

Two-layer pattern. Layer one: the agent retrieves the relevant clause from the code edition you scoped — IBC, ASCE 7, ACI 318, AISC 360, NEC, IECC, IPC — and returns the section number, the clause, and a page link. Layer two: if you have local AHJ amendments loaded (city or county adoption documents), the agent surfaces the amendment alongside the base clause so the engineer-of-record sees both. The agent is a research aid, not a code authority. The engineer-of-record verifies every citation against the controlling adopted code before relying on it.

What about PE-sealed deliverables — can AI assist without unauthorized practice of engineering?

AI assists the engineer-of-record's research and documentation work. It does not seal drawings. It does not make engineering judgment calls. It does not replace PE oversight or sign-off. Our scope inside an engineering firm is limited to research retrieval, code lookup, prior-project recall, proposal drafting, status communication, and proposal-pipeline follow-up. The licensed engineer-of-record reviews, edits, and takes professional responsibility for every output that touches a sealed deliverable. NCEES and state-board rules on the unauthorized practice of engineering apply unchanged. We design the workflow that way on purpose.

How does the Sales Closer agent work for our RFP and proposal sales cycle?

Engineering sales cycles are slow — months between RFP submission and award. Proposals stall, owners reorganize, projects get repackaged. The Sales Closer agent runs a multi-touch nurture cadence on submitted-and-quiet proposals: scheduled email check-ins, summary recap notes, status questions for the owner's procurement contact. It does not impersonate a principal. Every outbound message is reviewed and approved by an authorized firm staffer before it sends. The Snaptrude and OpenAsset RFP benchmarks show roughly 32 hours of effort per proposal — reactivation of even a single stalled pursuit usually pays the year on this agent alone.

Do you work with civil, structural, MEP, environmental, and architecture firms — or only one discipline?

All of them. Civil, structural, MEP, environmental, geotechnical, and architecture firms share the same four leaks — they reference different code books and standards, but the underlying problem (long sales cycles, code research time, principal stretched across too many projects, stalled proposals) is the same. We re-scope the Document Copilot to your discipline's reference set (ASCE 7 + ACI 318 + AISC for structural, ASHRAE 90.1 + NEC + IPC for MEP, IBC and the local AHJ amendments for architecture) and tune the proposal templates to your studio's voice.

Other industries we serve

Home Services (HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Roofing, Pest) · Manufacturing & Metal Fab · Specialty Construction & Trade Subs · Distribution & Wholesale · Accounting & CPA Firms · Auto Service & Tier-2 Suppliers · Law Firms · Medical & Dental Practices

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