Spec Summary
A 60-second orientation on an industry spec — title, scope, key requirements, who invokes it, and the usual traps. For the section you have to work to but have not read cover to cover.
Example automations · as-is
Engineering Firms
The RFI that sat three days because it landed in the wrong inbox. The submittal log that's a week behind because updating it is nobody's favorite job. The drawing set you FTP'd to the contractor by hand, again. On a project schedule, every one of those delays cascades — and the coordination work isn't the engineering you got into this to do.
Describe the work in plain English — "log every incoming RFI and submittal, warn me when a response is due, and sync the latest drawing set to the contractor's server nightly" — and InTouch AI builds the workflow, runs it on schedule, and tells you what's outstanding. No scripts. No per-transfer bill. And your project files and IP stay on-prem.
InTouch AI lives on your own computer, not someone else's cloud. Drawings, calculations, proprietary designs, client project files — none of it leaves your office. The logins for every contractor site and client portal never leave your office, and neither do your files. Your work stays on a computer you own.
Everything below is a real, ready-to-run automation you install with a click and point at your own projects — your folders, your delivery targets, your response-time rules. You adjust it and check it first. And nothing gets approved or stamped by a machine: every engineering decision is a licensed engineer's.
What the old way costs you
RFIs and submittals track themselves — badly
The log is a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember. A response due date slips, the contractor stops work waiting, and the schedule takes the hit. The tracking is critical and nobody wants to own it — exactly the job to automate.
Project documents are scattered
Latest drawings on the server, markups in email, specs in a shared drive, the contractor's copy on their FTP. Keeping everyone on the current revision is manual, error-prone, and occasionally expensive when someone builds off an old set.
Large-file transfers are done by hand
Drawing sets and models are big, and getting them to contractors, clients, and reviewers means someone manually pushing files over FTP/SFTP, one target at a time. It works until it's forgotten or done to the wrong folder.
Compliance and report assembly grind
Progress reports, compliance packages, closeout documents — assembled by pulling from a dozen places into a template. Recurring, formulaic, and always due when you're busiest with actual engineering.
Example AI skills
Describe the question, get a structured answer. Paste the input, read the result. Point it at your AI provider — or a local model, so nothing leaves the office at all.
Submittal Reviewer
Cross-checks a submittal package — data sheet, cut sheet, sample literature — against the spec section it is supposed to satisfy, and lists what matches, what does not, and what it could not tell. The engineer decides; this finds the places to look.
Example automation workflows
Scheduled or trigger-driven. Each reads a source you already have — an email label, a project folder, a log Sheet — does the work, and moves files or alerts the right person. It runs whether the project is quiet or crunching.
Submittal Tracker
Daily digest of pending submittals, aging at 14/21/28 days, plus anything past its target return date. Pair it with RFI Triage, which polls a Gmail label for incoming RFIs and classifies them by trade, priority and cost impact.
Drawing Rev Watcher
Watches email for drawing-revision packages and reads each PDF title block to pull the drawing number and revision, so a set that arrives at 6pm is logged before morning. Drawing Folder Watcher does the same against a Drive folder.
Deliverable Pack Check
Checks each project’s folder against what the client is owed and reports what is missing, who owns it and what is late — broken out per owner. A presence check; it does not open the files or assemble a document.
Milestone Deadline Watcher
Submittal dates, review windows, permit deadlines and inspections in 30/14/7/3/1-day windows, with anything past due or flagged at risk called out first. It does not read your programme file or recalculate a critical path — when the schedule moves, the sheet moves.
How it works
1. Install
Grab the free Personal edition of InTouch AI and run it on the firm's server. Browse the InTouch Hub, pick the skills and workflows you want, click Install. No scripts to write, no IT contractor.
2. Adapt
Each workflow ships with placeholders — project folders, transfer targets and credentials, log Sheets, response-time rules. Read the README, fill them in, point it at your project structure. Verify a run does exactly what you expect before you schedule it.
3. Schedule
Attach a schedule — or a folder trigger that fires the moment a new revision lands — and walk away. InTouch AI runs it, moves the files or alerts the team, and logs every run: a record of exactly which revision went where and when. When a target is unreachable, InTouch AI reads the failure, retries, and tells you why. As a workflow earns trust, dial it toward fully deterministic: same result every time, zero per-run AI cost, fully audited.
What you don't get
Straight talk. No surprises after you install:
- No engineering judgment, approvals, or stamping. InTouch AI tracks, moves, and drafts. InTouch AI does not approve submittals, seal drawings, or make an engineering decision. Every one of those stays with a licensed engineer — full stop.
- Not a CAD or PM replacement. InTouch AI works alongside your CAD, BIM, and project-management tools — automating the tracking, transfer, and assembly around them, not replacing the systems of record.
- No unsupervised issuance. Drafted RFI responses and assembled deliverables are queued for review. Nothing goes to a contractor or client without an engineer pressing send.
- Transfers do what you configure — verify it. A file-sync workflow moves exactly what its rules say. Test it against the right targets and folders before you trust it with a live drawing set; a misrouted revision is a real cost.
- No warranty. These automations are free and provided as is. The licence disclaims all warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and the accuracy, reliability or completeness of any result. A milestone reminder is a second set of eyes, not a programme — the engineer of record owns every date and every decision.
Stop configuring. Start describing.
Personal edition is free. Install it on the firm's computer, point it at your projects, and let it track the RFIs and submittals, sync the drawing sets, and assemble the reports. And because it all runs on your own computer, your drawings, calculations, and designs never leave the office — they stay yours.
Engineering connectors in the InTouch Hub
Every one installs from the hub and runs on your own server. Browse all over a thousand connectors, or describe what you need and the assistant builds it.
- FTP / SFTP — Push a drawing set to the contractor or client target — upload, download, list, rename, delete.
- File Management — Project-folder operations on your own disk: copy, move, list and test with wildcard and glob support.
- PDF — Generate PDFs, extract their text, read their metadata, and merge documents into a package.
- DocuSign — Send, sign and track proposals and change orders via the DocuSign eSignature REST API.
- Harvest — Pull billable hours by project and phase from Harvest. Hand-built, paginates properly, and says when a result is incomplete.
- QuickBooks Online — Query QuickBooks Online, read customers and invoices, create invoices, and fetch company details through the Accounting API v3.
- Slack — Put the submittal, RFI and milestone alerts in the channel the project team already watches.
- Rsync — Mirror a project directory tree to or from a remote host over SSH, delta-transfer only.
Every connector above is hand-built against the vendor’s real API, not transcribed from a public spec. Design authoring tools — Revit, Civil 3D, Bluebeam — and programme software such as P6 have no connector; the workflows above read from a Sheet and your project folders instead. Tell us what you run and it moves up the list.