Every estimating tool says it saves time. Almost none of them will show you a real bid, from a real contractor, with the hours attached. Over a five-week beta ahead of today's launch, we asked roughly thirty demolition, abatement, and remediation contractors to do something simpler than a case study: just tell us, honestly, what happened when they used FieldFlō's AI Takeoff & Estimating module on an actual job. Takeoff & Estimating is generally available starting today. Here's what beta users told us along the way — names, companies, and numbers included.
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474 vs. 480 Hours on the same job, AI-assisted vs. hand-estimated |
~30 min Start-to-finish on a straightforward bid, proposal included |
$15,000 Cost one estimator almost left out of a bid entirely |
Figures reported directly by beta users in office hours and check-in calls.
Rick Kuhlman has run HEPA Environmental Services since long before “AI” showed up in any estimating tool's pitch. So the first weekend he had real access to Takeoff & Estimating, he didn't just try it, he ran it against his own team, on the same job, at the same time.
One of his estimators went out, looked at the site, and built a manual estimate the way HEPA always has. Rick fed the same survey into FieldFlō and let the AI build the scope.
"I ran it side by side with one of my guys, who went out and looked at the job himself. The result was very close to what he estimated, our hours were real close. He came out at 480 hours. I was at 474. It can make a good estimator better," said Kuhlman.
A six-hour gap on a nearly 500-hour estimate is a 1.3% variance, closer than most estimators get comparing their own bid to itself six months later. Rick's read on the speed was just as specific:
"I hit ‘let flō cook,’ went upstairs, got myself a cup of coffee, came back down, read a couple of emails, and — boom — the analysis was done. Then it was just click, click, drag, drag, and I was done."
What he wouldn't do is round up. Asked directly about time savings, Rick drew a clear line between the kind of job that gets fast and the kind that doesn't:
"The demo bids I worked on that weekend honestly wouldn't take long, maybe half an hour, start to finish, proposal included. But when the survey's vague and I have to go hunt for the scope myself, that's still going to take hours. FieldFlō helps with that, but it isn't going to be automated completely. I'm still going to spend the time."
That honesty is exactly why the rest of his feedback carries weight. What Rick kept coming back to wasn't speed on its own, it was being able to check his own work, and his team's:
"It's going to be a fully transparent estimate that I can review. If one of my guys is doing an estimate, I can go back and see that they got everything. I love the audit trail, I can go back and figure out where I screwed up. I'm going to sleep better at night having that button."
The hardest cost to put a number on in estimating is the one that never shows up, the line item nobody remembered until the job was already underway and unprofitable. A few beta users caught exactly that, and could point to what it would have cost them.
Kristen Averett at Horsley Specialties runs estimating and setup for the company's polished concrete division, and she deliberately started her beta test on her most complicated product line instead of her easiest one. Early on, the AI flagged something her team had missed on a real estimate:
"We would've gotten burned — there was a $15,000 training cost we hadn't built into one of our estimates. That's working smarter, and it's going to save a ton of time. I love it. I'm super excited," said Averett.
She put the bigger shift in blunt terms: “This spreadsheet was made back in 1998, and we're still using it. I think this is going to make a huge change for our industry.” And she pointed to a gap that's easy to miss until you've lost money to it:
“We can finally see if what we're bidding, production-rate-wise, is actually hitting the mark. A lot of that gets missed in hand bidding or Excel — there's no way to pull that information out of those systems. This shows it to us in real time.”
Rick Kuhlman ran into the same kind of catch from the opposite direction — not a missed cost, but a scope item he might have waved off. On a 66,000-square-foot plaster job, the AI flagged asbestos content the survey listed at under 1%, which Ohio doesn't require contractors to remove. Rick's instinct was to double-check anyway rather than assume the AI had it wrong:
"It found more than it needed to, which I was pleased with, because I'd much rather it find more than less. If I miss a number-three notation on a drawing, that can cost me two hundred dollars every time — and that might win me the job, but it doesn't win me the profit," said Kuhlman.
Over at Asbestos Abatement Inc. (AAI), estimator Matt Smith tested the same instinct from the accuracy side — did the AI actually get the scope right, not just fast:
Smith said, "I picked the spec, and it found the exact two materials listed for removal — and got the exact quantities. That's actually a lot of help. I think it did a good job on this one."
Michael Poe at Advanced Environmental, Inc. ran a denser scope through it and got the same result:
“It had a big scope in there, and it picked everything accurately — all the square footage, linear footage, all of that was right,” said Poe.
Because demolition, abatement, and remediation estimators don't all work the same way — different scope documents, different units, different day-to-day rhythm — it mattered to us that the beta cohort wasn't just one trade talking to itself.
Joey Tamburin, Owner at Tactical Demolition was a part of the beta. His findings were:
"Definitely a game changer — very exciting."
None of these numbers came from a lab test or a vendor's own benchmark — they came from contractors using the product on jobs they were actually bidding, during the five-week beta that ran from August 14 to today's public launch. That's also why we're not going to hand you a single blended “% faster” figure: the honest answer, straight from the people using it, is that a clean bid gets fast and a messy one still takes hours, because the estimator's judgment is still doing the hard part. What moves is everything around that judgment call, the hunting through a spec, the re-checking of quantities, the line item that quietly falls out of an estimate.
FieldFlō's own modeling, built independently of these beta interviews, puts realistic annual savings for a mid-size demolition, abatement, or remediation contractor in the $75,000–$150,000 range. The beta feedback above is the reason that range holds up: it's built from caught errors and reclaimed hours, not a marketing multiplier.
The beta cohort spans demolition, abatement, and remediation contractors on purpose, because a tool built for one of those trades and marketed to all three usually shows its seams fast. So far, the seams haven't been the complaint. The complaint, when there is one, sounds like Rick Kuhlman's: it's still going to take hours on the ugly jobs. Which, from an industry that's heard “faster” promised by every takeoff tool for a decade, might be the most convincing thing anyone in this beta has said.
Takeoff & Estimating is generally available today, with scope templates built for asbestos abatement, lead abatement, mold remediation, structural demolition, and interior demolition.
It depends on the job. Beta users reported straightforward bids taking as little as 30 minutes start to finish, proposal included. Jobs with vague surveys or messy scope still take hours, because that judgment call is still the estimator's — FieldFlō speeds up the scope capture and math around it, not the parts that require a site-specific read.
Beta users treated it as a second set of eyes, not a final answer. In one side-by-side test, an estimator's AI-assisted bid landed within 1.3% of his crew's manually estimated hours on the same job. Every AI-suggested item has a manual fallback, and the estimator has final say on pricing and the proposal.
Demolition, abatement, and remediation contractors specifically, with scope templates for asbestos abatement, lead abatement, mold remediation, structural demolition, and interior demolition.
Yes. After a five-week beta with roughly 30 contractor accounts, Takeoff & Estimating is generally available as of today, September 22, 2026.