Transcripts
Foreign.
Speaker A:This is Alex with Arc It.
Speaker A:I'm the host of Design Under Influence podcast and on this episode today we gonna round up the whole submittal series.
Speaker A:So if you were paying attention or if you look in archives, we've designed an AI based submittal process to simplify life for architecture firms.
Speaker A:Compress the amount of work, figure out where the human gates are, where you need to make your professional decision, but leave all the mundane matching and data tracking spreadsheets to AI.
Speaker A:So in episode one we split it in three parts.
Speaker A:In episode one we covered intake submittals coming in from gcs.
Speaker A:Episode two, we've covered the review process itself.
Speaker A:This is where a lot of human gates were inserted, where AI prepares but the architect actually makes the decision and then AI packages that and sends that.
Speaker A:On episode three we covered tracking and resubmittals.
Speaker A:So whether we're going to close that submittal process or we're going to have to resubmit and that loop repeats if we resubmit.
Speaker A:So every part of the submittal process was done with demo documents.
Speaker A:So we sort of run mock real submission process and went through the whole workflow and after each episode we've built a skill.
Speaker A:Now the first two episodes were done on Copilot, but then our customers and people who watch this show said, hey, can you do it on a different AI tooling?
Speaker A:We don't use Copilot.
Speaker A:I was like, sure, sounds good.
Speaker A:So we built a third process or workflow out on Claude.
Speaker A:After each episode we requested that the system creates a skill and then we downloaded those skills in a zip format.
Speaker A:Now, one thing to point out here is the skills coming out of virtually any AI system right now and hopefully in the future are of a universal format.
Speaker A:In other words, we were able to grab our skills from the Copilot for first two sessions and from Claude from a.
Speaker A:From session three.
Speaker A:And then we're able to combine them into one super skill in Claude.
Speaker A:Now we could have put it in Gemini, we could have put it in Codex, we could have put it back in Copilot or any other AI system.
Speaker A:But I'm going to show you today how we got these skills out of Copilot and the process of importing them into Claude and directing Claude to create a one super skill.
Speaker A:So now we can manage a submittal process from end to end with the skills that we've built.
Speaker A:So let's take a look.
Speaker A:This is part two.
Speaker A:This is where we've done our review process.
Speaker A:So we went through step by step and then we Asked Copilot to export this as a skill.
Speaker A:From here, Copilot creates a zip file.
Speaker A:We went ahead and downloaded the zip file.
Speaker A:So we did the same thing for the initial demo.
Speaker A:There we go.
Speaker A:We did the same thing for the first demo which was training with AI on how to intake this the submittals.
Speaker A:We've downloaded this skill as well.
Speaker A:Next went to Claude and I asked Claude, I need to import two skills.
Speaker A:So just as reminder before we go there, this is the third skill which is tracking and resubmittals.
Speaker A:We went through the whole process and found some mistakes and this is episode three if you want to go in details.
Speaker A:But we've completed this and we've created a skill here in Claude for the submittal tracking process.
Speaker A:Okay, so now I created a new project for my Riverband community, which is a demo made up community where all of our documents were created.
Speaker A:So we're going to stick to that name.
Speaker A:And here I created a new task and my goal was to import two skills from Copilot and combine it all into a 1:1 skill set so we can run submissions full cycle.
Speaker A:So what Claude did initially it told me I asked it to go to my downloads folder and grab the two skills I just downloaded from Copilot.
Speaker A:It says, whoops, I don't have access to your downloads.
Speaker A:And I said, that's okay, I don't want to give you access to my downloads right now.
Speaker A:So I just go ahead and dump the files into the chat.
Speaker A:It checked both files, but if you notice, it said I cannot add them to the repository myself.
Speaker A:So I asked it, hey, can you create a skill from these two files?
Speaker A:And it said I cannot add this to repository.
Speaker A:So the process to add skills.
Speaker A:The right way to process on Claude is to go to customize, Click Add Upload skill and this is where you can drag and drop the skill.
Speaker A:So I ended up doing that for both the intake review and tracking resubmittals.
Speaker A:Okay, so we have all three skills.
Speaker A:Two of them from Copilot and one is from Claude which was created as part of the episode three.
Speaker A:So from here I said now you have three submittal processing skills.
Speaker A:Create one super skill from the three skills I uploaded.
Speaker A:It actually gave me an option whether I wanted to just create one super skill or should I merge and test run test cases with sample files?
Speaker A:I said, sure, let's run test cases with sample files.
Speaker A:I told it where the files are and when.
Speaker A:By files I mean this.
Speaker A:These are the demo files we use throughout the series.
Speaker A:So it's A again, it's a meta made up demo files, but it's Riverbend submittal tracking review record.
Speaker A:It's the submittal itself resubmittal and those are the documents I told it to go get or go use for this demo.
Speaker A:So here where I told it the files are in DOI folder.
Speaker A:Go grab them.
Speaker A:Those are demo files.
Speaker A:So it can test the skills as it's building one skill out of the three separate skills.
Speaker A:So it started working on stitching the skills together as well as testing this probably took about 30 minutes for for it to run through all the tests and create one skill.
Speaker A:It told me that it found two real problems.
Speaker A:One is an ordering bug in the intake workflow.
Speaker A:It checked for an existing duplicate log entry after drafting a row for human approval instead of before meaning human could not be asked to approve an append.
Speaker A:That was already wrong.
Speaker A:So it found that.
Speaker A:And another one was the ambiguous guardrail in the resubmittal tracking workflow.
Speaker A:The rule against defaulting to appears addressed only covered cases where independent confirmation was available but unchecked, not cases where the governing spec document was missing entirely.
Speaker A:Which is exactly what happened when I ran it.
Speaker A:So the spec document I suppose was missing.
Speaker A:I didn't have the spec in that set of documents.
Speaker A:So there it found that it had a problem that it really couldn't make recommended decision because the spec was missing.
Speaker A:Claude said I fixed both arrows, moved the duplicate check ahead of the approval gate, brought in the label guardrail to cover unavailable as well as unchecked.
Speaker A:So instead of appears addressed or unaddressed, it's actually going to flag it.
Speaker A:Now if documents are missing, for example, the spec for the door hardware was missing.
Speaker A:That's why it didn't find it.
Speaker A:But it didn't have instructions to let us know that was the case.
Speaker A:So the revised skills file is attached above.
Speaker A:As with earlier importing, it is on your end.
Speaker A:So we need to download this and add it to our customize.
Speaker A:Here's the advice that Claude gives us.
Speaker A:Okay, it says you'll probably want to retire the standalone submittal intake submittal review skills so as not to confuse the tooling.
Speaker A:So let's go ahead and download this skill and let's remove.
Speaker A:Let's remove it submittal review, let's go ahead and remove it as well.
Speaker A:And submittal tracking resubmittals, let's also get rid of this one and now we have no more no skills but what we will do.
Speaker A:So Claude called it submittal life cycle and that combines all of our Skills in one.
Speaker A:And so from here on we have full submittal skill for an architecture company.
Speaker A:The way we run it in ARC it.
Speaker A:But now this is fully customizable, it has human gates.
Speaker A:And what's left to do here is to start running this against real documents and step by step improve it and shift it to the way you work.
Speaker A:So now our Claude has the life cycle, the submittal lifecycle skill that will include all of the steps that we've covered in the past three episodes and it's actually completely ready to get started with experimentation.
Speaker A:We will have this skill available for free [email protected] you click on free Resources and it'll be right there.
Speaker A:The way I would approach this is once I download it and uploaded the skill to my AI tool, I would start processing your documents live manually first, without setting up any scheduled automations or anything like that.
Speaker A:Once you process, let's say four or five different submittals, fine tune the skills to match your specific operations.
Speaker A:From there I would start wiring up connectors and we can help you with that or you can do that yourself.
Speaker A:You can build an API to Procore so you can grab those as they come in.
Speaker A:You can have your schedule, schedule a, build a dashboard so every time your CA people come to work they can look at the dashboard and see what submittals they have to work on, what stages they're in and things like that.
Speaker A:The idea is that we let AI do all of the busy work, all of the data heavy work, things where we can as humans honestly probably make more mistakes because it's just tons of data and you have to look at different things and it's not easy to do and stay focused while you get interrupted by a whole bunch of other things flying your way.
Speaker A:So let IT do that work while the human gates are still very specific.
Speaker A:As far as we are responsible for the final outcome of this submittal and our review of IT and the skill that we've built accounts for those human gates.
Speaker A:It would not automatically proceed onto the next phase without a human approval and human specific review.
Speaker A:So I hope this was helpful to you.
Speaker A:You can ask us any questions, just comment here or go to getarchitect.com we implement AI into architecture firms of about 10 to 200 people and we are a IT company.
Speaker A:We've done this for last 12 years serving architects.
Speaker A:If you need help with your IT and AI boom, one house, we can definitely have a conversation.
Speaker A:Check us [email protected] thank you very much for your time.
Speaker A:See you next time.
