“Today, when you talk to construction people about the latest technology being used, they will still be talking about AutoCAD and BIM, which are two to four decades old at this point,” says Argenio Antao, Chief Business Officer at Inkers Technology.
As someone who has decades of experience in the construction business, Antao has been desperate for tech to rejuvenate and reimagine the possibilities in everything related to building apartments to huge smart city complexes. Since he didn’t find anything, he went ahead and developed it.
That stagnation is the problem Inkers is trying to solve with Kaël, India’s first AI-native construction intelligence system. I have to be honest, when I first heard about AI in a space like construction, I almost laughed it off. But the more I got to know, the more it turned out to be interesting. Here’s why…
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Every construction project generates thousands of documents, be it schedules, vendor contracts, design revisions, inspection logs, WhatsApp threads, or, more importantly, invoices. The problem has always been that none of them talks to each other.
“We have traditionally always been working in silos,” says Antao. “You have your design team separately, your planning guys, procurement people, construction people – and there is a lot of information loss that goes between one department and the other.”
“Chaos is literally a carpenter contractor telling you he can’t come next week, but the electronic lock contractor doesn’t know about it. It is genuinely impossible at a human level to keep informing every affected party the moment something like this happens,” says Rohan.
A few software have tried to solve this, but largely, it has made the whole situation worse because of the number of programs in each step. You had a procurement tool here, a scheduling dashboard there, each solving a part of the problem in isolation. While on paper, it looks helpful, in reality, it’s a nightmare for the project managers, as they are the ones manually bridging the gaps.
“Construction projects have histories of two to three years – invoices, every project detail, everything needs to go in,” says Rohan. “By mid-2025, context was no longer a problem. AI could actually understand the whole scheme of things and make decisions. That is precisely why this was the right time to build something like this.”
The team behind Kaël carries what Rohan estimates to be 230 to 250 years of combined construction experience. “The project insights that our senior team has, what happened at a particular site – all of that is the training data.” In Rohan’s words, they have “literally copied Antao’s brain and put it inside AI.”
“The easiest way to understand Kaël is to imagine a very senior CFO or project head sitting with you,” says Rohan. “This is a living entity that works on the project.”
If a vendor proposes a material that conflicts with the specifications in the contract, Kaël flags it before the project manager opens their inbox. If a delayed activity is going to create a problem six weeks down the line, Kaël models the financial exposure and routes the alert to whoever needs to act.
“Everything that happens on a construction site goes through Kaël,” says Rohan. “The only software we have not built is essentially Autodesk, where the architect is designing the building.”
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Rohan suggests that Kaël generated a comprehensive carbon footprint analysis for a project, including specific recommendations to bring the building into the top 25% of global emissions benchmarks, in under 30 minutes. “I don’t believe that a person sitting on it for a month would be able to tell the client at such a quick pace,” says Antao.
In another example, the duo stated that Kaël was able to produce a 100-page project report, with all essential information like cost per square foot, staffing requirements, and full schedule, during the course of a single client meeting. “What a normal PMC will take at least a month to prepare is done in half an hour while we are still in the meeting.”
His point is clear: “AI today is at a point where humans are the bottleneck – it is not that AI is slow.”
I like to end most of my AI-related interviews on a slightly bitter note by asking a question that most founders are afraid to answer: Job losses. Naturally, this question had to pop up in my head, and that’s because Kaël is basically replacing project managers, right? But, well, both the spokespersons had something interesting to say on this. Let’s hear them out.
Well, Rohan is pretty clear about where the human remains irreplaceable. He said, “We cannot replace Antao’s hunch for the next 20 to 30 years with AI.” I get it, but beyond that? Well, that’s something only time will tell.
On the jobs question in particular, Antao sees Kaël less as a replacement and more as a multiplier. He states that for new entrants, it’s a great thing. “Imagine a fresher who comes into this industry and in six months has all the experience of a 10-year veteran,” he says.
Thanks to AI, a large part of India is finally getting things done using newer ways. In today’s day and age, a lot of industries are supercharging themselves thanks to AI. It has gotten to a point that even an industry like construction, which has mostly been human-led, can be integrated with AI. It will be interesting to see where the future lies for AI in the construction space, and how other players bring innovations.
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