How I run a building company with a team of AI bots (and how to set up yours)

A lot of builders try AI the same way. They ask a chat window to write an email or tidy up a quote, then go back to doing everything themselves. That’s not a business system. That’s a fancy spell checker.

What we’ve been doing at Davies Construction is different. We’ve set up a team of AI bots that’s organised the same way a real construction company is organised, with each bot holding a role and a set of jobs. This post covers what Grok Bot is, what to buy, what we’re doing with it, and the rules we run it under.

What Grok Bot actually is

Grok Bot is an AI assistant you work with in chat, and you can set up more than one. The important part is that you can give each bot a job, the same way you’d give a person a position description. One looks after estimating, another admin, another the books.

There are two kinds of bots:

Personal bots are for one person. That’s your own assistant, working on your own stuff.
Team bots are shared. Each team bot has an owner, and once it’s set up the owner shares it with the whole team or with just the people who should use it.

Team bots are where it gets interesting, because the bot stops being “the boss’s toy” and becomes part of how the whole team works.

How to get it: buy Teams, not an individual plan

This is the bit that trips people up on my calls, so I’ll be blunt. Buy a Cursor Teams account. Don’t buy an individual account.

Go to Cursor pricing and make sure you’re looking at Teams, not Individual. Teams is US$30 and up per person per month, which gets everyone a Premium seat with Grok Bot included. Don’t grab the US$8 Plus plan. It doesn’t include Grok Bot.

Why not an individual plan for each person? Because that only gets you personal bots. You can only create Team Bots when you’re on a Cursor team, and Team Bots are the whole point for a building business.

Here’s how it works:

One person buys Teams. Whoever buys it becomes the admin. In most building companies that’s the owner.
The admin adds the team. Invite the people who need it as members of your Cursor team.
Everyone signs in to Grok Bot with their own account on that team.

What Team Bots give you

Once you’re on Teams, you can create Team Bots. A Team Bot is a bot you set up once and share with your team. You decide exactly who gets each one. The Estimator bot goes to the estimating side, the Bookkeeper bot only to the people who should be near the numbers, and a How We Work bot to the whole team. You can also make someone a manager of a bot so they can help look after it.

When you set a Team Bot up, it walks you through what it needs:

Tools. The apps it connects to, like your email, calendar, ClickUp or Drive. You connect them once on the bot and they work for everyone who uses it.
Skills. The step-by-step instructions for how you want the job done.
Secret keys. Logins and API keys, stored securely. Only add a key you’re happy for everyone on that bot to use.
Documentation. The files it should work from, like your SOPs, price lists or templates.

That’s what makes it easy for a team to pick up. Your site manager doesn’t set anything up. They open the bot and it already knows the tools, the process and the paperwork. Each person’s chats with a Team Bot are private, too.

And because it’s all just chat, nobody has to learn new software. They type what they need, the same way they’d text the office. That chat interface is what makes these AI agents the perfect companion for a construction business. The real work is deciding what your bots are going to do, and that’s the part most people skip.

What we’re doing with it at Davies Construction

We didn’t start with “what can AI do?” We started with “how is a construction company actually run?” and built the bots to match.

An org chart of bots

Our bot team is set up like a normal company org chart, and these are built and in use now:

CEO / GM. Sits at the top and looks across the whole business.
Construction Manager. Looks across all the jobs on the tools side.
Project Manager. Looks after jobs once they’re running.
Estimator. Handles the estimating side.
Procurement. Orders, suppliers and getting materials to site.
Sales. Works the Leads board in Wunderbuild.
Admin. The admin load every builder knows too well.
Bookkeeper. The numbers side.
How We Work. Holds the way we do things, so every bot works to the same playbook.
Company Memory. Holds what the business knows, so it doesn’t live in one person’s head.

The point is that every bot has a clear lane, just like a person would.

Every card move has a checklist and a skill

This is the part I’m most keen on. We run our jobs on a Kanban board in Wunderbuild. Every time a card moves, there’s a checklist for that stage and a matching bot skill. The bot knows what that stage needs, and the builder can see what it’s doing at each step.

A big worry with AI is “what is it actually doing?” When the work is tied to a checklist on a card you already use, you can see it. No black box.

One set of skills, no duplicates

All our shared skills live in one GitHub repo, with no duplicates. If two bots need to do the same thing, they use the same skill. That’s what stops it turning into a mess of slightly different instructions.

Where it’s heading

Our DC System Builder bot is working towards a fully AI-native system that runs the whole job, from a new lead and a set of plans right through to post-construction. Every bot and skill we add is a step towards it.

The everyday stuff

Day to day, the bots handle the jobs that eat a builder’s time:

Inbox triage and email drafts. The bots sort the inbox and draft replies, ready for a person to check.
Meeting notes into tasks. We record meetings in Granola, and the bots pull the tasks out of those notes into an approval digest. Nothing becomes a task until someone approves it.
ClickUp tasks. The bots create and update tasks as the work moves.

The rules we run it under

None of this works if you can’t trust it. Three rules, not negotiable:

A person always presses send. The bots draft, sort and prepare. A human decides what actually goes out to a client, a subbie or a supplier.
Nothing is deployed without approval. If a bot builds or changes something, it doesn’t go live until a person signs it off.
Security checks happen before anything is installed. No new tool, connection or add-on goes in until it’s been checked.

If you take one thing from this post, take the rules. The bots do the prep work. You stay the builder in charge.

How to start this week

You don’t need ten bots on day one. Here’s how I’d start again:

Get access. Buy Cursor Teams (not an individual plan) at cursor.com/pricing, add your team as members, and get everyone signed in to Grok Bot.
Draw your real org chart. List the roles in your business today: estimating, admin, project management, books, sales. Write them down separately, even if one person does five.
Pick one role to start. Choose the one that eats the most of your week. For a lot of builders that’s admin or the inbox.
Write the rules down first. A person presses send, nothing goes live without approval, nothing gets installed without a security check.
Tie it to a checklist you already use. Take one stage of your job board, write the checklist for it, and make that the bot’s first skill. That way you can see exactly what it’s doing.
Decide personal or team. If it’s just for you, start with a personal bot. If the team needs it, make it a Team Bot, add its tools, skills, keys and documents, and share it with only the people who should use it.
Review it at the end of the week. Look at what it got wrong, adjust the checklist and skill, and only add the next role once the first is working.

The bigger point

AI isn’t going to run your building company for you, and it shouldn’t. But a team of bots with clear roles, checklists you can see and a person pressing send takes weight off the owner. That’s the weight that stops most builders ever working on the business.

That’s what Future Builder is about: learning the business of building alongside builders who’ve done it, and AI is part of that conversation. If you want to see how other builders are thinking about this, Basecamp is where the foundations get laid and the community is where you can talk it through with builders on the same road. If you’ve got a question about getting started, just get in touch.