Contractors Are Leaving Millions in Bid Opportunities Untouched: The Real Issue is Estimator Capacity

By SHIVA DHAWAN

Across the construction industry today, opportunity is not short in supply.

Project pipelines remain strong across several sectors, and planning activity continues to hold steady. Dodge Construction Network’s Momentum Index reflects sustained commercial and institutional development, while investment in large-scale projects such as data centers is adding further momentum to the market.

Yet inside many precon teams, a very different constraint is emerging.

Contractors are receiving more invitations to bid than their estimating teams can realistically pursue. What looks like a healthy pipeline is increasingly becoming a capacity bottleneck inside businesses.

Part of the pressure comes from ongoing labor shortages across the industry. According to the Associated General Contractors of America, more than 80 percent of construction firms report difficulty filling positions. While much of the conversation around labor shortages focuses on field roles, the shortage extends into estimating functions as well.

At the same time, the work required to produce a bid remains highly manual. Industry estimates suggest that takeoffs alone can account for 50 percent to 70 percent of the total bid preparation process. Estimators routinely spend hours reviewing drawings, extracting quantities, coordinating with vendors and assembling estimates before a project can even be priced competitively.

When experienced estimators are limited and workflows remain time-intensive, companies inevitably reach a point where they prioritize certain opportunities over others.

What does this mean? Contractors are leaving high-value projects untouched – not because they lack expertise, but only because they lack the time to bid on them.

A Pattern Emerging Across Trades

Over the past several years, I have seen a pattern emerge in conversations with contractors across the U.S.

One example comes from Rays Stairs, a steel contractor based in Atlanta that bids on complex stair and structural steel fabrication projects. Demand for its expertise has remained strong, but the estimating team’s bandwidth was limited. When several opportunities arrived simultaneously, the team was forced to decide which bids it could realistically pursue and which to skip.

We saw a similar challenge at Vinco Builders, where manual takeoffs were slowing down the entire bidding process. Estimators were spending significant portions of their day reviewing drawings and extracting quantities before they could even begin developing the estimate. This drastically restricted the team’s ability to bid on more projects.

What became clear in both cases was that the issue wasn’t expertise. It was capacity and time.

Both teams eventually began looking for ways to remove that manual effort from the estimating workflow. By adopting Beam AI, both teams were able to automate takeoffs and estimates, the most tedious parts of the estimating workflow. This change did not hamper the estimator’s role; it simply gave time back to bid on more high-value projects, focus on risk assessments, vendor communications, relationship building, etc.

When estimating, teams are constrained by time rather than opportunity; the impact is significant. Across the industry, contractors are leaving millions in bid opportunities untouched simply because their teams cannot process the volume of work coming through the door.

The Experience Gap Problem in Estimating & How AI Is the Solution

Workforce dynamics are making this challenge even more pronounced.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects tens of thousands of openings for cost estimators each year over the next decade, many driven by retirements and workforce transitions. Estimating is a discipline built on experience. Professionals develop judgment over time by reviewing plans, understanding scope risks and learning how projects unfold on field.

When experienced estimators retire, companies lose headcount and knowledge that has traditionally helped train the next gen of professionals.

At the same time, fewer young professionals are entering estimating roles compared to previous decades. As demand for construction projects grows, the gap between demand and supply widens.

Artificial intelligence is now emerging as a solution to this problem. AI systems automate the most time-consuming parts of estimating – reading drawings, extracting quantities and generating estimates. Tasks that once required days of manual work can now be completed in hours.

For estimators, this amplifies expertise. Instead of spending hours on repetitive takeoff work, experienced professionals can focus on the parts of bidding that truly require judgment: evaluating scope gaps, coordinating with vendors, refining pricing strategies and managing project risk.

In other words, AI expands estimator capacity by allowing the same team to evaluate and pursue significantly more opportunities.

Culture Ultimately Determines Whether Technology Works

Technology alone, however, rarely solves an industry problem.

Expanding estimator capacity ultimately requires leadership teams to rethink long-standing workflows and build organizations that are comfortable adopting new ways of working.

At Beam AI, we think about this through our BOLD culture code. For us, that means staying curious, building continuously for the customer, owning the problem, being on a constant learning path and doing the right thing for the industry.

That philosophy shapes how we build Beam AI and how we work with contractors navigating the shift to AI workflows in preconstruction.

The companies that succeed in the next decade of construction will not be the ones with the most technology. They will be the ones who build the culture, systems and leadership mindset needed to use technology intelligently and expand their capacity to pursue opportunity.

Shiva Dhawan is CEO and co-founder of Attentive.ai.