Just Now Possible

Building Tendos AI: How an Agent Swarm Turns Construction Emails into Quotes

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Guests

  • Daniel Kappler — CPO (Product & Design), Tendos AI
  • Matthias Hilscher — CTO (Engineering), Tendos AI

    • Key Takeaways

    • Start narrow to prove value: Tendos AI began with just radiators for one design partner before expanding to all building products
    • Own the interface: building a web application (vs. integrating into legacy systems) gave them control over UX and the ability to iterate toward full automation
    • Evaluate each agent, not just the chain: per-agent evals make debugging tractable and show exactly where performance changed
    • Use review agents: a separate agent that checks work (like code review) catches errors before they reach humans
    • Let customers pull you: customers asked Tendos to replace their CPQ software—strong signals of product-market fit

      • Topics Covered

      • The tendering chain in construction and why it's ripe for automation
      • How domain expertise (CEO's construction background) helped identify and validate the opportunity
      • Entity extraction from PDFs ranging from 1 page to 1,800+ pages
      • Planning patterns in agentic systems—creating and updating plans based on findings
      • How agents evaluate product fit against customer requirements
      • Building custom tracing and observability tools for complex agent chains
      • The path toward self-learning systems through human feedback loops

        • Links & Resources

        • Tendos AI
          • Chapters

          00:00 Introduction to Tendo and Key Roles

          01:01 Understanding the Tendering Chain
          02:26 Real-World Construction Analogy
          03:34 Challenges in the Construction Industry
          04:48 AI's Role in Tendo's Product
          12:59 Early Prototypes and AI Integration
          18:31 Expanding Product Capabilities
          28:56 Customer Collaboration and Workflow Automation
          33:15 Strategic Partnerships and Technical Groundwork
          34:20 Focusing on Specific Customer Segments
          36:03 Product Evolution and Current Capabilities
          38:17 Technical Workflow and Automation
          40:12 Evaluating and Matching Product Requests
          47:00 Dynamic Agent Architecture
          55:29 Quality Measures and Evaluation
          01:02:59 Future Directions and Customer-Centric Development

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          Just Now PossibleBy Teresa Torres