What AI companies buy from AEC firms
AI companies are building agents that do professional work: reviewing submittals, drafting responses to RFIs, checking a change order against a contract. To do that work well, the models need to see how it was done by people who did it for a living.
Public text does not contain that. The record of a real project sits inside firms: who asked what, who answered, what was revised, and who approved it. That record is what buyers are now paying to license.
The market in October 2026
In October 2026 one AI data company publicly committed $1B over 12 months to licensing enterprise operational data. The commitment covers many industries, and AEC is one of the places buyers are looking, because the work is document-heavy, regulated and well recorded.
Published buyer tiers start at $100K+ per license for qualifying firms. Larger or unique datasets run higher. We work with firms of 20 or more employees. Larger firms usually hold more history, which tends to raise a license’s value.
What buyers value
Buyers want records that show reasoning and process. A finished drawing shows an outcome. A thread of RFIs shows the question, the delay, the clarification and the decision. That sequence is what an agent has to learn.
The categories with the most interest are:
- RFI, submittal and change-order threads, including review cycles, comments and resolution dates.
- QA/QC standards: checklists, review procedures and office standards that show how a firm checks its own work.
- Estimating reasoning: how a firm built an estimate, which assumptions it used, and how bids compared with final cost.
- Project accounting workflows: billing, WIP reporting and fee tracking as they were actually run in Deltek or a similar system.
What buyers value less, or avoid
Drawings and BIM models rank low. They are large, hard to clean, and tied closely to client work and to instruments of service. They also raise the most rights questions. Archeon includes project drawings or models only with the building owner’s written consent, after a full clean.
Anything confidential to a client is excluded for a similar reason. So is federal or security-sensitive work, including anything under CUI or ITAR rules, and any record containing personal data or protected health information. Personal data is removed during preparation.
A record can be valuable and still be the wrong one to license. The test is whether the firm owns it outright and whether a contract restricts its use.
What this means for a firm owner
Most firms hold more of this material than they expect. Ten years of closed projects in Procore, Newforma or an Excel archive usually contains thousands of threads. The question is which parts are complete, consistent and free of rights questions.
A data review answers that. It looks at your systems, your export formats and your contracts, and tells you what a buyer would look at first. The review costs nothing, and your counsel reviews any license before you sign.