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Construction Dive's August 5, 2026 interview, "'Trust but verify:' How Novo Construction compares drawing packages with AI," written by Matthew Thibault, features Colin Stoner, Chief Information Officer at Novo Construction. Stoner describes how the Menlo Park, California-based builder has used Diffs, Buildcheck's drawing comparison product, on two California projects.
What the article covers
The interview focuses on a narrow and expensive problem: identifying what changed between drawing revisions before those changes reach a subcontractor's price. Stoner locates the highest-value window as the period after preconstruction but before construction starts — the point at which a moved wall, an added window or a revised door schedule still shifts pricing dramatically.
The manual baseline
Novo's project managers previously overlaid revisions by hand in tools such as Bluebeam. Stoner is direct about how that approach scales across a full package: doing it over hundreds of pages of drawings is cumbersome and, in his words, "makes you go cross-eyed."
Because Novo's contracted scope often changes along with the drawings, a missed revision is not a documentation problem. It is a pricing problem that surfaces later.
What changed with Diffs
Diffs runs the overlay automatically and flags changes across the set. Stoner describes the resulting workflow as reviewing or dismissing flags rather than hunting for them — many revisions are not pertinent and get dismissed, and clicking a flag highlights the affected sheets. He characterizes the learning curve as "pretty low friction" now that detection is automated, against what he calls a steep curve when changes had to be spotted manually.
The operational value he identifies is twofold: the time not spent searching, and the log of what changed. Once a wall moves, the project manager can go to the framing and drywall contractor and begin pricing the delta.
Stoner sums up the benefit as staying in front of the drawings as they evolve.
'Trust but verify'
Asked what the experience taught his team about AI, Stoner says it has made them more trusting of it — with a standing caveat he applies to any tool, whether internal or from a vendor: trust but verify.
He also describes automated drawing comparison and Buildcheck's core design review as complementary capabilities rather than substitutes for one another.
Read the full interview at Construction Dive.
