Every year the VDAB publishes its list of knelpuntberoepen, the jobs Flemish employers struggle hardest to fill. In 2026 the list runs to 227 occupations, and two of the ten biggest are werfleider (site manager) and calculator bouw (construction estimator). More than half of the ten hardest roles to fill in Flanders are technical functions in industry or construction.
Now look at what those two roles spend their evenings doing. The werfleider writes up the site meeting after everyone else has gone home. The calculator sends out three price requests, gets back three quotes that are organized completely differently, and hunts for the relevant information manually. Neither of those is the job they were hired for, and neither of them is the job that is hard to fill. The same pattern shows up in the office. The person handling invoices and delivery notes is chasing subcontractors for confirmations. The owner is explaining the same project status to a client, a subcontractor and an insurer, three times, in three different registers.
This post is about one tool, IttesAI’s AI Agent, and six specific jobs it can take on inside a construction or renovation firm. Some of them belong to the site manager. Others belong to the estimator, the office manager or whoever ends up doing the paperwork on a Friday afternoon. All six start from information the firm already has.
What an AI agent is, and what it can reach
The difference between an agent and a general AI chat window is simple: persistence and reach.
Let’s start with persistence. A chat window starts from nothing each time, so you spend the first five minutes explaining the project again. An agent is set up once for one job. It holds the instructions for that job, it holds the background of the project it belongs to, and it keeps its own running conversation. Open it three weeks later and it still knows which project you mean, what was decided in it, and who the subcontractors are.
The reach comes from connections. An agent can be linked to the systems the firm already works in, and connected means it can act rather than advise:
- SharePoint. Ask a question about a document that lives there and get the answer back, rather than opening four folders to find which version of the specification is current.
- Outlook or Gmail. It can draft the follow-up to the client, look up which address you last used for that site contact, and send it once you have read it and confirmed. It can pull the calendar to answer what is scheduled, and it can forward a file from the conversation on to a subcontractor.
- Files you drop into the chat. Specifications, drawings, delivery notes, Excel schedules. It works from the document in front of it and keeps it available for later questions.
Then it shows you the draft before it acts, so nothing sends without a person confirming.
None of this is early-adopter territory in Belgium any more. According to the FOD Economie’s Belgian Digital Economy Overview 2026, 34.54 percent of Belgian companies used at least one AI technology in 2025, up from 24.71 percent the year before, well ahead of the European average of 19.95 percent. The report also finds that the most common use is exactly the unglamorous one: organizing administrative and management processes.
The site visit that writes itself up
The site manager leaves the werf at half four. The write-up happens at eight in the evening, or on Saturday, or not at all. By then the detail has thinned out and what makes it into the werfverslag (site report) is whatever was memorable rather than whatever mattered.
An agent set up for site reporting takes the account on the drive back instead. Voice mode works in the IttesAI app, so it is spoken rather than typed, and then you can ask the agent to structure it the same way every time: decisions taken, open points, who owns each one, the date it is due, and what is blocked pending somebody else.
This is already happening elsewhere in the industry. The Wall Street Journal reported that superintendents at the American contractor Mortenson dictate their daily logs while driving around a project site, and that being able to enter information without sitting in front of a computer is a meaningful improvement in itself.
The gain is not that the report is written faster. It is that the report reads the same whether it came from the site manager who is meticulous about paperwork or the one who is not. When somebody goes back to it in eleven months because there is an argument about who agreed to what, that consistency is the entire value.
One site meeting, four different follow-ups
The same meeting has to become an email to the client, a message to each subcontractor, and an internal list of what the firm itself has to do. In most firms one person writes all four at nine at night, and the four versions do not quite match. That gap is where disputes start.
An agent produces all four from the same record. Its standing instructions carry the rules that actually matter and that are easy to forget when you are tired: internal costs, margins and complaints about a subcontractor never appear in the client version, and each subcontractor sees only their own actions rather than the full picture of everyone else’s delays. With Outlook or Gmail connected, the drafts are prepared for review and sit there until you send them.
Meerwerk, and the money that goes missing
A client asks for something extra while standing on site. The site manager says yes, because it is small and because saying no on site is awkward. Nobody writes it down. Three months later the work has been done and it is not on any invoice.
Meerwerk (additional or variation work) is the most familiar money leak in renovation, and it is almost never a pricing failure. It is a recording failure. An agent can be set up for this to give every variation the same treatment at the moment it happens, spoken into the app on site: what was asked, by whom, on what date, what it does to the planning, and what still needs written confirmation before anyone starts.
That last field is the one that pays for itself. The agent’s instructions can be written so it always asks whether the client has confirmed in writing, and flags the variation as unconfirmed until somebody says yes. It is a question that a person may forget to ask under pressure, but that a tool never does.
When somebody is away
Bouwverlof (the collective construction holiday), illness, or a project manager taking a job somewhere else. Projects change hands at exactly the moment the person who understands them is not there to explain them.
Because an agent keeps its own conversation history for the project it belongs to, whoever picks it up can ask where things stand, who owes what, and what falls due in the first week back. The answer is built from the project’s own record rather than from a colleague’s memory or a handover meeting that never happened.
The sharper version of this is the one the whole industry is heading towards. As experienced people retire, what leaves with them is not in any system. The Wall Street Journal quotes Trimble’s vice president of technology innovation on precisely this point, that “this data sometimes just resides in the heads of those experienced employees”, and describes the work as sitting down with the expert and getting that knowledge into a form the rest of the company can reach. The same article reports that Skanska has built a safety assistant trained on thousands of documents written by its experienced safety leaders.
A Belgian contractor with forty people is not building that. But the principle scales down. If the way your best werfleider assesses a project is written into the instructions of an agent that everyone uses, that knowledge can survive their retirement.
The opleveringspunten nobody owns
Defects arrive by phone, by WhatsApp, by email, and from the client standing in a doorway pointing at a skirting board. Each one is described differently and none of them are in the same place. The opleveringspunten (snag list) becomes three partial lists held by three people.
All of these disparate bits of information can be given to an AI agent, who can then normalize it all into one register: what the defect is, where, which trade, who is fixing it, by when, and whether the client has signed it off. Ask what is still open on a project and the answer comes from the register rather than from three people’s recollection of last Tuesday.
This is the phase where a finished project turns into a bad relationship, and it is almost always an administrative failure rather than a quality failure.
Start with one
The same FOD Economie report finds a wide gap by company size. More than three quarters of large Belgian companies use at least one AI technology, against 28.82 percent of small ones. The obstacle firms name most often is not cost or scepticism. It is a lack of in-house expertise, followed by legal uncertainty and questions about data protection.
That’s important because none of the six jobs above require expertise. None of this replaces a project manager, an estimator or a site manager. It takes on the writing-up, the reformatting and the chasing that those people are currently doing instead of the work they were actually hired for. In a sector where a good werfleider is hard to come by, that is not a small thing.
Tell us how your projects actually run. We will tell you where this would make a difference and where it would not. Thirty minutes with somebody who knows the platform and has seen how other construction firms use it.
