Giving Time Back: One Year of Compass at RO

A schedule narrative that once consumed a Friday afternoon can now take 15 minutes. A project team can compare a budget with an estimate in the time it once took to assemble the files. After a day filled with 80 emails, an employee can ask what still needs attention and get a list to work from.

A lot can change in one year.

When Compass launched, RO’s in-house AI assistant had its share of skeptics. Today, it is becoming part of how people across the company plan projects, find information, and start their day.

Since its launch, Compass has answered more than 350,000 questions from our teams. In a typical month, 705 people use it, and nearly a third of the company uses it daily. This year alone, it has helped our people review thousands of drawings and conduct more than 25,000 spec searches. Behind every number is a builder who got a piece of the day back. Even if each question saves only five minutes, that adds up to roughly 14 person-years of attention returned to our people.

“Attention is one of the most valuable things our builders bring to a jobsite,” said Todd Wynne, Chief Innovation Officer at RO. “Compass helps protect it by making information easier to access and guiding focus toward what matters most. That allows us to plan better, support healthier teams and strengthen critical thinking, not replace it.”

One place to access RO’s knowledge

Compass is RO’s own AI assistant, connected to the systems where our work lives: Procore, our scheduling and estimating platforms, the data warehouse, Microsoft 365, and our internal Playbook. Employees can ask about a project, specification, schedule, trade partner, or company policy, and Compass can draw from RO’s trusted systems to find the answer. Information that was once scattered across a dozen logins is now accessible in one place.

Every department is using it, from field operations, quality, and preconstruction to accounting, marketing, and VDC.

“Our project teams should be able to spend their time acting on information instead of assembling it,” said Joe Williams, Innovation Solutions Engineer. “Compass can consolidate data from multiple systems and provide each team with a view tailored to the decision they need to make. For Project Directors, that means identifying the risks that deserve attention across multiple projects. For commissioning, it means understanding what is ready, what is not, and the specific issue or inspection holding it back.”

Because Compass was built specifically for RO, it operates within our enterprise security environment and respects employees’ existing access permissions. That gives our teams a secure place to work with sensitive project information while maintaining the controls our clients expect.

Compass in action

Field Director Bob Britton treats Compass as a planning partner. During a recent feasibility study, he used it to help turn conceptual information into a planning-level CPM schedule and compare two construction options. The analysis indicated that reusing an existing building could save five to six months.

“I’ve used Compass as a planning partner to develop schedules based on scope, field execution, regulatory requirements and contract risk, not just to review existing dates,” Britton said.

Quality Manager Christian Fowler uses Compass to stay ahead of the daily workload. It helps him identify which specification section applies to a submittal, create an Outlook task list from submittals and RFIs, and review what may still need his attention at the end of the day. “I get about 80 emails a day,” Fowler said. “Instead of digging back through 50 of them, I ask what I might be missing today, and it gives me a list I can check off.”

Preconstruction teams are finding similar opportunities. On one healthcare project, a team used Compass to reconcile the project budget with the estimate and surface gaps in minutes instead of spending an afternoon working through the information manually.

Marketing also works against the clock. Senior Marketing Manager Carolyn Haldeman used Compass to rebuild a site logistics graphic the night before a pursuit interview. She also used it to adapt content from a previous proposal for a new RFP under a tight deadline.“Our site logistics graphic just wasn’t there,” Haldeman said. “I used Compass to punch it up with drop shadows, a cleaner font, and a Google Maps background, and it came out far more polished than what we started with.”

Across those examples, Compass is not replacing professional judgment. It is helping RO employees access information faster so they can apply judgment where it matters.

How Compass has evolved

Compass today is a different tool from the one employees met at launch. Compass is now available through iOS and Android apps. We also recently launched Compass Voice, which allows a superintendent to ask a question aloud while walking a floor.

With Compass Sites, employees can create and share interactive tools without writing a line of code. Trevor Owen, Reality Capture Manager on RO’s VDC team, has built about 10 of them, from a guided pricing tool for MirrorScape to a role-aware command center that adapts to the person viewing it.

“You can build your own interactive dashboard, something live you share with your team and come back to,” Owen said. “If you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, the next day you can update it with a prompt. Owen encourages his team to remain curious and continue testing what Compass can do. “The biggest thing is to be curious,” he said. “Pull the thread and see where it takes you, because it will go quite far.”

Built by RO, for RO

Compass is built and maintained by our own people.

Wynne set the direction and made the early investment in data. Terry Mullis, Vice President of Information Technology and Analytics, built the data warehouse that supports the platform. AI Solutions Architect James Wagner leads the development team alongside Chloe McKnight, Hagen Fritz, Yazen Barakat, and Williams.

Together, the team continues to add capabilities and improve how Compass supports RO’s work. What employees can accomplish with it today is significantly different from what was possible at launch, and its capabilities continue to expand.

“We strive to make Compass a little better every day,” Wagner said. “The three big themes over the next year will be memory and personalization, agentic capabilities, giving Compass more tools to do work, and surfacing proactive insights to help us all focus our attention.”

Building the technology is only part of the work. Helping employees understand and adopt it is equally important.

RO created a dedicated role to lead that effort, naming Richard Anderson Senior AI Enablement Program Manager. After years as a project manager at RO, Anderson understands the daily realities of project teams and can help employees identify where Compass can make the greatest difference.

“The potential for Compass to have a positive impact on our daily work is almost limitless,” Anderson said. “Every day, I hear new ideas for what it could do that would have seemed almost impossible just a few months ago. The fact that we’re now able to work on these ideas says a lot about our Compass development team and our entire company’s willingness to try new things and find a better way.”

Where Compass is headed

We are still early in understanding everything Compass can do. The next year will be about taking it deeper into our daily work, removing more administrative burden, and helping our people focus their attention on the decisions that require experience, collaboration, and critical thinking.

At RO, our purpose is clear: Together, we build a better Texas.

That takes focused attention. Compass helps clear the path so our people can spend more of their time where it matters most.

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