There’s an App for That (We Built It)

Jul 13, 2026
There’s an App for That (We Built It)

A 3-minute read about RO’s team behind Compass, and the ones whose workdays it changed.

Trey Stewart was a Compass skeptic at first.

When it first landed, our Field Director saw one more piece of software, one more login, one more thing between him and the work.  Today, he opens it over morning coffee to monitor updates across every project he oversees, all in one place. That arc, from “not for me” to “can’t work without it,” is the real story of Compass. Not the technology. The people who changed how they work because of it.

Ask any RO project leader how they did their job a year ago and how they do it today, and you’ll get two very different answers. The difference is Compass, the in-house AI agent we built for our people. Ask it a question, and it reads our drawings, searches our specs, queries our project data, drafts the email, and writes the report.

The 10 minutes that add up

We didn’t build Compass because AI was trending. RO lives by a core value, “Find a Better Way,” and this was simply the better way.

The math that mattered most to us is this: if Compass saves a builder just 10 minutes a question, then across the thousands of questions our team asks it every week, that adds up to roughly 14 person-years of work handed back to our people in nine months. But person-years is an abstraction. What it really means is a project engineer who leaves the tedious lookup behind and spends the afternoon on the actual build. A superintendent who doesn’t have to stay late to write a report.

A P6 schedule narrative that used to eat an entire Friday afternoon now takes 15 minutes. Compass puts RO’s institutional knowledge in the hands of every builder on every project we build. Our people are doing better work because of it, and our clients are feeling the difference.

A bet that started with one person

Compass didn’t begin in 2025. It began in 2012, when Todd Wynne joined RO.

Now our Chief Innovation Officer, Todd spent years laying down the data standards and digital workflows that Compass would eventually run on, years before the industry knew it needed them. Under Todd, we made a quiet, unfashionable bet: we invested in our data warehouse, standardized our systems, and treated information like an asset. Without that foresight, there is no Compass.

The warehouse itself was built and maintained for years by Terry Mullis and his team. It was originally built for Power BI, and it turned out to be the perfect foundation when AI finally showed up. The team that turned that foundation into Compass is smaller than you’d guess, and it built something the rest of RO now can’t imagine working without. But the part we’re proudest of is that the momentum didn’t stop with them. It spread, person to person, across the company.

What it looks like on a real project

The best way to understand Compass is to watch how our people actually use it.

For Project Director Cain Young, it runs his mornings.

“Compass lets me have a serious conversation about a lender’s insurance requirements, an owner’s contract dispute, a manufacturing process, and an MEP load diversity number in the same morning, and then draft both the response to the owner and the follow-ups to my team before I close the tab. It puts the data, the contract language, and the technical context at my fingertips, and it has changed how I run my projects.” — Cain Young, Project Director

R&D Manager James Holmes uses it for cross-project trade partner intelligence. When a partner falls behind, he can ask Compass how much total float that trade has left, how many days their work can slip before it knocks the whole schedule off track. Then Compass goes further: it scans every other active RO project in the region where that same partner is working, finds where they have float to spare, and maps out a way to shift crews to the job that needs them most. A question that would normally take days of coordination calls gets answered in a single conversation.

Sarah Rathborne in People Services uses Compass to make critical benefits information instantly accessible to every employee, turning what used to require emails, phone calls, and document searches into a simple conversation. That’s Compass making life easier for people who never set foot on a job site.

Now they’re building their own tools

Compass’s Sites feature lets any RO employee, not just developers, publish a live, branded dashboard or report from their own data in minutes. Director of Field Engineering Michael Clark used it to build the field engineering dashboards his team now relies on. Nobody wrote him a line of code. He just built what he needed. We’re putting the power to build directly into the hands of our people, and they’re running with it.

We didn’t set out to prove RO could build impressive technology. We set out to hand our team a better way to work, and then watched them take it further than we ever planned. From Trey checking his projects over morning coffee to Michael building his own dashboards, that’s the story worth telling.

That’s what innovation looks like at RO. And yes, there really is an app for that. We built it.