Most businesses already have the data - they just don’t have straightforward answers.

Teams spend hours pulling information from systems, files, and spreadsheets just to understand what’s happening and what needs attention.

In construction, this burden is especially heavy. At Constrafor, we work with subcontractors who are focused on building, not navigating back-office processes. Yet tasks like managing materials, invoices, payments, and cash flow often stretch across multiple systems and require too many manual steps. The information to simplify this work is already there; the challenge is delivering clarity without adding more tools to learn and juggle.

So we embedded Forethought’s AI agents directly into Cru, our AI-native platform for subcontractor financial operations. The goal: move from complex dashboards to a conversational work layer, a “digital double” that understands your business and takes action with you.

The Shift from GUI to "Getting it Done"

For decades, software has been built around graphical interfaces. You click buttons, scroll tables, toggle filters. Your actions are bound by what’s visible on the screen.

We’re now entering a new era. Agents can reason through your data, understand intent, and carry out multi-step workflows. Interaction shouldn’t be limited to clicking, it should feel like working with a colleague.

This is the vision behind Cru’s digital double: an AI financial analyst for your back office that works for you 24/7. Not a chatbot. A partner that interprets data, surfaces insights, and helps you make decisions.

Forethought’s technology makes this conversational layer possible, which is why we chose to integrate their agents into our product.

How it Works: From a Simple Question to a Strategic Action

We started with one of the biggest operational pain points for our customers: materials management.

Our Materials Agent, powered by Forethought, lets a user ask a plain-language question, then handles the complexity behind the scenes. The AI agent stays context-aware, enabling a back-and-forth conversation that can go five layers deep without losing track of intent.

In under a minute, a subcontractor can move from a simple query to an informed, high-impact financial decision. That’s the real promise of agents: they turn fragmented data into clear, actionable next steps.

Why We Partnered with Forethought

Product teams face the same question every day: build or buy? For us, the answer was straightforward.

A Full-Stack Agent Platform

Forethought provides everything needed to run a production-grade conversational agent: prompt engineering, orchestration, retrieval, analytics, and a modular front-end library. It’s far more than an API call.

While we could have tried to build this ourselves, partnering with Forethought was a strategic decision that allowed Constrafor to scale quickly with accuracy.

Two things stood out about Forethought:

Actionable Analytics

Measuring the performance of an agent and its multifaceted capabilities is not straightforward. Forethought’s analytics layer gave us visibility into outcome success from day one.

White-Glove Expertise, Then Self-Serve Speed

Forethought’s team, especially our implementation lead, Rowen Witt, helped us tune the agent for the unique language of construction finance. Now that the foundation is in place, we can spin up new agents in a low-code fashion. As a non-engineer, I can build agent frameworks for other critical financial workflows - like invoicing collections, and cash flow forecasting - faster than we could have on our own.

This Is Just the Beginning

From search, to chatbot, to conversational agents. Constrafor is bullish on what agents can do for our customers and the construction industry as a whole. I invite you to consider what agents could do for your customers.

To see how this works in practice and learn how to identify high-value agent opportunities in your own organization, join our upcoming webinar. Rowen and I will walk through how we designed, tuned, and launched the Materials Agent…and what’s next.

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