Cost overruns, material price swings and delay claims surface at month-end, after the money is already spent. Site and head-office teams see price and schedule risks while there is still time to order early, file notices and re-plan crews.
A worked example for a typical Malaysian EPC & Building Group, not a description of any real company. Go through the six stages in order: paste each prompt into Claude, check the answer against how your business really works, then continue. Change the profile at the start to match yours.
Stage 1 of 6
Map how the operation really runs
Act as an operations consultant. I run a EPC & Building Group in Malaysia. Profile: A Malaysian construction and EPC group — ~25 live projects, ~3,000 site and office staff, mix of private developments and infrastructure, CIDB Grade G7.
Interview me, one question at a time, to map how decisions actually get made today. Cover: the recurring meetings and reports, who decides what, which numbers people trust, and where decisions are late or made on gut feel.
Known friction: Profit vs. Handover date; Saving money vs. Site safety; Winning new bids vs. Finishing current jobs; Cheapest subcontractor vs. Dependable one; Cash in vs. Work done.
After 8 to 10 questions, summarise the five decisions that cost us the most when made late, in a table: decision, current owner, current delay, cost of delay.
Stage 2 of 6
Design the specialist agents
Using the decision map above, design 5 specialist AI agents for our EPC & Building Group: Bid Pipeline, Supply Cost, Site Crew, Delay Claims, Project Mix.
For each agent give: the one question it answers every day, the data it reads, what it may recommend, what it must never do alone, and the format of its output.
Starting points for what each should watch:
- Bid Pipeline: tender pipeline, win-rates, bid cost vs. margin, capacity to absorb new work
- Supply Cost: commodity price moves, delivery slippage, cost-to-complete vs. budget
- Site Crew: headcount by trade, foreign-worker permits, incident and near-miss trends
- Delay Claims: critical-path slippage, extension-of-time claims, liquidated-damages exposure
- Project Mix: margin fade by project, cash position, resource clashes across sites
Keep every agent narrow. If an agent covers two jobs, split it.
Stage 3 of 6
Wire up data and compliance
For the agents above, list the data feeds needed. Likely systems: Project scheduling tools; QS cost reports and progress claims; Procurement and supplier records; Site safety and attendance logs.
Output a table per agent: field, source, how often it refreshes, data-quality risk, and what the agent should do if the feed is stale or missing. Mark every personal-data field and say how to minimise it.
Rules we operate under: CIDB requirements, DOSH/JKKP safety rules (OSHA 1994), contract terms such as PAM and JKR forms, PDPA 2010. Safety-critical calls stay with the site safety officer.
End with a short list of actions that always need human sign-off.
Stage 4 of 6
Design the morning brief
Design the single daily brief that pulls the 5 agents together for the Group MD, ready before the first meeting of the day.
Specify how the brief merges overlapping or conflicting recommendations, how it ranks items (impact, urgency, reversibility, confidence), and the exact fields per item: what to decide, recommended action, evidence, owner, deadline, and the cost of doing nothing.
Then write a realistic sample brief of five items. Items might resemble: Order rebar for Block B now — prices are up 6% in two weeks and the pour is in 12 days / File the EOT notice on Project 7 before Friday: rain delays hit the critical path / Hold the new tender: no site manager capacity until Q2.
Stage 5 of 6
Build and automate it
Turn the design into a working automation for our EPC & Building Group.
Needs: a scheduled daily run; the 5 agents run in parallel and each saves structured JSON; a final step reads them all and sends the brief by email or chat; every run is logged with inputs, outputs and cost.
Propose the build with Claude plus a workflow tool (for example n8n or the Claude Agent SDK). Give the steps in order, what happens when a data feed fails, and a human-approval step before anything that spends money or makes a customer commitment.
Stage 6 of 6
Roll out and measure
Write a rollout plan for the EPC & Building Group agent team that starts small and earns trust.
Stage 1: one agent, advisory only, run alongside the current process. Stage 2: add the other agents. Stage 3: switch on the daily brief. Stage 4: let agents prepare low-risk actions for approval.
For each stage give duration, owners, what "ready to move on" means, and the metrics to track: time to decision, how often recommendations are accepted, hours saved, and errors caught. Close with the three biggest risks and how we contain them.
