A start-up with a deep tech pedigree launches AI to train the trades

For a decade and a half coming out of the Global Financial Crisis and housing crash of the 20-oughts, a shortage of skilled labor has bedeviled homebuilders and their ecosystem of stakeholders, stalling projects, driving up costs and growing worse as skilled front-liners age out of their roles on job sites. 

The Home Builders Institute’s Fall 2025 Construction Labor Market Report encapsulates this challenge. According to the report, residential construction is short about 723,000 workers. This labor shortage, the report concludes, costs the industry $10.8 billion annually, including $8.1 billion from lost construction and $2.7 billion from construction delay. 

The question has long been, “is there opportunity in residential construction’s chronic, intensifying labor capacity constraint?”

A new company, Navigate.AI, aims to prove there is such an opportunity, with a model that combats the labor shortage by leveraging AI to make construction workers on residential and commercial job sites more efficient and effective.

The platform, launched this week by Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu, utilizes an AI copilot that helps train students and new employees, gives workers real-world insights and assists crews with quality control and project planning. 

Navigate.AI uses video from cell phones and from Meta’s AI smart glasses to provide insights, assistance and coaching to workers in construction and the trades. The copilot has four features: AI upskilling and coaching, AI knowledge on-demand, AI quality control and AI project scoping. 

The company raised $25 million in funding from the likes of Lennar, Invitation Homes, Tishman Speyer and the founders of DoorDash. Lennar already gave Navigate.AI its stamp of approval, partnering with the company to deploy the AI copilot across its entire organization, including with construction managers, general contractors and skilled and semi-skilled trade front-liners. 

“There’s a PhD in our pocket in every vertical, and we see all these impacts and efficiency gains and activity with people behind the desk, including engineers, support people, attorneys and the like. I think those same principles can apply to people in the field,” Wu told HousingWire’s The Builder’s Daily in an interview. 

Training the trades

Navigate.AI has already partnered with trade schools, such as the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, to help students and apprentices learn valuable skills more quickly. Students wearing Meta glasses receive guidance from the copilot, which essentially acts as a virtual on-the-job coach, telling them which steps to take to complete a particular task or project. 

The AI coach gives students and trainees step-by-step instructions and ensures that projects are completed to the correct standards. Users can get feedback and ask the copilot if they are completing a task in the right way.  

“The students have been really excited by it. The first thing that we found is that there are 25 students in the lab for each teacher or one trainer. You just can’t be with every student all the time,” Wu said. “The second thing we uncovered is that some of the students don’t want to raise their hands to ask questions. This [AI co-pilot solution] allows them to actually learn how to do things without having to raise their hand.”

The feature is helpful in the classroom and also supports new employees and trainees as they complete their first projects out in the field. Instead of having a more experienced team member watching over the shoulder, crews can leverage Navigate.AI to help onboard and train new hires. 

“If you had the world’s best journeyman literally just right by your side, then you can probably learn a lot faster,” Wu explained. “As you’re building a home, for example, you’re going to be able to lean on that coach to help you measure things, help you figure out the right steps to take, to do quality control in real time and to do upskilling in real time. I think it’s going to be quite powerful.”

Users can also leverage the knowledge-on-demand feature to ask questions and get real-time answers. The copilot pulls information from specs, manuals and historical records, and leverages that information to give workers instant insights, while citing sources. 

The idea is for workers to have an AI coach with them at all times as they are learning the ins and outs.

“How can we leverage the intelligence that’s in your pocket and help people who are in the field do their work perfectly the first time and safely? That’s the vision,” Wu explained. 

Quality control and project scoping

Navigate.AI is useful even for experienced workers and teams. Users can use the platform to AI-verify a project by using AI quality control to catch issues before a crew leaves. 

The platform was trained on real projects with real teams to detect quality control issues as they arise. All a worker has to do is take a video of a project or capture the project using Meta’s smart glasses, and Navigate.AI will alert the user if there are any outstanding issues. 

Navigate.AI customizes AI models with real-world construction data so that the platform can reliably inspect work captured on camera. 

“All you need is the visual evidence of something, and we can, with AI, tell you whether it’s done correctly or not,” Wu said. 

The feature could prove to be very useful for homebuilders and developers as their teams work on job sites, but it is also helpful for property management firms. Tishman Speyer, which owns properties across various verticals like multifamily, office, industrial and retail, has partnered with Navigate.AI and plans to roll out the platform to its maintenance crews. 

‘They just have to walk around with the app, and, with the video, we’re able to translate that into whether that building or that lobby or that space is set up the right way, and of the quality that their standards require,” Wu explained. 

Navigate.AI also has a project scoping tool, which enables users to get a comprehensive scope of work within minutes. This includes a list of every item, finish and fixture, with pricing estimates. All a user has to do is capture a project area with a phone or the Meta glasses. 

“I just think about it as a second pair of expertise. As you’re walking through an asset, trying to figure out what to renovate and what to repair, there are going to be different opinions. So, how do you apply local and company policies to judgment in the field? We think about it as just having AI supplement someone’s judgment, and really making sure they’re scoping the right things and are in line with policies at the corporate level,” Wu explained. 

The implications for homebuilders

For the homebuilding industry, platforms such as Navigate.AI can get workers ready for the job site more quickly and make crews more efficient, producing higher-quality, right-the-first-time outcomes. Amid a homebuilding environment of compressing margins and tepid buyer demand, every gain in operational efficiency can go a long way. 

“We think this is going to help across all three vectors of speed, quality, and cost. Obviously, speed is top of mind. If you can get installs and builds of different components done correctly the first time with no rework, then you save quite a bit of time. But we also think that it’s going to improve quality, as there’s going to be the removal of defects, and then ideally we will make the whole system more efficient, so that it lowers the cost of building a home,” Wu explained. 

There’s a lot of talk right now about AI replacing humans. While that may be possible in some industries, that is not likely to happen in construction. Wu sees AI as a tool for making construction and trades workers far more efficient, and hopes that technology will incentivize more people to enter the construction workforce.  

“Construction might be one of the bigger, if not the biggest, net job gainers due to AI. I think people don’t think about that enough. There’s this narrative around job destruction, but in construction in particular, at least from my vantage point, I’m seeing a big labor opportunity. There’s going to be a bunch of reskilling and upskilling in the sector,” he said.