CIM uses AI to read your drawings and specs and surface findings. It's powerful, but it's not magic. Reading this once will save you from the most common trust issues.
What it's good at
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Reading text on drawings and specs. Title blocks, notes, schedules, callouts. High accuracy.
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Comparing two documents for consistency. Architectural vs structural column grids, drawings vs spec, revision A vs revision B.
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Finding things that aren't there. Missing notes, absent details, undocumented assumptions.
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Volume work. Reading 400 sheets in an hour and surfacing the 30 that need a human.
What it's not (yet) good at
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Counting. Car spaces, GPOs, doors, fixtures. Don't trust quantities. Use it as a starting point and recount.
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Measurements. Corridor widths, room areas, setback distances. Same rule — verify on the drawing.
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Implicit cross-document inference. If the answer requires combining info from three documents the AI wasn't told to look at, it'll often miss it.
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Knowing what should be on a drawing. It can compare what's there to what you told it to check for, but it doesn't have construction intuition.
Expect false positives. Roughly 1 in 4 findings will be wrong. This is normal and we tell every customer upfront. The right mental model: the AI is doing the first pass, you're doing the judgement call. Always click the citation to verify before you action a finding.
The single most common failure mode: the AI looked at the wrong drawing.