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Advice for Quantity Takeoff using CoPilot CLI

Bill Crowe

I ran my first batch of tests using CoPilot CLI to attempt to do quantity takeoffs of various ceiling speaker models in a 170 page PDF drawing set. The speaker location identifiers consisted of a circle with a number inside that denotes the speaker model. I honestly thought that this would be right in the wheel house for an AI to find and quantify, but CoPilot spent several minutes looking for these location identifiers with no success. I even simplified the search to have CoPilot just tell me what sheets of the drawing set these speakers were found and I had zero hits.

Any advice out there that may help me and my team use these AI tools in these types of tasks? Does the AI/MCP just use the built in search functions of Bluebeam?

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Comments

Mike Petersen

So… I have found a similar issue using Claude. I asked it to do identify the quantity of toilets, room numbers etc. From what I read, one of the Bluebeam native functions limitations is geometry identification. If you are using AI inside of Bluebeam it seems that its niche if for markups only. However, bringing your document into your AI platform, you can obtain more geometric information. I will caution you though, it is not completely accurate and you should review it yourself. Claude does get hung up on even the slightest differences and may prompt you for input or completely ignore it. In my example, I spent an hour with claude to count toilets on a plan. If the toilet had a grab bar above it, the program was baffled until I went in and defined that as a toilet as well. Secondly, if there is an overlapping line that was on the toilet, like an architectural leader it also didn't have a clue either. I wish I knew a way where you could make a pick box around an object(s) to tell Claude to include this in the count. One of the other concerning issues I had with a very small plan was having it list the room numbers. It often missed 1or 2 on a plan with only 24 units on it. Bluebeam needs to have more inherent geometry functions integrated into AI and even in general. It should be a simple task to define the length of a line mark up without having to adjust the xy values. Its also irritating that it knows the scale but wont recognize the line lengths on the xy to the scale of the drawing, only the 1:1 scale.

Bill Crowe

Thanks for the information. I was really hoping to reap the rewards of faster and possibly more accurate quantity take-offs with AI, but if I miss a video encoder or touch panel on my take-off, that's about $2k for each miss and a overcount would likely cause us to loose out on the job. If I have to go back and manually count for accuracy, I am struggling to find the point of all this. Can someone show me a real world example of this working well?

David Cutler

Thank you for your posts about this @Bill Crowe as I haven't tried any of these processes yet. Historically our Civil Site takeoffs are completely manual - using custom markups in Revu. From time to time I will use the "Visual Search" as a qc check to ensure we haven't missed something in our manual process.

Are you using Visual Search and applying markups to what Revu finds?

Bill Crowe

I can't trust that either.

Screenshot 2026-10-01 at 11.33.28 AM.png

David Cutler

"Trust but verify" @Bill Crowe 😎

Have you tried adjusting the sensitivity?

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