Episode 62: Tyler Madsen and Jason Bassett on cutting spec review from 2 hours to 15 seconds with AI

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"What used to take me two hours takes me about 15 seconds now." – Tyler Madsen

A striking before and after from Tyler Madsen, Director at Madsen's Millwork & Custom Cabinets, who rebuilt their estimating workflow by feeding drawings and specifications into an AI bot that strips out irrelevant data and returns only what's needed to quote a job. The broader problem he and IT & Asset Manager Jason Bassett are solving isn't just speed, it's the operational drag that builds up when a manufacturing shop is still running on paper drawings, manual data sorting, and an IT person who becomes the bottleneck every time someone needs an answer. When information lives on paper, you get version control failures, field installers working off outdated drawings, and a team spending its time managing data instead of acting on it.

In This Episode:

Tyler and Jason walk through how Madsen's Millwork has digitized its day to day operations, from estimating to the shop floor to field installation. Tyler describes feeding specs and drawings into an AI bot that strips out irrelevant data for quoting. Jason covers the physical changes on the shop floor: big screen displays at every workstation now pull live drawings, replacing paper that created double data sets and made version control nearly impossible. He also gives field installers the same live job data on site, so a mid job change reaches them in real time, and describes building knowledge banks inside Epicor Prism pre-loaded with the questions his team most commonly brought to IT, so employees self-serve instantly instead of waiting on him. They're also candid about what isn't solved yet: getting skilled trades workers to trust and adopt AI day to day remains an open challenge, and Tyler flags hallucinations as a real operational risk that requires experienced human oversight to catch.

Topics

• Cutting spec review from two hours to 15 seconds using an AI bot
• Building Epicor Prism knowledge banks to eliminate the IT bottleneck
• AI owns data retrieval; humans own judgment, their workflow decision framework
• The mutual checking model: humans verify AI output, AI challenges human decisions
• Replacing paper drawings with live digital displays at every shop workstation
• Field installers accessing real-time job drawings remotely during installation
• Using client AI renderings as the engineering starting point for custom projects
• Why getting skilled trades workers to trust AI remains their biggest unsolved challenge
• Hallucination risk in manufacturing operations and how to stay vigilant