How Long Does an AI Plan Check Take?

The honest answer is that it depends on the size of the drawing set and what's being checked, but the more useful answer is understanding what actually drives that time, since it's not the same as manual review scaling up.

What Drives Review Time

Manual review time scales roughly linearly with page count, because a person has to actually look at each sheet. A 500-page set takes a reviewer meaningfully longer than a 100-page set, more or less proportionally. AI-assisted review doesn't scale the same way. Structured AI has reported reviewing 2,500 pages in 30 minutes, a pace that isn't achievable by simply adding more human reviewers to the same problem.

The Syska Hennessy Group case, one of the largest MEP firms in the US, replaced a process that used to take days of manual drawing review with an AI check that runs in around 20 to 30 minutes per project set. That's the kind of time difference that shows up when the bottleneck moves from "how many pages can a person read in a day" to "how fast can a system process a document."

What Doesn't Get Faster

Speed on the AI side doesn't eliminate the human verification step, it changes what that step involves. Traceable, deterministic findings mean a reviewer can confirm each flagged issue in seconds rather than minutes, but reviewing and signing off on the findings still takes some time, especially on a set with a lot of flagged issues. The overall time savings comes from the review itself running fast and producing a shorter, better-evidenced list to work through, not from skipping human judgment entirely.

Custom Checks Can Affect Timing

A drawing set checked only against baseline code compliance runs differently than one checked against a firm's full custom check library on top of code checks. More checks running means more analysis happening, though the traceable output format keeps the verification step fast regardless of how many checks were run.

Revit-Based Review Timing

Checks run through the Revit Add-In against a live model work a bit differently than checks run against exported PDFs, since the system is querying structured model data directly rather than processing flattened pages. Either way, the goal is the same: turn a process that used to take days into something measured in minutes.

FAQ

Does review time vary a lot by discipline? It can, depending on how much cross-referencing a discipline's checks require. A structural check that has to cross-reference calculations against details may behave differently than a straightforward code compliance check, though both are still dramatically faster than manual equivalents.

Is a faster review a less thorough one? Not by design. The speed comes from processing the full set and running checks systematically, not from skipping sections. Traceable output is what lets that speed translate into something a reviewer can actually trust and verify.

How does review speed compare across different file types? Structured AI works across .pdf, .dwg, .rvt, and .ifc files. Processing time can vary somewhat by format and file complexity, but the deterministic, evidence-linked findings format stays consistent across all of them.