When Field24 does a takeoff that has drywall and framing, it measures the walls off the plans in the same way a human estimator does. This update allows Field24 to more accurately and quickly measure walls and calculate the required amount of drywall and framing for a project.
Field24 has an accuracy as high as 96%, ahead of generic AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude when tested on our drywall and framing evaluation (DrywallBench).
01 - Why drywall and framing
Drywall and framing are the highest-volume line items on most jobs, whether they're residential or commercial. When you have a wrong wall measurement, the error cascades through your estimate - impacting framing, paint, and labour amounts - this can result in your estimate being off by 11-15% and eventually losing the bid.
02 - What changed
Field24 has a collection of tools in its tool belt that it uses when doing a takeoff. In this update, we added a new tool that improves the ability of Field24 to identify and measure walls using a custom computer vision model.
Now whenever you run an estimate based on a set of plans, if drywall and framing is part of the scope, Field24 will use its new tool during the takeoff process. This allows it to identify where the walls are before it starts measuring, even in plans with a lot of markup.
03 - Common mistakes
AI assistants often use outdated and inaccurate methods to measure walls on a set of plans, like classifying every set of parallel lines as a wall. The result, is over 90 wall fragments instead of continuous wall centrelines, that will cause you to under measure. In our most recent update, Field24 is trained to return the whole filled wall body, improving the accuracy of your takeoff.
Another common mistake assistants like ChatGPT and Claude make are assuming the height when calculating drywall area, often they’ll incorrectly apply the ceiling height instead of reading the dimensions or callouts. This assumption can cause you to underestimate the amount of drywall by up to 15% when the partitions are full height , Field24 has learned to correctly calculate drywall and find the heights from the plans.
04 - Results
We compared how well Field24, Claude, and ChatGPT perform when doing a drywall and framing takeoff on our private evaluation called DrywallBench. This evaluation uses takeoffs done by human estimators on multiple real commercial plans and compares it to the quantities that each AI returns.
| Arm | Case-even score |
|---|---|
| Field24 | 88% |
| Claude | 77% |
| ChatGPT | 71% |
05 - What's next
We will keep improving the accuracy of Field24 across all the trades, using the same process we used here: find where the takeoff goes wrong on real plans, fix it, and measure whether it actually moved.
If you have questions about how Field24 handles your scope, or there is something you want it to do that it does not do yet, tell us. We build from what contractors ask for.