Here’s the simplest and most efficient way to write documents from notes, with AI, while making them easier to read.

Producing clear, precise, and readable documents without spending hours on them is a daily challenge for any professional. This is even more true in the construction industry, where adding photos, though routine, remains tedious and largely manual. On this common issue, practices remain archaic, leading to wasted time, reduced quality, and, very concretely, lost opportunities.

Numerous software options exist—take Word, for example, the most prominent one. Its use is so widespread that it seems indispensable to anyone needing to write a document. These tools rank among the oldest and most popular ever created. Yet, the majority of leading tools on the market were designed over a decade ago, and their core concepts have barely evolved since, even as our expectations, technologies, and document-writing practices have changed dramatically.

1️⃣ Word, the #1 Tool for Document Writing

Word Is the Global #1

Indeed, everyone knows how to use Word—whether starting from a blank page or a template—and its flexibility makes it an ideal system. This is especially true since it’s provided by default to every employee. Why look elsewhere for a solution to prepare documents?

With Word, you can create almost any kind of report, and do so decently.

The statistics are undeniable: there are reportedly over 1.5 billion Word users.

But Word Has Its Limits, Which We All Experience

Through over 50 user interviews in 2024, we identified the frustrations and shortcomings of Word in daily use, leaving a lot of manual work on the table.

It’s Time to Complement Word

Word’s limitations, of which the list above is just a glimpse, often make us wish for a major innovation to render it a tool of the past—its richness and flexibility reserved for rare needs—while giving way to solutions better suited to modern, everyday document writing.

We find ourselves hoping for change, but unsure how to do it, where to turn, or which solution to learn, not knowing if it will remain a lasting complement to Word.

To take charge of this evolution, some turn first to specialized software.

2️⃣ Specialized Tools Boost Productivity… for Certain Document Types

At Finalcad, we experienced this firsthand, starting in 2011, a year after the iPad’s debut. While the tablet concept was new, we poured our efforts into bringing this tool to construction sites, with advantages that made it an ideal solution for sites, especially compared to the laptops of that era.

It’s clear why construction sites have since normalized and widespread tablet use—though not yet enough, but that’s another story.

Document Automation Increases Productivity

At Finalcad, we understood that regular, consistently structured documents are the key to productivity gains. Take a familiar example: the punch list at the end of a construction project.

We automated these documents, helping site teams generate hundreds of thousands of them, resulting in over one million hours of productivity gains.

But Not All Documents Can Be Standardized

Here’s the catch: automating document production requires standardization.

While this works for highly structured tasks like punch list resolution, it’s just one process among many. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of documents we had to generate at Finalcad:

• Quality checks

• HSE inspections

• Near-miss reports

• Completion certificates

• Temp worker tracking

• Cost estimates

• Additional work orders

• Equipment receipt logs

• Site journals

• Material tracking

• Commissioning reports

• Inventories

• …

Each document has its own content, format, and constraints. An off-the-shelf standardized solution no longer delivers productivity gains across all teams and processes. How do you combine Word’s flexibility with the automation of specialized software?

Can All Document Types Be Automated?

It’s possible to use tags to pull data from specialized software into a Word document, a theoretically sound solution. With tedious setup, productivity gains could be rolled out across all documents for various workflows.

Here’s how it works, a method being developed by excellent companies like Kraaft:

If you can freely insert any data from specialized software into a Word document with full control over formatting, that should be perfect, right?

Not quite. In practice, that’s not how it plays out.

For many good reasons, very few people take the time to adopt these solutions, and we revert to the simple, trivial, but archaic practice of doing everything “by hand”—clicks, copy-pastes, and all.

Indeed, implementing such solutions often remains a niche endeavor.

The reasons for this failure are numerous:

• It requires establishing a new process;

• Each workflow needs a designated person to handle setup;

• The specialized software must support this feature;

• The Word document template must be configured;

• Templates need ongoing updates as the system evolves to transfer data into the document;

Ultimately, while nearly everyone uses Word daily, how can we ask a few people to configure the perfect template for all their colleagues? The bottleneck makes implementation impossible, and everyone falls back to using Word as is, abandoning sorely needed improvements.

3️⃣ Our Mission: Create a More Enjoyable and Efficient Way to Write and Read Documents, Starting from Notes, with AI’s Help

That’s why we decided to launch there. We wanted to rethink a new standard for document writing and sharing and share our insights and tools with all companies. Our vision is to create a more enjoyable and efficient way to draft and read documents, starting from notes, with AI’s assistance.

Here’s How We’re Tackling Our Mission

• Deliver an excellent user experience focused on speed and efficiency. This is a tool you’ll use multiple times a day—we want it to be simple, clear, and comprehensive to support your work without getting in the way.

  
  

• Automate manual tasks. What if importing photos, exporting to PDF, compressing a PDF, or juggling multiple copy-pastes became a thing of the past? We’re eliminating these manual steps by integrating and automating them.

  
  

• Go beyond Word and PDFs. We’re not here to replace emails and PDFs but to make them easier to produce. And we don’t stop there—we’re adding a modern, rich reading experience for recipients. Everyone should be able to read or listen to a report however they prefer or request a personalized summary.

there Covers Every Step—from Notes to Reading, Including Drafting

• Simplify Note-Taking. While OneNote, Apple Notes, or even a paper notepad are decent tools, their limitations become apparent in practice. Mention photo imports or retyping notes, and it’s clear they fall short. Our mission is to make note-taking easy, comprehensive, and to integrate your paper notepad.

  
  

• Enhance Smart Writing. Turning notes into a report often means fleshing out short, typo-ridden notes—rephrasing, refining, and correcting them. Sometimes, it even involves translating them for certain clients. AI advancements in rephrasing, translation, summarization, and correction are mature enough to become standard, and this vision is built into there from the ground up.

  
  

• Send Effortlessly. Sending a report typically takes 5 minutes instead of 10 seconds—and it shouldn’t. We want you to forget the mechanical tasks you shouldn’t have to handle, letting you focus on crafting the right message for your recipients. To spare you from chasing people down to confirm they’ve reviewed the document, we’re building read-tracking features to streamline communication and avoid unnecessary follow-ups.

  
  

• Adaptive Document Reading. While most emails—including professional ones—are read on mobile, document display isn’t optimized for it. It’s time to evolve toward more comfortable, recipient-tailored reading. Our approach is seamless, mobile-friendly, and gives readers options: full text, summary, audio, or even a conversational experience with the report during a car ride. Reading a document won’t feel like a 90s experience anymore.

  
  

• Create Templates Dynamically. To start a new document, people often copy the last one, “reset” it, and build from that structure. Another option is creating document templates. Our 53 interviews confirmed what a decade at Finalcad taught us: most prefer duplicating an old report or starting from scratch over using a template. We want to help you do what you already do, with smart duplication that automates your natural workflow.

Will Your Next Documents Be in there?

This is just the beginning, and much more is yet to come. The journey will be long and exciting, and we’re thrilled to share our learnings and reflections as we progress.

there is now in public beta. If you’d like to be among the first users and help shape its direction, sign up here and follow us on X and LinkedIn.

David and Jimmy