Every subcontractor and GC knows the drill. A change hits the project. Someone has to price it. That means pulling rates from a spreadsheet, cross-referencing the contract, building out line items, assembling backup, and packaging it into a change order request (COR) that the GC or owner will actually accept. For a simple change, that's a half hour. For a complex one, it can eat an entire day.
And that's just the first submission. If the COR comes back with revision requests, the cycle starts again.
We've spent the past several months building something to fix this. The COR Pricing Agent is now in open beta, available to Clearstory users, with general availability on the horizon.
The COR Pricing Agent handles the full range of how change order requests get created and priced inside Clearstory. It works for specialty contractors pricing their own work, self-performing GCs estimating in-house, and general contractors assembling owner-facing change order packages from sub responses.
Here's what it looks like in practice:
Voice notes for quick CORs. A PM needs to price overtime work over the weekend. Instead of filling out a form, they tap the microphone, describe the scope, labor, materials, and equipment in a 20-second voice note. The agent transcribes it, matches rates from the project library, and drafts a complete COR for review. No manual entry.
Takeoffs and estimates for complex changes. The user attaches a completed takeoff listing material quantities. The agent analyzes the quantities alongside the change documents and builds out a fully priced COR with structured line items. When a revision request comes back, the user attaches the comments and the agent addresses each one automatically.
Paper T&M Tags. For teams still working with paper in the field, the agent can read a scanned or photographed T&M Tag and convert it into a priced, structured COR inside Clearstory. No more double data entry between what happens in the field and what ends up in the system.
GC packaging for owners. For general contractors, the agent can take multiple approved subcontractor CORs that live in Clearstory and bundle them into a single owner-facing change order request. Title, description, consolidated line items, attached backup. One click to review, one click to send. What used to be a half-day packaging exercise now takes minutes.
Change order pricing is the bottleneck in every project's change management workflow. It's where time disappears, where errors get introduced, and where money gets left on the table because the admin burden of documenting and pricing the work is too high.
The industry loses billions annually in change orders that never get submitted, or get submitted late, or get rejected because the documentation wasn't right the first time.
The COR Pricing Agent doesn't replace the PM or the estimator. It gives them a draft to react to instead of a blank screen to start from. The human reviews, adjusts, and sends. The agent handles the data entry, the rate matching, and the formatting.
The COR Pricing Agent is one of four AI agents we're building at Clearstory, each designed to automate a different leg of the change order workflow: Change Notifications, COR Pricing, COR Review, and T&M Tags.
These agents work together because Clearstory sits at every handoff in the change order process, connecting GCs, specialty contractors, and owners in one shared workflow.
By reducing revisions, speeding up time to visibility, and ensuring accuracy, the change order cycle time for the entire industry can be dramatically shortened.
That network architecture is what makes this possible. An AI agent that only sees one side of the transaction can only do so much. Ours sees the full picture.
We published our full AI strategy for anyone who wants to go deeper on where this is headed and why we believe Clearstory is uniquely positioned to build it. [Read the AI Strategy]
The COR Pricing Agent is in open beta now for all Clearstory customers. If you're already on the Clearstory network, you can start using it today. If you're new to Clearstory, this is a good time to see what we can do.
We're actively building alongside our beta users and looking for feedback as we move toward general availability. If you want to help shape what this becomes, we'd like to hear from you.