Field work happens fast. The documentation doesn't.
A crew wraps up a day of owner-directed work (extra labor, rented equipment, materials that weren't on the original plan) and someone has to turn that into a T&M Tag before the details go fuzzy. That means pulling the right labor classifications, matching equipment time against the contract rates, accounting for every material used, and writing a scope description clear enough that the GC will actually approve it.
On a good day, that's 20 to 30 minutes of work per tag. On a bad day, when it gets pushed to the end of the week, or the foreman who was on site isn't the one filling out the paperwork, it's incomplete documentation, a revision request, and a delayed payment.
The T&M Tag Agent is built to fix this. It is now in beta for Clearstory customers, available on web and mobile.
The agent works as a chat panel inside Clearstory's T&M Tag form. You describe the work in plain language, by voice or by typing, and the agent builds the tag for you to review. Here's what that looks like across the use cases our customers are using it for most.
Voice-to-tag. A foreman wraps up a shift and needs to document four hours of overtime labor and a half day of crane rental. Instead of opening a form and filling in every field, they tap the microphone and describe the work out loud. The agent transcribes it, matches the labor and equipment to the project's configured rate library, and drafts a complete tag, including title, description, and line items, ready for review. What used to take 20 to 30 minutes takes under two minutes.
Spanish-to-English documentation. Field crews don't always work in English, and making them document work in a second language introduces errors and slows things down. With the T&M Tag Agent, crews can describe work in Spanish (or other foreign languages), by voice or text. The agent works with them in Spanish, shows the original message alongside an English translation so they can confirm the meaning was captured correctly, and builds the T&M Tag title, description, and line items in English for review and submission. Quantities, scope, labor roles, and location all come through. If a term is unclear, the agent asks before it continues. You stay in control with review of all terms and items.
Editing a tag conversationally. If a tag is already in progress, the agent can pick up where it left off. Change the foreman hours from 8 to 10. Add 40 linear feet of conduit. Remove the second labor line. Each instruction updates the tag directly. You don't have to locate the right field in the form yourself.
Writing and improving descriptions. Thin descriptions are one of the most common reasons T&M Tags get rejected. The agent can review a description, flag it when the scope isn't clear enough, and suggest a revised version that explains what was done, why it was required, and what the GC needs to understand to approve it. The PM reviews and accepts or edits before anything goes anywhere.
Converting paper tags. For field crews still working with paper, the agent can read a photographed or scanned T&M Tag and pull the title, description, reference number, and line items into Clearstory. No manual re-entry. If part of the scan is unreadable, the agent shows what it could read and flags what's missing rather than filling it in with a guess.
T&M documentation is where cash flow goes to die. When documentation is incomplete, it gets rejected. When it gets rejected, the revision cycle starts. When the revision cycle starts, payment gets delayed, sometimes by weeks.
That delay isn't just a paperwork problem. Every stalled T&M Tag is a gap in the change order record. Scope gets disputed. Costs go unrecovered. The work happened, but without clean documentation moving through the process, contractors don't get paid for it and GCs get hit with surprise costs they didn't see coming.
The T&M Tag Agent closes that gap at the source, before the tag ever leaves the field.
The T&M Tag Agent is one of four agents Clearstory is building to automate the full change order lifecycle: Change Notifications, COR Pricing, COR Review, and T&M Tags. Each handles a different stage of the workflow for a different stakeholder. These agents work together because Clearstory sits at every handoff in the change order process. When a T&M Tag is drafted and approved, the data carries forward cleanly into a COR. When a COR is priced and submitted, the GC's Review Agent picks it up. The documentation doesn't get rebuilt at every stage.
For the full picture on where Clearstory AI is headed, read our AI strategy blog.
The T&M Tag Agent is live in beta for all Clearstory customers with AI enabled. Check with your account owner to confirm it's on for your projects. We're building this with beta users' feedback, so let us know what you think.
New to Clearstory? Request a demo to put Clearstory's AI agents to work on your T&M Tag and COR workflows today.