Get Our Weekly Newsletter
Trunk Tools: Why You Should Use It
Anyone who’s run a commercial job knows the real bottleneck isn’t the work in the field, it’s the mountain of paper behind it. Specs, drawings, bulletins, submittals, RFIs, schedules, and somebody has to dig through all of it to find the one answer a foreman needs right now.
Trunk Tools was built to take that grind off your plate. At its core is Cortex, which plugs into your existing systems, reads every document and drawing on the project, and maps how they connect into a knowledge base that keeps updating as the job moves along.
The company says its models are trained on 5+ years of real jobsite data and are running on around 1,000 U.S. projects covering $50B in construction volume. And it wasn’t dreamed up by tech folks guessing at construction: founder and CEO Dr. Sarah Buchner has a PhD in construction data and 20 years on jobsites.
On top of Cortex sit tools aimed at specific headaches. TrunkText lets a super text a question like “what critical path activities happen next week?” and get an answer back with sources cited.
TrunkSubmittal checks submittals against your specs and drafts responses, TrunkRegister builds a submittal register from a full spec book in minutes, TrunkReview flags clouded and unclouded changes in each new bulletin, TrunkRFI catches RFIs the documents already answer and drafts the rest, TrunkBid lines up sub bids against your scope to show the gaps, TrunkBrowse gives you full context on any object you click on a sheet, and TrunkChange detects and analyzes change events.
They also train teams in person on their own jobs and run change management programs at the head office, so it doesn’t end up as shelfware.
Pros
- Answers come with cited sources, so your team can verify instead of trusting blindly
- Text-based access means supers can use it from the field without logging into anything
- Covers a wide range of PM and PE paperwork, from submittals and RFIs to bids and change events
- Hands-on, in-person training on your actual project documents
- Built by people with real construction backgrounds; SOC 2 Type II certified
Considerations
- Best suited to larger commercial projects with heavy document loads; smaller residential or specialty contractors may not get full value
- Pricing isn’t something you’ll nail down without a conversation with their team
- Getting the most out of it takes real buy-in and process change across the office and field
- AI-drafted submittal and RFI responses still need an experienced set of eyes before they go out
