Building Tendos AI: How an Agent Swarm Turns Construction Emails into Quotes

Guests

• Daniel Kappler — CPO (Product & Design), Tendos AI
• Matthias Hilscher — CTO (Engineering), Tendos AI

Key Takeaways

• Start narrow to prove value: Tendos AI began with just radiators for one design partner before expanding to all building products
• Own the interface: building a web application (vs. integrating into legacy systems) gave them control over UX and the ability to iterate toward full automation
• Evaluate each agent, not just the chain: per-agent evals make debugging tractable and show exactly where performance changed
• Use review agents: a separate agent that checks work (like code review) catches errors before they reach humans
• Let customers pull you: customers asked Tendos to replace their CPQ software—strong signals of product-market fit

Topics Covered

• The tendering chain in construction and why it's ripe for automation
• How domain expertise (CEO's construction background) helped identify and validate the opportunity
• Entity extraction from PDFs ranging from 1 page to 1,800+ pages
• Planning patterns in agentic systems—creating and updating plans based on findings
• How agents evaluate product fit against customer requirements
• Building custom tracing and observability tools for complex agent chains
• The path toward self-learning systems through human feedback loops

Links & Resources

• Tendos AI

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Tendo and Key Roles 01:01 Understanding the Tendering Chain 02:26 Real-World Construction Analogy 03:34 Challenges in the Construction Industry 04:48 AI's Role in Tendo's Product 12:59 Early Prototypes and AI Integration 18:31 Expanding Product Capabilities 28:56 Customer Collaboration and Workflow Automation 33:15 Strategic Partnerships and Technical Groundwork 34:20 Focusing on Specific Customer Segments 36:03 Product Evolution and Current Capabilities 38:17 Technical Workflow and Automation 40:12 Evaluating and Matching Product Requests 47:00 Dynamic Agent Architecture 55:29 Quality Measures and Evaluation 01:02:59 Future Directions and Customer-Centric Development