Automating the Pain of Drawing Review
A new wave of AI tools is redefining how AEC firms verify, compare, and deliver drawings.
Drawing review has always been one of the most time-consuming and least rewarding parts of design production. Architects and engineers spend hours—sometimes days—checking symbols, annotations, scales, and notes for inconsistencies across sheets and disciplines. It’s slow, costly, and depends on senior professionals whose time could be better spent designing, managing clients, or winning new work.
Now, AI is beginning to take on the tedious side of quality control. Instead of scanning every sheet manually, teams can use new platforms that detect missing information, compare drawing sets automatically, and highlight potential coordination issues before they become expensive mistakes. Three tools in particular are reshaping this process.
Its add-on, AI-Match, compares drawing sets across phases to highlight what’s changed, what’s missing, or what no longer aligns. It’s especially powerful for complex, multi-disciplinary projects where coordination errors can cascade into costly rework.
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Swapp, on the other hand, acts as an AI co-pilot for construction documentation. Integrated directly into Revit and Autodesk Construction Cloud, it learns each firm’s drafting standards and automates everything from views and annotations to schedules and full DD/CD sets.
Instead of spending hours reviewing drawings for missing annotations or inconsistencies, teams can rely on Swapp to generate and verify documentation automatically. By applying each firm’s standards from the start, it minimizes coordination errors, keeps drawings aligned across disciplines, and reduces the amount of manual checking required later in the process.
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Finally, MarkedUp takes a lighter, laser-focused approach. It’s built for quick, surface-level checks: you upload your 2D drawings, and the platform verifies whether every callout symbol has a matching detail (and vice versa). Within seconds, it returns a redlined PDF with the results. At around one dollar per page review, it’s a practical option for teams that constantly run into symbol and callout inconsistencies.
What Demo
By automating the mechanical parts of checking, these tools allow experienced designers to focus on what machines can’t: understanding intent, constructability, and the human side of design. But soon, designing with their help will feel almost like having a senior professional working beside you — catching errors, preventing rework, and analyzing multiple files in real time as you design.
Curious about what’s next, and how to apply these tools in practice?
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