Compliance AI is live today. It is the first product Buildalytic is shipping, and it does one job well: it audits construction compliance paperwork before it goes to an agency, so errors get caught while they are still cheap to fix. It covers certified payroll, prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon, apprenticeship, and HUD Section 3. This is the first launch, not the last, and we started here on purpose.
We started with compliance because it is the pain with the clearest right answer. A certified payroll report is either correct against the wage determination or it is not. A prevailing wage is either paid or it is short. An apprentice ratio either holds or it does not. Unlike a lot of AI use cases where the output is a matter of taste, here there is a rule, and the rule can be checked.
What does Compliance AI do?
Compliance AI reads a certified payroll report, whether it is a WH-347, a state form, or a scanned PDF from a subcontractor, and checks it against the prevailing wage determination that governs the project. It flags underpaid classifications, missing fringe benefits, wrong overtime, apprentice ratio problems, and gaps in the statement of compliance. It produces a report you can act on, with each finding tied to the rule it came from.
Certified payroll audit
Certified payroll is the weekly report contractors on government-funded work must file, verifying that each worker was paid the required wage and fringe. Under 29 CFR 5.5, it is due weekly, within seven days of the regular pay date, and records are kept for three years. Compliance AI ingests the report, normalizes the classifications, and checks every line against the determination, the same audit a compliance officer would do by hand, done in the time it takes to upload the file.
Prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon
The Davis-Bacon Act requires the local prevailing wage on federal construction contracts over $2,000, and most states run parallel rules on their own public works. California, for example, applies prevailing wage to public works over $1,000 and can assess up to $200 per day per underpaid worker under Labor Code section 1775. Compliance AI matches each worker to the correct classification, applies the base rate plus fringe, and checks overtime and cash-in-lieu fringe credits, which is where most underpayments actually hide.
Apprenticeship
Public work carries apprenticeship obligations: ratios of apprentice hours to journeyworker hours, required dispatch requests, and, on federal clean-energy projects, the Inflation Reduction Act labor-hour rules. Compliance AI tracks the ratio against hours actually worked and flags when a project is trending short, before the shortfall becomes a penalty.
HUD Section 3
On HUD-funded projects above the Section 3 threshold, contractors must direct a share of labor hours to Section 3 workers: a 25 percent benchmark for total labor hours and a 5 percent benchmark for Targeted Section 3 workers. Compliance AI tracks labor hours against both benchmarks so the reporting is a byproduct of the work, not a scramble at closeout.
How does a Compliance AI audit actually run?
You give Compliance AI the certified payroll and the wage determination that governs the project. It reads the payroll into structured data, worker by worker and line by line, whether it started as a WH-347, a state form, or a scanned PDF from a subcontractor. It normalizes the trade classifications so they can be matched against the determination. Then it runs the checks: base rate and fringe for each classification, the correct jurisdiction's overtime, apprentice registration and ratio, and the statement of compliance. What comes back is a list of findings, each one tied to the specific rule and the specific line that triggered it, so a reviewer sees exactly what to fix and why.
The design principle is that a finding is only useful if it is actionable and traceable. A result that says a payroll is ninety-two percent compliant tells you nothing you can act on. A result that says a named worker was paid the laborer rate for hours that read as operator work, short by a specific amount per hour against a specific line of the determination, is a correction you can make before Friday. Compliance AI is built to produce the second kind of output, not the first.
What does it cost to miss this?
The exposure is layered, which is why small errors matter. The floor is back wages, the difference between what was paid and what was owed, multiplied across every affected worker and week. On federal work, willful or repeated violations can lead to debarment from bidding for up to three years, and falsifying a certified payroll is a federal offense. States pile on their own penalties, such as California's up to $200 per day per underpaid worker under Labor Code section 1775. Because the same mistake usually repeats across a crew and a schedule, a one-dollar-an-hour classification error is never a one-dollar problem.
How is this different from a compliance portal?
A compliance portal collects reports. It is where a prime or an agency receives what subcontractors submit. That is useful, and Buildalytic is complementary to it: you can audit a report with Compliance AI and still file it wherever your agency requires. The difference is that a portal checks that a report was submitted and is internally consistent. Compliance AI checks whether the report is actually right against the governing wage determination, which is a different and harder question.
A portal tells you the form is filled in. An audit tells you the numbers are correct. Those are not the same check, and the second one is the one that costs you money when it is missed.
Who is Compliance AI for?
It is built for two roles. For a general contractor, it is the layer that reviews subcontractor payrolls before the prime is on the hook for them, so a sub's underpayment does not become the GC's liability at audit. For a subcontractor, it is the back office that produces clean certified payroll without a dedicated compliance hire, which matters most for the 40 to 200-person specialty shops that carry the same rules as a large prime with a fraction of the staff.
It also serves the compliance officer who already does this work by hand. Compliance AI does not replace that person's judgment. It removes the mechanical part, the line-by-line reconciliation across a full crew every week, so their time goes to the exceptions and the hard calls rather than to re-keying rates. The people who know this work best tend to be the ones most relieved to stop doing the tedious half of it.
Works with your systems of record
Compliance AI reads from and writes to the tools you already run, including Procore, Vista, Sage, and CMiC. It is an audit and generation layer above your system of record, not a replacement for it.
What comes after compliance?
The other four pillars, finance, field, voice, and intelligence, are built on the same foundation and roll out from here. Because they share one data layer, a wage rate the compliance side validated is the same rate the finance side uses to check a labor cost, and a daily log the field side captured is evidence the compliance side can cite. Starting with compliance is not a narrow bet. It is the anchor the rest attaches to.
The best way to judge it is on a report you already had trouble with. Bring a certified payroll or a pay application that failed an audit, or that took a person a day to reconcile, and see what Compliance AI does with it.