Contech Firm Planera Wants You to Meet Manny, Its New AI Assistant

Planera, a critical path method (CPM) scheduling platform, has launched Manny, an artificial intelligence assistant designed for construction teams.

Manny helps construction teams analyze schedules, understand impacts and make faster decisions. Embedded directly within Planera’s platform, Manny is a real-time decision-making tool, allowing teams to run what-if analyses and detect risk in real time, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

CPM is a project management timetable that is typically presented in graphic form, with the schedule illustrating specific individual tasks that comprise an overall project.

“It’s typically pretty hard for a lot of project teams to interact with the schedule because the tools have been traditionally super hard to use,” said Nitin Bhandari, CEO and co-founder of Planera. “We make it super easy to collaborate, like with Google Docs, so that multiple people can be in the schedule together and you get this beautiful logic saying, ‘I’m going to do this, then after this I’m going to do that.’ As you’re doing that, you create your entire schedule, your Gantt chart [a timetable] and labor graphs. So it’s super powerful, but also super easy and approachable to use.”

Manny uses existing models such as Claude and OpenAI, but adds context-specific capabilities. It has been tested by more than a dozen companies.

“What AI is great at is giving you natural language ability to ask questions and then give you proper responses,” said Bhandari. “So, our Manny AI is a scheduling system that is smarter than your general AI in that it understands construction concepts really well. The tasks are all hyperlinked, so you just click on it in your schedule, and it takes you right to that part of the schedule. All the information is right there.”

Construction teams can use Manny to uncover critical path drivers by instantly identifying the activities dictating the project finish date, as well as predict downstream impacts by modeling how a single delay could affect the rest of the project, according to Planera. It can also stress-test scenarios by creating new schedule versions from hypotheticals to compare options before committing.

“Manny is giving all stakeholders the ability to analyze the schedule at a deep level and look for opportunities regardless of their software training,” said Asa McMains, scheduling manager at Balfour Beatty, a servicing company specializing in general contracting, at-risk construction management and design-build for clients in both the public and private sectors.

In addition, Manny can identify high-risk areas early by spotting potential bottlenecks before they create issues in the field, and expand access to schedule analysis by enabling property managers, superintendents, and virtual design and construction teams to participate more easily in scheduling decisions.

“Too often, critical analysis is skipped because legacy systems make it cumbersome,” said Bhandari. “When getting answers is easier, teams can make smarter, more proactive decisions.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.