With support from the Innovate UK BridgeAI programme and Digital Catapult’s High Growth AI Accelerator, the team accelerated development of an AI-powered tool that speeds up audits, improves accuracy and makes the process accessible to a wider range of users. This innovation is helping Material Index grow its licensing model and scale reuse across the built environment.

The challenge

Construction generates huge amounts of waste, and reuse rates in the industry remain low compared to the UK average. Although overall recovery rates are high, most of this comes from recycling and backfilling rather than true reuse, which remains extremely limited. Pre-demolition audits are essential for identifying materials with high reuse potential, but they have traditionally relied on spreadsheets and generic benchmark data. This approach is slow, prone to errors and hard to scale.

The Material Index team understood that AI could unlock significant efficiency and quality gains, particularly in material identification and categorisation. However, integrating AI into such a complex workflow can be. Through BridgeAI and support from Digital Catapult’s technologists, Material Index received practical advice on usability, design and the most viable AI use-cases. This mentorship helped the team avoid common pitfalls, refine early concepts and focus their development efforts on areas that would deliver the greatest impact.

The solution

Material Index built a mobile-friendly tool that uses a high-performing image recognition model to classify construction materials quickly and accurately. Trained on a curated dataset of components, the model returns a ranked list of categories aligned with Material Index’s internal taxonomy, achieving 89% accuracy within its top nine suggestions. This reduces errors and makes audits faster and easier. The tool requires just three hours of training and works best for large commercial real estate projects – though it is also proving valuable for residential, retail and infrastructure sites.

BridgeAI support was complemented by Digital Catapult’s technical mentorship and cloud credits, which enabled MI to build and test an early prototype, validate the scope of the solution and lay the foundations for a robust Minimum Viable Product. This work also helped define how the AI functionality integrates with MI’s wider platform, which provides environmental reporting, secure digital records for circular asset management and a B2B marketplace for material exchange.

This is a game-changer in our ability to provide very accurate, detailed, relevant audits at an accessible price.

– Rob Smith, MD, Material Index

The impact

The AI tool has improved audit speed by 40% and accuracy by 6%, cutting time on-site and freeing auditors to focus on higher-value tasks. It also delivers more consistent categorisation, reducing overall user error. This consistency is crucial for rolling out the product to less experienced users. Since launch, Material Index has secured two new licenses worth £100,000 and expects to generate significant additional revenue as it scales over the next three years.

The future

AI is now a core part of Material Index’s SaaS-enabled marketplace. It is already improving functions like identification, description and search, and the team plans to keep training and testing models across these areas. As models become faster and more sophisticated, MI expects to adopt new methods of data capture. The company believes that as AI continues to evolve, industry-specific data will become even more important in the UK’s transition to a more circular, resource-efficient built environment.

This is a real improvement on our current technology. It’s also the first step in the re-imagining of our business and product to be AI-first.

– Morgan Lewis, CEO, Material Index