The challenge

For years, Milan Parmar saw the same problem across the construction sector: vast amounts of valuable project cost data locked away in Excel spreadsheets. “People often intend to use the data,” he says, “but they just don’t have the time or the resources to turn it into anything useful.”

That frustration led Milan, an experienced quantity surveyor and digital consultant, to create costify.ai, a software-as-a-service platform that automatically transforms messy construction cost data into structured, searchable categories aligned to industry standards. costify’s system produces AI-ready intelligence that can reveal trends and patterns, predict risks, and enable faster, more confident project decisions.

The solution

With support from Innovate UK’s BridgeAI programme partner The Alan Turning Institute Independent Scientific Advisor (ISA) offer, Milan has taken the platform from the prototype development stage to pilot projects with major industry players. Since this interview was recorded, costify has transformed data from more than £1.5 billion worth of projects.

costify grew out of Milan’s existing consulting business, MP Consulting, and his earlier work training teams around the world on cost management software. Through a feasibility study funded by Innovate UK, Milan and colleagues explored automating the conversion of project information from 3D building models into a cost classification standard known as NRM1. When an extension opportunity to develop the prototype arose through BridgeAI, the scope evolved: rather than processing building information models, costify would focus on transforming Excel spreadsheets and PDFs, the most common pain point clients were struggling with, into AI-ready data aligned to industry standards like NRM1, ICMS3 and CESMM4.

Having worked together on previous Innovate UK-funded projects, Milan and Dr Ogerta Elezaj teamed up again through the ISA offer. Ogerta provided targeted technical support on crucial aspects including the accuracy of the AI-driven classification and prediction systems, the handling of highly unstructured construction data, and the validation of text-generated reports from the generative AI component of the product. She has also helped the costify team to identify and apply for additional funding opportunities and has worked with the company to ensure its product is scalable and aligns with real-world client needs.

The impact

costify’s biggest engagement has been with one of the largest construction cost management consultancies, achieving 88% automated classification accuracy across data from around £700 million worth of projects, something that would have taken months of manual effort. This paves the way for pilots with other major companies, as well as the addition of new features such as cross-project benchmarking and conversational AI, and in the longer term, expansion into markets including Australia and North America.

Ogerta, a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and Associate Professor in Applied AI at Birmingham City University, says: “It has been a long and productive journey with costify, from building the initial prototype to our current work focused on fine-tuning the system so it is as accurate and reliable as possible. The product addresses one of the main challenges in the construction sector, structuring data for cost classification and analysis, and there is a clear need for it among potential clients.”

Working with BridgeAI has been hugely valuable, I wouldn’t change anything. Even with a strong in-house technical team, having BridgeAI’s support and broad experience to call on has made a real difference. The support has helped to shape our AI platform, strengthen our approach, and put us in a position where we’re now rolling costify out with major industry partners. We’ve come a long way this year and Innovate UK has definitely played an important part in that.

– Milan Parmar, Founder, costify.ai