Construction enquiries cover everything from one-off renovations to multi-million-pound public-sector frameworks. Most BD teams spend an hour a day politely declining domestic enquiries that hit a commercial-only firm, or fielding subcontractor PQ submissions that should have gone to procurement. The qualifying questions — sector, value, programme, procurement route, framework — never get asked early enough, so by the time a tender lands on the right desk it's already three days old.

SleekAI reads your sectors, recent projects, and accreditations and captures the basics on first contact. A school trust enquiring about a 4.2m two-school project gets a real answer about your DfE framework status, recent education work, and realistic 14-month programmes — not a generic 'contact us' deflection. The bot quotes your latest Considerate Constructors score from the published audit, names the framework lots you sit on, and routes the conversation to the pre-construction director with the procurement route, RIBA stage, and programme target attached.

Subcontractor and recruitment enquiries get separated from tender traffic automatically. Trades looking for the PQ portal land on the right form. Candidates asking about live sites and benefits get answers from the careers page. The BD inbox sees only enquiries worth a follow-up, and every conversation is logged in WordPress with timestamps for the procurement audit trail.

Public sector and framework work has a procurement audit trail attached, and most main contractors lose on programme credibility before they lose on price. A school trust deciding between three contractors at PQQ stage is testing whether your team understands a phased two-school delivery on the DfE Lot 1, not whether you can paste a generic 'we are committed to quality' paragraph into a webform. The conversation that converts is the one where someone — or something — knows the steel lead time is six weeks at present, that Considerate Constructors averages run 38-41 across your live sites, and that a 14-month programme with school-holiday possession is realistic.

A chatbot that can hold that conversation at 9pm on a Sunday, when the procurement officer is doing weekend prep, signals a level of operational maturity that competitors phoning back on Tuesday cannot. It also protects margin: filtering out unrealistic domestic enquiries and routing subcontractor PQs away from BD frees up the team to chase the work that actually fits the firm's capacity and sector.