I spent years building a SaaS product for the construction trades focused on health and safety. We obsessed over UI/UX because our users varied wildly in age, tech comfort, literacy, and preferred language. As good as we were, it was always a challenge to get new users to become proficient with it. That company was acquired in 2022.

One thing I noticed throughout that journey: internally, we lived in Slack. It became our hub for everything — team conversations, server alerts, support tickets. It was always the open tab. So naturally, we tried to get our construction clients to adopt it too.

None of them did. The reason was obvious in hindsight: Slack is built around typing. That doesn't work when you're on a roof, driving between jobs, or on a scaffold installing wall panels.

After some time off, I kept thinking about that gap. What if field teams had one unified interface where they could:

- Communicate with the rest of their team - Update their work orders, timekeeping, or other systems they already use - Ask questions answered by an AI trained on their company's own documents and data

All by voice. Any language. No typing. No learning multiple apps.

That's Conkoa. A foreman on a ladder can say "We had three workers on Level 3 for eight hours at the Green Cedar project" and that information gets properly entered into Procore or whatever their system of record is. Messages are automatically transcribed and translated, so a Spanish-speaking crew member and an English-speaking PM stay in sync without anyone doing extra work. Teams can upload photos and documents that feed into a RAG pipeline, so the built-in AI agent can summarize and surface that information on demand.

We integrate with tools like Procore today and are building out more integrations.

Conkoa is live and being used by dozens of companies across the construction trades. You can set up a free workspace at https://conkoa.ai — would love feedback from the HN community.

user:	jimsrand
created:	December 20, 2022
karma:	1