From Days to Minutes: AI for Code Reviews

Grant Calloway

Welcome to AI for Small Business. I'm Grant Calloway. Picture a sign company that gets a request to bid on several hundred custom signs at once. Every one of those signs has to meet the city's sign ordinance, the state's structural rules, and federal accessibility standards. Somebody senior has to sit down with the code books and check them, one by one. That takes days. Meanwhile the customer is waiting, and your competitor is happy to answer the phone. Today, I'll show you how a 25 person shop in Florida got that review down to minutes, and how you can try the same move this week.

Grant Calloway

First, the backdrop, because it matters. On October 22nd, Goldman Sachs announced a five hundred million dollar commitment to expand its 10,000 Small Businesses program and launch a Small Business AI Institute with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. That's the headline. The useful part is the survey they released alongside it. They surveyed 2,473 alumni of their program. Keep that qualifier in mind, because these are owners who've been through a business training course, so they probably lean ahead of the average. Eighty six percent of them use AI, up from fifty six percent in 2024. But only fifteen percent have fully woven it into their core operations.

Grant Calloway

Here's the shift worth noticing. In 2024, seventy four percent of those owners used AI to write marketing text. Now it's sixty five. Meanwhile, among AI users, financial analysis and business planning more than doubled, from eighteen percent to forty two percent. Owners are moving from asking AI to write a caption to asking it to help them run the place.

Grant Calloway

The Federal Reserve's 2026 small business credit survey, fielded in late 2025 across 6,525 employer firms, points the same way, with a broader crowd. Forty six percent of firms said they use AI. Of those, seventy one percent reported higher productivity, and thirty one percent reported higher sales. But the top complaint, at forty six percent, was accuracy. Remember that number. It's going to shape how we do this.

Grant Calloway

So what's the problem we're solving? Rulebooks. If you're a contractor, a fabricator, an installer, anyone who has to prove your work fits a zoning ordinance, a building code, or an accessibility standard, you carry a hidden tax. Hundreds of pages, written by committee, and your best people spend their sharpest hours cross referencing them. It's not glamorous. It's also where quotes stall, and where a missed line turns into a failed inspection or a redo.

Grant Calloway

The fix is simple to say. Think of it as hiring a very fast junior reader. You hand them the code book and your draft proposal, and they come back with a marked up copy showing where the two disagree. They don't make the final call. They make the first pass, so your senior person starts at the finish line's last stretch instead of the starting gate.

Grant Calloway

Now the story. Advanced Multi Sign Corp is a custom sign company in the Miami area, founded by Ariel Pedrosa. It's a team of 25 working out of a 13,000 square foot facility, building signs for developers, hospitals, franchises, and municipalities. They often receive bids in the hundreds, and each one has to be reviewed against state sign codes and ADA requirements.

Grant Calloway

Pedrosa and his team brought AI into that review. Per the Goldman report, it compressed the regulatory review from days to minutes, with human oversight throughout. That last part is the whole game. The AI acts as the first auditor. Experienced people check what it finds. His design team also uses AI to work through pressure and structural requirements for sign mockups under different weather, lighting, and visibility conditions, before anything goes into production.

Grant Calloway

Pedrosa told Goldman, and I'm quoting: "AI lets me upskill my employees while driving productivity at an individual level. Though there was some fear at first, I'm now seeing my employees encourage each other to use it more in their workday." Notice what he didn't say. He didn't say he cut the team. The skeptics came around because the tool took away the tedious part of the job, the page flipping. I don't have a revenue number for you from this story, and I won't invent one. The reported result is time and morale, and for a shop that lives on deadlines, time is money.

Grant Calloway

The lesson to steal is the order of operations. AI reads first. People decide second. That's how you handle that accuracy worry from the Fed survey. You don't trust it blindly. You ask it to show its work.

Grant Calloway

A quick word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Jellypod. If you've been meaning to start a podcast for your business but can't spare the hours, Jellypod creates AI podcasts on autopilot. Think of it as a production crew that never clocks out. Find out more at jellypod.com.

Grant Calloway

This week's tool is Claude, from Anthropic. Its strength here is that you can give it very long documents, like an entire municipal code or a thick contract, and ask questions across all of it. It's best for contractors, fabricators, estimators, and service owners who check their work against written rules and don't have a compliance consultant on retainer. There's a free tier to kick the tires. The Pro plan is twenty dollars per user per month, and it adds Projects, which let you keep your code documents loaded in one place so you're not uploading them every time. For perspective, Goldman found seventy three percent of AI using owners spend under one hundred dollars a month, including those on free tools. This fits in that range.

Grant Calloway

One practical use: create a Project, load your local sign ordinance or fire code, then paste in a draft scope of work and ask what's missing. Permits you forgot. Dimensions that break a rule. It's a second set of eyes at three in the afternoon when your first set is tired.

Grant Calloway

Here's your one hour challenge. Step one: download the PDF of one ordinance, accessibility requirement, or client specification that always slows your quotes. Step two: open Claude and upload it. Step three: paste in the scope of work from a recent quote or an upcoming proposal. Step four: type this. "Audit this scope of work against the attached regulatory document. Identify any potential noncompliance issues, dimensional errors, or required permits, and cite the specific section numbers for each finding." Those section numbers are your safety net, because they let you check every claim against the page. Step five: spend fifteen minutes going through the results with your senior technician or project lead. Mark what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it caught that you'd missed.

Grant Calloway

That's the takeaway. The money in AI for a small shop usually isn't in the flashy stuff. It's in the slow, painful chore your best person hates. Find that chore, hand the first pass to the machine, and keep the judgment with your people. Try it on one document this week. If it saves you a morning, you'll know exactly where to go next. I'll see you Wednesday.