Zutec, a construction software company that sells mainly to contractors and building owners in the UK and Ireland, launched Zutec Handover AI on November 2, 2026. The announcement says the product is available now and is built for main contractors. It covers closeout: collecting O&M manuals, drawings, certificates and safety files from subcontractors and assembling the record the owner receives at practical completion, the UK term for substantial completion.
What it does
On most jobs this work falls to a project engineer or document controller on the main contractor’s team. Zutec describes the current process as chasing subcontractors for files, receiving wrong or incomplete documents and keeping status in Excel trackers, which ends in a rush at practical completion.
With Handover AI, subcontractors upload documents into Zutec’s platform through guided templates or by drag and drop. According to the announcement, Zutec’s own specialist staff chase missing submissions and quality-check each upload within 48 hours. The software then classifies, names and tags each file. Classification means the AI reads a document and assigns it to a slot in the handover structure, the way a document controller would file a pump data sheet under the mechanical O&M section.
The main contractor’s team reviews, approves or returns each item in a workflow that keeps comments, tasks and an audit trail in one place. Dashboards show what has been submitted, what is outstanding and what is complete, for one project or across a portfolio. A chatbot answers questions about the documents collected so far.
The output is the building manual. Zutec lists exports for UK requirements, including Building Safety Act and Regulation 38 fire safety packages, along with an asset register and a logbook. The Irish version of the release names the Digital Safety File and BCAR documentation instead. After handover, an owner can load the record into Building AI, a separate Zutec product launched in February that answers plain-language questions with a citation to the source document.
Evidence so far
The evidence is Zutec’s announcement, which includes comments from one main contractor and one subcontractor. These claims come from Zutec:
- The product draws on more than 25 years of handover work and data from over 5,000 projects.
- Zutec’s own research found that main contractors repeatedly cite supply chain chasing, incomplete information, slow responses and limited visibility as handover problems.
- Asset register, Regulation 38, Fire and Emergency File, BREEAM and logbook features, which were paid add-ons before, are now part of the core product without raising its cost.
Jet Maal, a senior technical coordinator at main contractor Mount Anvil, says in the release that the dashboard shows a project completion percentage, an activity log and the items waiting for review. Maal adds that consistent AI naming and tagging cuts administrative work. Thalia Rothwell, a quality engineer at subcontractor William Hare, says the subcontractor’s team knows what to submit and where, and spends less time asking for status updates.
Time saved per project, the accuracy of the AI classification and the share of uploads that pass the 48-hour check on first submission are not yet public.
How to measure it on your projects
Track closeout completeness at substantial completion. Divide the number of required closeout documents that were received and accepted by the substantial completion date by the total number the contract requires. Take the list from the closeout submittal requirements in Division 01 of the spec, and count each O&M manual, warranty, as-built set and test report as its own line item.
Capture these baselines from three to five recently closed jobs of similar size:
- The completeness percentage on the substantial completion date.
- Calendar days from substantial completion to the owner’s acceptance of the full closeout package.
- Hours the project engineer or document controller charged to closeout in the job’s last 60 days, if your timekeeping separates them.
During a pilot, log each document the AI classified and whether a reviewer had to rename or refile it. The share that needed a correction is the tool’s error rate on your own subcontractors’ files. Closeout documents are the last submittals on a job, and our post on Buildertrend’s AI Submittals covers a tool that drafts the submittal log at the start of a job.
A first step on one job: pull the closeout log from your most recently finished project and count how many required items were still open on the substantial completion date.
Availability and cost
Zutec says Handover AI is available now. The releases carry London and Dublin datelines, and the regulatory packages they name are UK and Irish ones. Availability for US projects could not be verified. Pricing is not listed in the announcement.