AI take-off at AKA Acoustics: a 400% lift in tender submissions

Measured by AKA Acoustics: tender and take-off submissions after the system went in versus before, same team, same drawings, 2026.

“I didn’t build this as a demo. I built it inside my own firm, on real jobs with money on them, because it had to actually work. Since it went in, we’re putting out four times the tenders, off the same drawings, with the same team.”

Daniel Natoli, Director, AKA Acoustics

What is AKA Acoustics?

AKA Acoustics Pty Ltd is a Sydney-based acoustic design and construction firm. It designs, engineers and builds high-performance acoustic environments such as recording studios, cinemas and theatres. Because it tenders for real construction work, it lives and dies by take-offs: measuring quantities off drawings to price a job. It’s also Daniel Natoli’s own firm, which is exactly why FKD can point at it as proof rather than a promise.

The bottleneck: take-offs gate every tender

Every tender starts with a take-off: someone sits with the drawings and measures how much of everything the job needs: square metres of board, lineal metres of stud, door counts, the lot. It’s slow, it’s repetitive, and it caps how many jobs you can quote in a week. Miss the deadline and the faster firm wins the work. Hire an estimator and it’s a salary; don’t, and the owner does it at night.

What Daniel built

An AI take-off system that reads a set of plans, measures the quantities, and hands them back sorted by trade, ready to drop into a price. The estimator checks and prices instead of measuring from a blank page. And because it was built inside a working firm with money on the jobs, it had to be accurate enough to actually trust. That’s the bar that turns it from a demo into proof.

How a faster take-off became 400% more tenders

The take-off was the ceiling on output. Every tender had to wait its turn behind the measuring. Take that off the critical path and the same team can respond to far more tenders in the same week. That’s what happened at AKA Acoustics: a 400% increase in tender and take-off submissions. Today the estimator reviews 30 to 40 tenders a day, and quoting a project that used to take far longer is done in under an hour. More tenders out the door is more chances to win work, without hiring an estimator to get there.

Not one chatbot: a second brain for estimating

This isn’t ChatGPT with a clever prompt. It’s an internal “second brain” built on Claude, wired together with Codex, Antigravity and a few custom tools, so it pulls exactly the right information for every job. As Daniel puts it, it’s “like having a dozen estimators at your fingertips, all armed with exactly the right information.” It doesn’t replace the estimator. It hands them a dozen of themselves. That’s the discipline behind every FKD deployment: build with whatever actually performs on your jobs, not whatever’s in fashion.

What it means for your business

For a builder or estimator, the win is hours back on every quote and more quotes out the door without hiring, the same take-off step, done off the drawings and handed back ready to price. To be precise about the numbers: 400% is AKA Acoustics’ own measured result; the 3–8 hours saved per quote we quote on the home page is a projection of the range this kind of automation returns. Your real figures come out of your audit. We don’t promise you AKA’s number, we show you what’s possible and then measure yours.

Why this is the proof that matters

FKD is new and honest about it. We won’t fake reviews or invent case studies. What we have instead is a tool that already works on real jobs in a real Sydney firm, with a number behind it. When we set up a take-off for your business, you’re not the experiment. You’re getting something that’s already earned its place.

Meet the team behind it ›