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11 posts tagged fieldintel.

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— alta

ALTA 2026 Moved the Burden Onto the Record

The 2026 ALTA/NSPS Land Title Survey Standards have been in force since February 23, and with year-end closings ahead, most firms are about to run their heaviest title-survey season under them. Read the changes together and a pattern appears: almost none of them change how you measure. Nearly all of them change what you must obtain, observe, document, and be able to show. The standard moved its weight onto the record -- and the firms whose records can carry it will have the easier winter.

October 2026 · 5 min read
— crs

A Foot Is Not a Foot

For sixty-three years the United States had two feet: the international foot the rest of the country adopted in 1959, and the US survey foot that surveyors kept. They differ by two parts per million -- about an eighth of an inch per mile, which is why nobody worried. Then you put that eighth of an inch into a state-plane coordinate with seven digits in front of the decimal, and it becomes six feet. The survey foot was officially retired at the end of 2022. Your archive did not get the memo.

September 2026 · 5 min read
— pointscout

The Life of a Survey Point

Follow one capped rebar at the northeast corner of a farm parcel from the morning it is set to a question asked about it thirty years later, and you can see every place a survey firm's most valuable asset -- what it knows -- leaks away. The measurement is taken once. It is proven once, delivered once, filed once. Then it gets reused a dozen times over decades, or it doesn't -- and the difference is whether each handoff kept the data alive or turned it back into paper.

September 2026 · 5 min read
— fieldintel

The Assistant That Shows Its Work

Surveyors and right-of-way professionals are right to distrust AI -- a chatbot that confidently invents a coordinate is the most dangerous tool you could put near a legal instrument. So when we built Theo and Heath, we didn't start from 'what can AI do.' We started from 'what would it take for a professional who stamps their work to act on an answer.' The result is three rules that decide everything about how our assistants are built -- and they're the difference between an assistant and a party trick.

September 2026 · 5 min read
— crs

Every Coordinate You Own Is About to Change

The National Geodetic Survey is retiring NAD83 and NAVD88 -- the reference frames under essentially every coordinate American surveyors have produced for forty years -- with the modernized replacements originally targeted for the end of 2026 and now, with the public beta opened in September 2026, expected in 2027. The ground will not move. Every label on it will. And the difference between a clean migration and years of quiet confusion is decided by something firms can only do beforehand: knowing exactly what their archive contains.

August 2026 · 6 min read
— fieldintel

Your Archive Prices Your Next Bid

Every estimate is a bet on the unknown, and most firms hedge the same way: pad the number. But the padding loses winnable work, and thin bids win the jobs that bleed. The evidence that would price the bet properly -- prior jobs, control you already set, the deed mess somebody already untangled -- is sitting in your own archive. The firm that can reach it in minutes prices with evidence while everyone else prices with nerves.

August 2026 · 5 min read
— fieldintel

Ask Theo Before You Break Ground

Every project starts with a question the firm can already answer and usually doesn't ask: what do we know about this site? Prior jobs, control we set, a boundary we resolved, a utility we hit. The knowledge exists -- reaching it takes an afternoon nobody has, so the bid gets priced blind and the crew rolls out cold. This is about the assistant that turns that afternoon into a question you ask in plain language, get back in seconds, and -- the part that matters in a liability profession -- get back grounded in your own records, with the job and the field note it came from, not a confident guess.

August 2026 · 5 min read
— workforce

The Office Has Its Own Scavenger Hunt

The field wastes scarce hours on a scavenger hunt -- driving out to find monuments -- and you can fix that by sending a helper. The office runs its own scavenger hunt, and in one way it's worse: you can't delegate it. Searching the archive for prior work, reconstructing a right-of-way history out of email threads, assembling a QC record after the fact -- that's skilled hours spent on retrieval instead of judgment, and it's invisible because it never leaves the building. Here's the other half of the only lever a short-staffed profession has left.

July 2026 · 6 min read
— fieldintel

How Much Does It Cost to Forget?

A survey firm's real asset isn't its trucks or its instruments -- it's the forty years of plats, field books, and deeds in the back room. That archive is also the firm's most expensive liability, because the moment you need it, the answer is buried in a filing cabinet or in the head of someone who retired last spring. Here is what forgetting actually costs a firm, why 'just search it' has never worked on this kind of data, and what it takes to make decades of records answer a question in seconds.

July 2026 · 7 min read
— vlm

Why We Replaced 'Extract' With 'Transcribe' (And Got 7x More Data)

FieldIntel ingests handwritten field books by asking a local vision-language model to read each page. The original prompt asked the model to extract and organize what it saw -- and produced confident hallucinations on roughly half the regions we tested. Replacing 'extract and organize' with 'transcribe verbatim' lifted total entity extraction by 6.7x on the same model, same hardware, same input. Here's the test, the failure mode, and the one-line config change that shipped in v1.2.2.

June 2026 · 6 min read
— crs

Reading a CRS Verification Report: A 3-Minute Walkthrough

When a customer hands over an archive sample for FieldIntel profiling, the deliverable on Day 7 is a four-page PDF with a status breakdown, a basemap-overlaid cohort, a per-point table, and a caveats section. Here's how to read each part of it -- what each status means, where to look for systematic problems, and how to know whether the configuration is ready to deploy.

June 2026 · 7 min read

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