At CICAD, the problem wasn't a lack of process. It was the opposite.

In July 2024, Philippe Maubert runs an internal brainstorming session on their in-house job site meeting report. The feedback is clear: too rigid, hard to update, too long, not read enough.

The ideas that come up all point in the same direction: drafting assistance, automatic follow-ups, integration with scheduling, targeted extracts by contractor, meeting transcription. The need isn't cosmetic. It's operational.

And yet at CICAD, the report was never a cobbled-together Word doc. It was already a system. A custom Excel file. Scripts. A quality framework. Consistent practices across teams. A document capable of carrying the contact directory, attendance, crew counts, penalties, progress tracking, reminders, and deadlines.

The problem was rarer: a demanding professional standard was sitting on a tool that had become too costly to maintain.

there, the in-house tool becomes a liability

The tipping point comes when the internal developer leaves the company.

From that point on, CICAD isn't just trying to improve a tool. CICAD is trying to make sure a central piece of its project management doesn't collapse under its own fragility.

Philippe comes into the search with a specific anti-goal, shaped by a recent experience: "I didn't want to fall into the trap of a rigid app. We had just come out of deploying an application where we'd invested heavily in building templates designed to anticipate every possible scenario — and they still had to be adapted in most cases. That was the pitfall to avoid."

It's in May 2025, at Contech Connect at Station F, that the connection with there.do is made — drawn to its specialization in construction document editing and its report-native building blocks.

The question is no longer how to build a better document. It's how to protect a quality standard.

there, the pilot has to prove nothing gets lost

The first real test plays out on the Asnières middle school project. Not because it's simple — precisely because it isn't. CICAD needs to verify that the new tool can handle a real-world case, with formatting already tailored to the owner's specific requirements.

The non-negotiable is set from day one: CICAD's five-date system must survive the switch.

Noted on. Planned start. Planned finish. Actual start. Actual finish.

The pilot runs through a dry test, then a parallel workflow through the summer of 2025. What validates the switch isn't an abstract promise about AI — it's that there.do accepts CICAD's professional grammar: the five dates, task indentation, headers and footers. "The tool's ability to adapt to our requirements was the deciding factor."

A second pilot, on the Carré-Champerret project, confirms it in a different construction administration context. The engineers there are intentionally given minimal training. "The fact that I didn't have to step in for support was decisive."

Two pilots. Two contexts. By October 2025, every new CICAD project launches on there.do. Worth noting: CICAD adopted the tool before AI.There. What convinced them was operational reliability. And the pricing model carried just as much weight.