You’ve been to the meeting. Every owner has.

Forty-five minutes in, you’re still reviewing open RFIs from three weeks ago. The contractor and the architect are debating something that should have been resolved before anyone sat down. The project manager is reading from a spreadsheet. You’re wondering why you’re there.

OAC meetings (Owner, Architect, Contractor) are supposed to be where critical decisions get made. In practice, they’re often where critical decisions get deferred.

What’s actually wrong

The root cause isn’t bad facilitation or undisciplined attendees. It’s information asymmetry.

People arrive at OAC meetings with different data. The contractor has updated cost numbers the architect hasn’t seen. The owner’s rep has concerns about a schedule milestone that the GC hasn’t been briefed on. The architect has RFI responses that haven’t been distributed yet.

So instead of deciding, you spend the first half of the meeting getting everyone to the same starting point. Then the clock runs out. The real decisions get deferred to next week.

Meanwhile, the project keeps moving. RFIs stay open. Schedule risk accumulates. Change order exposure grows.

The real cost of a slow RFI

The construction industry generates roughly 10 to 15 RFIs per million dollars of construction value. Every one that drags into an OAC meeting costs time and money before you ever add up the administrative burden.

Each unresolved RFI is a decision the field can’t make. Work gets sequenced around it, creating inefficiency. Trades wait, or worse, proceed on an assumption that turns out to be wrong. By the time the RFI reaches the meeting agenda, the downstream damage is often already done.

The OAC meeting isn’t where RFIs should be resolved. They should arrive at the meeting already resolved, or, better, never have needed a meeting at all.

What a better process looks like

The goal is simple: nothing should arrive at an OAC meeting that could have been resolved before it.

That requires two things. First, a triage system that catches issues early and routes them to the right decision-maker without waiting for the weekly meeting. An RFI that requires an architect’s interpretation shouldn’t sit in a queue for seven days. It should be flagged, assessed for urgency, and answered within hours for anything on the critical path.

Second, preparation that actually prepares people. An OAC agenda that goes out the morning of the meeting is not preparation. It’s a list. Real preparation means every attendee arrives knowing the status of every open issue, what decision is needed, who needs to make it, and what the downstream impact is if it gets deferred again.

When those two things are in place, the meeting changes. Instead of reviewing status, you’re making decisions. Instead of discovering problems, you’re resolving ones you already knew about. Forty-five minutes is plenty of time.

What AI actually changes here

AI is useful in this context in a specific, practical way: it compresses the time between a problem appearing and a decision being made.

A system that’s reading your project data continuously (RFIs, submittals, schedule, cost) can flag coordination gaps before they become field problems. It can identify which open items are on the critical path and which can wait. It can draft response options for the architect to review rather than starting from a blank page.

The result isn’t a robot running your project. It’s a project team that’s better informed and faster-moving, where problems surface in hours instead of weeks.

That’s the version of AI worth asking your design and construction partners about. Not the demo. The actual workflow.

Your role in making this work

The owner’s job in this equation isn’t passive. You’re the one who sets expectations for how information flows on your project.

If your contract doesn’t specify RFI response times, you’ll get whatever pace your design team defaults to. If your OAC agenda format doesn’t require decisions to be pre-staged, you’ll get status reports. If you don’t push back on meetings that drift into review mode, they’ll keep drifting.

The standard worth demanding: every OAC meeting should be 80% decision and 20% status. If the ratio is inverted, something in the information flow is broken and you should find it.

Your time is too valuable to spend in meetings where the only outcome is a plan to meet again.