Georgia DOT Puts Decades of Project Records Back in the Hands of its Project Teams

Atlanta, Georgia, September 24, 2026. A transportation project takes years to travel from idea to construction. Some of that is unavoidable: environmental review, right-of-way, utility coordination, public involvement. Some of it is not. A meaningful share of the schedule goes to tasks that are not fully informed by work the agency has already done, on projects it has already delivered.

The Georgia Department of Transportation is going after that share. Under a new multi-year agreement with Beacon, GDOT is turning more than 10 million project documents and 20 terabytes of delivery history into something an engineer can ask a direct question and get a sourced answer from. The agreement scales the Beacon Benchmark pilot from one project type and one phase into more project types and more documents, used by the project teams who do this work every day. It commits the two organizations to explore every phase of GDOT's project development process. The agreement was signed at the end of August and with extensions will run through 2031.

Where the time goes

GDOT has delivered tens of thousands of projects for the citizens of Georgia across its history, so comparable work almost always exists. However, when a GDOT employee sits down to identify early conceptual activities, they are often starting from scratch. Finding that comparable work and synthesizing it is the problem. With more than 10 million documents and 20 terabytes of project data accumulated over decades, the right information is a needle in a haystack of scope narratives, discipline breakdowns, change orders, and project histories. The need becomes more acute as experienced staff retire and take decades of hard-won knowledge with them. All of that information has been available in theory, but invisible in practice — until now.

What Benchmark does today

Benchmark reads the agency's own records and finds the past projects that are most comparable, matched on the attributes the documents describe rather than on file names or keywords. It recommends a set of comparables, and then returns a task-level estimate of hours by discipline drawn from what those projects actually took. The AI searches, assembles and synthesizes. The human exercises the judgment and makes the decisions.

Every number links back to a source, so engineering staff can understand the basis for the comparison, and adjust. The arithmetic runs in a separate deterministic layer: the AI model does the reading and matching, and the figures are calculated, not predicted.

That traceability matters to estimates that must be justified. "This estimate is based on data from ten comparable projects GDOT has delivered" provides the visibility that public accountability demands. It also changes the negotiation itself. An agency that can anchor its number in its own statewide history is negotiating consultant scope from evidence. Resulting in faster, more confident delivery.

From one project activity to the whole process

The pilot was scoped to prove out the concept: Initiating roundabout conceptual development more quickly. GDOT's own subject matter experts tested Benchmark and provided feedback as it developed. Building trust in the system, and providing visibility into the underlying data, were important attributes of how it was developed.

The rollout expands from roundabouts out to a broader range of project types, against millions of documents. It will also move past initial estimates into other parts of the delivery process.

Every estimate makes the next one better

Estimating is where Beacon and GDOT started because it is measurable, bounded and painful. The same approach can move up and down the project lifecycle, into other stages where a project waits while somebody reassembles what the agency already knows.

The pattern is the same in each case: read the agency's own history, surface what is comparable, let a professional decide, then keep the decision so the next person inherits it.

The point of all of it is that a project reaches completion sooner. That is the part the public sees, and it is GDOT's goal.

How Georgia procured Benchmark

Benchmark was purchased as commercial software. Beacon is a named supplier on a Sourcewell cooperative purchasing contract, via the reseller Vertosoft.

Any agency eligible to purchase through Sourcewell can use the same route. Here's how that works.

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