Scaling Sustainability
EllisDon partnered with Building Digital to build CarbonTrace, a purpose-built AI platform that is on track to eliminate four months of annual manual effort, achieve 90%+classification accuracy, and create audit-ready carbon intelligence across a $9B construction portfolio.
Use algorithms to process the image and extract important features from it
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Use machine learning to classify the image into different categories
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Filter the images based on a variety of criteria, such as color, texture, and keywords
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Automatically group similar images together and apply a common label across them
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Convert the extracted features into a vector representation of the image
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How EllisDon Built an AI-Powered Emissions Intelligence Platform
As emissions reporting requirements tighten and clients demand carbon data at the bid stage, EllisDon’s Sustainability Team partnered with Building Digital to build CarbonTrace, a purpose-built AI platform designed to directly support EllisDon’s reporting and compliance goals.
The Problem
An Industry Without the Tools to Track What Matters
EllisDon is one of Canada’s largest construction companies, with over $9 billion in annual revenue, 5,000+employees, and active projects spanning fifteen national and international offices. As a company committed to sustainability, EllisDon had long tracked its operational carbon emissions across its fleet, construction sites, and facilities through manual processes.
By the early 2020s, however, the systems supporting that commitment had not kept pace with the scale of the business, the complexity of its supply chain, or the speed at which emissions reporting requirements were evolving.
This challenge was not unique to EllisDon. Construction firms broadly lack scalable tools to track fuel use and emissions across complex portfolios. Emissions data lives in thousands of unstructured vendor invoices, scattered across PDFs, Excel files, and fragmented vendor reports, with no central system, no audit trail, and no scalable path forward. This was not a failure of effort, it was a gap in available tooling.
This is precisely where AI delivers its greatest value: not replacing human judgment, but handling the volume and complexity that no manual process realistically can.
Building Digital's Solution
Build What the Market Could Not Sell Them
The first step was diagnostic. Building Digital needed to identify the gaps in the data and where the most accurate sources of that data could be found. That work revealed two root causes: vendor data inconsistency, leading to misclassified emissions and unreliable reports, and structural blind spots in the invoice ingestion pipeline, leading to gaps across the sustainability dataset.
With the root causes understood, the decision was made to build in-house rather than adapt an off-the-shelf tool. This gave EllisDon full ownership of the data pipeline, the classification logic, and a system that could be trained on real construction data from day one.
The result is CarbonTrace: an AI-powered emissions intelligence platform leveraging EllisDon’s pre-existing centralized data lake. Invoices are ingested from multiple unstructured sources, processed through a smart classification layer, and routed to one of two AI models based on document complexity. A lightweight model handles standard invoice formats with speed and cost efficiency. A higher-capacity model handles dense, multi-page, or unusually formatted documents that require deeper reasoning. A prompt-driven classification engine identifies electricity and fuel types, including diesel, gas, and propane, and feeds results into a quantification module that aggregates by emission type.
Automated outputs are never accepted blindly, however. A human-in-the-loop validation module requires domain experts to review sample sets, creating a continuous feedback loop that improves classification accuracy over time. The result is emissions data that is not just fast, but defensible.
The Results
Real-Time Carbon Intelligence, Audit-Ready
The CarbonTrace platform is on track to fundamentally change how EllisDon’s Sustainability Team manages its emissions footprint. What once demanded months of manual effort per year can now run automatically, with a live dashboard delivering project and portfolio-level carbon insights in real time, filterable by province, business unit, vendor, and fuel type.
Beyond the efficiency gains, the platform changes the nature of the Sustainability Team’s compliance posture. Verification audits that were once time-intensive will now be supported by a clear, traceable data lineage, allowing the Team to respond to client RFP emissions requests with confidence and speed.
The Sustainability Team also gains strategic clarity on what comes next. With emissions tracking live across the portfolio, Building Digital and EllisDon are advancing toward site-level operations dashboards, materials-based tracking, and full carbon lifecycle intelligence from procurement to project closeout.
Ready to Modernize Your Emissions Reporting?
About EllisDon
EllisDon is an employee-owned global construction services and technology company with a purpose to redefine the construction industry. Focused on innovation and sustainability, EllisDon delivers the future of construction by empowering people to push beyond traditional boundaries. With thousands of salaried and hourly employees across fifteen national and international offices, EllisDon has become a leader in every sector and nearly every facet of the construction industry. For more information, visit www.ellisdon.com.
About Building Digital
Building Digital is a sub-brand of EllisDon, offering a wide range of tailored technology services to the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. With 250+ sector-specific professionals and more than 20 years of experience deploying enterprise technology, Building Digital brings a field-first perspective to every engagement. From data infrastructure and AI to VDC/BIM, software optimization, and digital asset delivery, the Team builds technology solutions designed for the realities of construction projects. The result: technology that earns trust on the job site and delivers measurable ROI at the portfolio level. For more information, visit buildingdigital.com