Three weeks to launch a scalable AI-powered marketplace solution with secure governance
An American construction company sought to scale a new service – a marketplace platform matching homeowners with contractors for renovation projects – without adding to their headcount by leveraging AI. In three weeks, we built and deployed a human-in-the-loop system that integrated AI-powered workflows to reduce manual overhead, improve lead response times, and deliver high-quality contractor matches, all while maintaining enterprise-grade oversight and control.
Introduction
The company needed to scale its regional renovation-service platform to a national audience, without adding headcount. Administrators were spending significant time manually reviewing renovation inquiries, extracting key project details, and matching them with contractors. The goal was to leverage AI to automate and accelerate these manual processes while preserving human oversight and quality control.
Solution
Using large language models, the system reviews project inquiries, capturing relevant details about the scope, homeowner preferences, and budget. The system then recommends contractors whose availability, skillset, and past performance best align with each project’s needs.
Fuzzy matching via embeddings
To go beyond keyword-based search, we integrated embeddings that map text into a shared vector space. This allows the system to identify subtle, context-rich relationships between project requests and contractor profiles, ensuring more accurate and nuanced matches.
Human-in-the-loop feedback process
We enabled business leads to refine the matchmaking algorithm based on user feedback without requiring developers. Administrators would review AI-recommended matches, approving or rejecting them. Airbender logs any discrepancies between AI outputs and admin decisions, capturing the reason, lead details, and proposed matches. Business leads can then analyze these insights in Airbender and tune the matching algorithm, for instance, increasing the skillset weighting if rejections reveal consistent skill mismatches.
Enterprise Oversight and Control with Airbender
Airbender provides full governance over the AI system:
- Comprehensive Logging: Every user interaction is recorded, enabling easy performance measurement and traceability.
- Early Issue Detection: If an LLM update triggers unexpected behavior, detailed logs help quickly pinpoint the root cause and revert to a stable version if needed.
- Real-Time Management: Non-technical controls, such as a kill switch, allow business teams to halt or adjust the AI system instantly, ensuring safe, continuous operations.
Results
In just three weeks, we built and deployed a human-in-the-loop system leveraging generative AI on Vercel’s front-end cloud.
- Faster, More Accurate Matches: The AI captured subtle correlations that manual review or basic search tools would miss, leading to higher-quality contractor recommendations.
- Human Empowerment, Not Replacement: The admin team enjoyed streamlined workflows and trusted the system’s recommendations, but maintained ultimate decision-making control.
- Transparent Testing: Airbender’s visibility features allowed the team to observe system behavior in real-world conditions, quickly refine models, and ensure consistent performance.
- Scalable, Evolvable Solution: Easily extended to new project types and regions, the cloud-native AI system scales without requiring proportional increases in staff.
- Saved Time & Resources: By offloading initial matching tasks to AI, staff could focus on higher-value activities, improving both productivity and cost-efficiency.
Conclusion
For enterprises with complex manual processes, leveraging a stack that includes Vercel, Airbender, and generative AI can deliver remarkable gains in scalability and efficiency, without sacrificing transparency or control. This project demonstrated how quickly such solutions can be built and deployed when using the right platforms and development practices.
If you’re looking to implement AI-powered workflows that retain human oversight and scale seamlessly, our team can help you build and deploy solutions that drive real business impact.