Dr. Sarah Buchner is the founder and chief executive of Trunk Tools, which builds construction-specific AI agents to help contractors navigate fragmented project documentation, catch conflicting requirements and prevent costly mistakes on jobsites.
Raised in rural Austria, Buchner began working with her carpenter father at 12 and progressed into foreman, superintendent and construction-management roles. At STRABAG, she worked on construction digitalization while pursuing doctoral research in civil engineering and data science. A worker’s death on a Berlin high-rise project prompted her to develop a construction health-and-safety application and focus on industry-wide problems software could address.
She moved to the United States in 2019 to attend Stanford Graduate School of Business and founded Trunk Tools in 2021 while pursuing her MBA. Its first product, TrunkPerform, focused on worker productivity and performance-based compensation. TrunkText subsequently enabled construction teams to query project documents in ordinary language, establishing a foundation for broader workflow automation documented in a Stanford business-school case study.
Buchner’s technical priorities include:
- Construction-specific retrieval-augmented generation. A New York skyscraper project produced 3.6 million pages of documentation. Buchner builds systems that interpret drawings, specifications, schedules, contracts and requests for information while tracing answers to their original sources.
- Detecting conflicts before they become rework. When documentation disagrees about whether a door requires power-actuated hardware, surfacing the contradiction early can prevent expensive physical corrections. Buchner wants agents to help resolve such discrepancies by drafting requests for information and coordinating subsequent work.
- A shared intelligence layer for construction workflows. Trunk Tools Cortex connects project documents and drawings to support specialized assistants handling submittals, drawing revisions and bidding gaps. Buchner considers retrieval increasingly commoditized; durable value comes from construction-specific knowledge and practical workflow execution.
- Human-centered jobsite automation. Her AI Engineer World’s Fair presentation emphasized reducing administrative work while keeping builders responsible for consequential decisions.
Buchner was named a 2024 Construction Champion.
