SmartHalls
A broker for steel construction. An enquiry reaches the right contractor before anyone picks up the phone.
Visit the project siteWhat it is
SmartHalls matches steel enquiries with contractors from its own network. We manufacture nothing. The platform’s job is to recognise what the client actually needs and route the case to a contractor who does exactly that.
The scope is anything made of steel: structures, industrial facilities, offshore, platforms and service walkways, grating, supply with installation. Halls were the first product and stayed in the name, but stopped being the whole scope long ago.
Demand comes from search. The site runs in seven language versions, because an enquiry from Norway or Sweden looks different from a Polish one and has to land on content in its own language.
Business model
- We earn on distributing the enquiry or on a commission from a completed job. The end client pays nothing for the match.
- Value grows with the breadth of the supply side. The more contractors with different specialisations, the fewer enquiries have to be turned down for having nobody to hand them to.
- The cost of acquiring an enquiry is mostly one-off and sits in the content. A page written once works for years, and each additional enquiry from it costs close to nothing.
Where AI wins
- First contact. An enquiry from a form, email or calculator is read by a model: it recognises whether this is a job at all, what it concerns and what information is missing before it can be passed on.
- Sorting cases. The same word means different things in different enquiries. Recognising whether the sender is a client or a contractor offering cooperation happens automatically and decides the whole path.
- Content for seven markets. Hundreds of product and local pages in several languages is work a small team would not do by hand in reasonable time.
- Order in the data. The enquiry lands in the CRM described, prioritised and with its history, before anyone looks at it.
Where the humans are
- The sales conversation. Agreeing scope, timing and price is a negotiation, not a form. A human does that.
- The contractor relationship. Who is reliable, who delivers on time and who can be trusted with a difficult job comes from experience, not from a database.
- Deciding terms of cooperation. The model prepares the invitation to the network, but the owner gives the terms personally and approves them.
- Execution. Design, manufacturing and installation sit with the contractor. The platform does not pretend to do anything with steel.
What it taught us
Automation that sends messages to clients on its own looks attractive until the first mistake. Today the model qualifies and prepares, and sending to a client requires a human decision. Throughput dropped by the cost of one click; risk dropped by an order of magnitude.
This describes how we work, not commercial data. We do not disclose client names, terms of cooperation or financial figures.
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