Wenti Labs co-founder Ethan Ow
Ask any project manager on a Southeast Asian construction site what eats up their evenings, and the answer rarely involves engineering. It’s paperwork: chasing updates, compiling reports, making sure the right photo is attached to the right ticket.
Ethan Ow knows this frustration intimately. He lived it as a junior executive in 2012, left the industry for tech in 2017, and returned years later to find nothing had changed. Group chats were still buzzing with site updates, but somebody, somewhere, still had to convert that chaos into a proper record, usually late at night, usually by hand.
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That gap is what Ow set out to close with Wenti Labs, a Singapore-based startup building AI agents that turn WhatsApp messages, photos and voice notes from construction sites into structured reports — no new app, no retraining an entire workforce.
Today, more than 20 paying enterprise customers, including Woh Hup, PentaOcean, Obayashi, and Jacobs, run their reporting through Wenti Labs. The company processes around 20,000 API calls a day and claims to cut a task like a site walk report from an hour down to 30 seconds.
Building inside the chat, not around it
The decision to embed Wenti Labs inside WhatsApp rather than launch a standalone platform wasn’t a branding choice; it was a survival strategy.
“WhatsApp was the obvious starting point because of its ubiquity across Southeast Asia,” Ow explains. The real problem wasn’t a lack of data; it was what happened to it afterwards. Project managers were still pulling information out of chat threads and manually re-entering it into spreadsheets before a report could be filed. Wenti Labs was built to eliminate that step entirely.
“This allows them to continue using a familiar channel while the administrative work happens in the background,” he says.
Why an entire industry got stuck
Construction’s resistance to digitisation is often framed as stubbornness. Ow disagrees.
“A lot of project data is logged in group chats, but the actual digital records are often created later, when the person responsible has time to enter everything manually,” he says. “This delay creates gaps, so different teams can end up working from different sets of information.”
His conclusion is blunt: “I do not think that the industry is resistant to technology. The problem is that many digital tools have asked people to do more admin before they save them any time.”
Inside the pipeline
Before writing any code, Wenti Labs maps out each customer’s workflow — what needs tracking, what a correct report looks like, and where information needs to land. Only then does the team build customer-specific agents using OpenAI’s Responses API, tools, and Agent SDK.
Ow describes a typical scenario: a worker spots a missing safety barricade during an inspection and sends a photo into the project’s WhatsApp group. The model extracts the issue, location, category and criticality, and the system generates a ticket automatically. Once a colleague fixes it and shares evidence in the same chat, the agent closes the ticket, no forms involved.
“The difference is that changes are recorded in real time and the worker does not have to transfer the same information from one platform to another,” Ow says. “Because the output is structured and follows the customer’s workflow, it can be used for official reporting.”
One playbook, many markets
Expanding across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam means confronting different documentation standards and languages, a challenge Wenti Labs tackles through configuration rather than a rigid template.
“We tailor the final output to each customer’s local requirements by configuring the required fields and connecting the result to their existing systems,” Ow says.
Some Singapore-based contractors communicate in Mandarin; other customers operate entirely in Vietnamese. Site teams message in whatever language they’re comfortable with, and the agent produces the report in whichever language is required. The company has extended the same approach to heat stress management for customers in Singapore, Australia and Japan, each with distinct regulations.
Whose data is it, anyway
Construction data can include safety incidents, contractor performance and project delays, all flowing through a consumer messaging app. Ow is direct about where the company draws the line.
“We stay true to the principle that all project data belongs to the customer,” he says. “Wenti Labs does not use customer uploads to train or fine-tune a shared model, and our agents can access only the information the customer has authorised.”
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Deployment isn’t one-size-fits-all either; the company supports granular access controls alongside region-specific and on-premises storage, letting customers control exactly where their data lives.
Winning over the sceptics
Older, less tech-savvy site supervisors are often assumed to be the hardest group to convert. Ow found the opposite, provided the tool asked nothing new of them.
“Workers of all ages can simply keep doing what they already do,” he says. “From the site team’s point of view, Wenti Labs functions just like another user they can message on WhatsApp.”
The numbers back him up. One customer had previously logged around 30 safety issues a month through a form-based system. After adopting Wenti Labs, that jumped to 300 — not because more accidents were happening, but because roughly 90 per cent of existing issues simply weren’t being recorded before.
“Any new tool can feel unfamiliar at first, but seeing is believing,” Ow says.
The reliability bar nobody talks about
Perhaps the most candid part of the conversation is Ow’s math on reliability. At 20,000 API calls a day, even a model with a 90 per cent success rate would generate roughly 2,000 unreliable outputs daily — “a margin that is not feasible in construction.”
Cheaper open-source models were tested along the way, but the extra engineering needed to hit the necessary consistency wasn’t worth the trade-off. “OpenAI’s reliability has generally kept pace with each update, so we eventually decided it was more practical to stop evaluating every new model and focus that time on solving customer problems,” Ow says.
Codex has also become part of the internal toolkit — not just for writing code, but for quality assurance, monitoring agent outputs across customers and surfacing new edge cases. “A typical sprint used to take two weeks; now we can ship a feature in about two days,” Ow says.
Beyond the site walk report
Safety inspections were the starting point, but other bottlenecks are in the crosshairs too. Equipment certificates, for instance, typically arrive as PDFs that someone manually copies expiry dates from into a spreadsheet. Wenti Labs’ agents now extract that information automatically and flag renewals before they lapse — the same logic applied to consolidating concrete supplier and test lab data for real-time project oversight.
A retention play, not just an efficiency play
Singapore’s construction sector has a well-documented labour crunch, and Ow frames the company’s impact in terms broader than pure productivity.
“It does not help when teams find themselves weighed down by repetitive paperwork instead of the engineering and site work they signed up for,” he says. “Over time, that can push people away from the industry.”
Staying in its lane
Despite interest from farming, manufacturing and shipping, Ow has no plans to turn Wenti Labs into a generic tool for every industry.
“Wenti Labs’ domain knowledge lies in construction,” he says, pointing to legal-AI platform Harvey AI as the model he’s chasing: deep, not broad.
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The ambition stretches beyond report generation altogether — Ow wants Wenti Labs to become something closer to an operating system for construction projects, quietly connecting chats, emails, documents and existing software into a single, coherent record of what’s actually happening on the ground.
For an industry that has spent decades logging its most important information in group chats and losing track of it soon after, that would be less a feature than a fundamentally different way of working.
The post The 30-second report: How one startup is killing construction’s paperwork problem appeared first on e27.