Platform turns institutional design standards, project documents and expert decisions into a continuously applied compliance system
SAN FRANCISCO, August 28, 2026 — Core Runway Inc. today announced the continued expansion of its AI-powered construction compliance platform, designed to help universities, healthcare systems, airports and other large building owners apply their internal design and construction standards consistently across every project.
Large institutions often maintain hundreds or thousands of pages of design standards covering everything from electrical systems and mechanical equipment to finishes, sustainability requirements and approved products. Those requirements must then be reconciled with project specifications, drawings, revisions and product submittals — a process that today depends heavily on manual review and the experience of individual facilities, engineering and design professionals.
Core Runway creates a compliance intelligence layer between an organization’s standards and its construction projects.
An institution uploads its design manuals and other requirements once at the organizational level. Core Runway then continuously compares project specifications, drawings, revisions and submittals against those standards, identifying discrepancies and exceptions for human review.
The platform also preserves decisions made during that review process. Approved exceptions, recurring interpretations, preferred products and expert judgments can become part of a reusable institutional knowledge base rather than disappearing into individual projects, emails or the experience of employees who eventually leave the organization.
“Large building owners have spent decades developing standards for how their facilities should be designed and constructed,” said John Burton, CEO and co-founder of Core Runway. “The problem is not creating the standards. The problem is applying thousands of requirements consistently across thousands of pages of project documentation, on every project, every time those documents change.”
From Design Standards to Product Approval
Core Runway follows requirements through the construction documentation lifecycle.
The platform can first compare project specifications and drawings against an owner’s institutional standards. Once the project requirements are established, proposed products and equipment can then be evaluated against the applicable specification.
If supporting product documentation is missing, Core Runway can locate manufacturer information, extract the relevant technical evidence and prepare a source-linked comparison for review.
Every finding remains traceable through the decision path:
Institutional standard → project specification → submitted product → manufacturer evidence → human decision
Qualified members of the owner or project team retain final responsibility for approval, rejection or override decisions.
Built for Institutional Scale
Core Runway recently tested its technology by comparing a 2,800-page architectural specification against a 1,000-page institutional design manual, completing the initial analysis in approximately 15 minutes.
The platform identified requirements and potential compliance issues that would otherwise require reviewers to locate and reconcile information spread across thousands of pages of documentation.
Dr. Joshua Lee, Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, said of the technology:
“This tool could significantly improve quality control and save millions of dollars by avoiding change orders for large projects.”
Preserving Institutional Knowledge
Core Runway is also designed to address a less visible problem facing large facilities organizations: the loss of institutional expertise.
Experienced architects, engineers and facilities professionals routinely make decisions and interpretations that never become part of the formal design manual. When those employees retire or move to another organization, much of that knowledge can disappear with them.
Core Runway captures those decisions in context, allowing organizations to retain preferred approaches, accepted products, approved exceptions and recurring interpretations for use on future projects.
Over time, this allows a static design manual to evolve into a living organizational rulebook.
An Independent Compliance Layer
Core Runway is designed to work across the construction ecosystem rather than requiring an institution to standardize every project around a single project-management platform.
The goal is to allow an owner’s standards to remain consistent even when architects, contractors, consultants and project systems change from one project to another.
“Every project may have different architects, contractors and software,” Burton said. “The one constant should be the owner’s requirements. Core Runway gives the institution a way to carry those requirements — and the knowledge behind them — across its entire portfolio.”
Core Runway describes this emerging category as Compliance Intelligence for Construction: using AI to help organizations apply their own standards, locate supporting evidence, identify issues, preserve expert decisions and maintain a verifiable record of how construction requirements were interpreted and applied.
For more information or to request a compliance review, visit CoreRunway.com.