How to Set Up Grok Bot for Construction

0:00Grokbot is an AI assistant released by Elon Musk's company SpaceX and it's the natural progression of all these AI tools, which is simplification and abstraction. Instead of having to deal with things like skills, memory, and context like you do in Claude or ChatGPT, Grokbot packages everything into a bot. You only need to think about what bots or assistants do you want and what do you want them to do? They then adapt, learn, and customize to what you actually want them to do over time. In this video, I'm going to explain Grokbot, what it is, how to use it, how I think it compares to tools like

0:35ChatGPT and Claude, and where I see it fits amongst all these different tools, and how it applies to construction. I'll also go through and explain this concept of bots and how I would set up these bots for a construction business. The fundamental idea of Grokbot is that it takes these concepts that we have to deal with in ChatGPT and Claude, like skills, context, memory retains, and it

0:59puts them behind this layer of a bot. So, the only thing we have to think about is what bots do we want and what specifically do we want them to do? We then connect our applications to them and then we can set up a team of agents that go and do work for us. For example, I have a project assistant that I can use to manage my to-do list. It goes through my email, my WhatsApp messages, and then updates a task list that I keep track of things in Notion. It's a super simple application, but it just makes sure that I don't forget following up or

1:31doing anything. And honestly, if you have used tools like Claude Co-work or Code or Codex or ChatGPT work, they're all effectively the same. The key difference with Grokbot is it is just abstracting a lot of the concepts and things we have to deal with in tools like Claude and puts them behind this concept of a bot. I think once you've played with enough of these tools, you effectively understand how they all work. The only thing that really changes is the user interface and what tasks they automate for themselves. For example, when I open up Claude Co-work, I have projects, artifacts, scheduled tasks. I can open the customize panel

2:08and set up things like skills and plugins. When I go and create chat, I can choose between the model. I can create new chats to start with fresh context windows. I can do things like toggle on and off what specific capabilities the model has. In Grok Bot, you don't have any of that. All you can do is create new bots or create group conversations with multiple bots in them. For example, I can go and create a new bot and I can say, "I want to create a new bot that will be used for my construction projects, for getting

2:39quotes from subcontractors and vendors. In Notion, I have a list of template trade packages. And when I kick this off, I want you to go look at that list, look at my supplier and subcontractor directory, read the project scope of works, and create initial plan of which subcontractors to get quotes for." So, with that simple instruction, effectively Grok Bot will go create a new custom bot for this specific workflow. And like any AI agent, they love to be sycophantic and pump up your

3:10own tires. And so, it says, "I love it. I can be the bot for that." Now, this is obviously one specific niche use case, but behind this bot, it's going to have its own memory, its own context, and its own skills. Now, I have created some more specific bots for my specific way of working. You know, obviously, I don't have a construction business, I run a consulting company and make YouTube videos. So, I have a bot for brainstorming YouTube videos. I have a bot to help with some of my community stuff. I have a project assistant, which I use for helping help managing my consulting projects. Now, my way for

3:44approaching any new tool like this is once you understand the fundamentals of how AI works, all the tools are effectively going to be very, very similar. So, what I like to do is always like to start with one small specific use case and experiment with it and just see what interacting with the tool is like. Now, from playing with Grok bot for the last couple of days, I don't see it as a replacement for the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps. Now, if you're familiar with any of my videos or the way I talk about AI in construction, I talk about having processes and then creating workflows for small design

4:18specific tasks and using AI within a structured workflow. For example, here is our pre-construction workflow where we have a series of skills for doing things like takeoffs and preparing estimates and checking estimates. I like the fact in that in ChatGPT and Claude, I have a skill library and I can control these skills, inspect these skills, and edit these skills. I also like the fact that I can easily manage my routine and automated tasks. So, you have a lot of you have much more control in a tool like ChatGPT or Claude. addition to that, when we've actually looked at how these models perform in terms like construction takeoffs and analyzing

4:56construction drawings. So, if we go to our takeoff benchmark, you can see Opus 5.5 with Claude co-work is by far the best model for construction takeoffs, but Grok bot or Cursor with Grok in it, which is effectively what Grok bot is, is quite a bit worse in terms of its overall performance. Therefore, I don't see Grok bot as a replacement for how I'm going to be running these construction workflows. What I see these tools is and actually thought Hermes agent was a really, really similar concept. I really liked Hermes agent. I just thought it was really frustrating to set up and manage and it kept breaking. I see Grok bot more like a

5:30personal assistant where you can send it messages, you can ask it to do things, and you don't really have to put a lot of time and effort into setting it up and structuring it, but over time it will write its own skills and store its own memories. So, what I'm currently using it a lot for is I'm just using it

5:47like a personal assistant and reminder. When I'm on the go and I remember to do something, I just message it and say, "Can you add this to my to-do list?" Or for example, how it's going through all my emails and Slack messages and just maintaining my to-do list. That is something that is really useful for me. That's the first use case I'm just starting to experiment with. Over time, I will probably build on this and expand as I get more and more familiar with the tool. But like whenever I start using a new tool, I always just start really simply and then slowly growing the sort

6:15of stuff I do with it as I like it more and more. But to me, the fact that it sort of manages its own skill, memory, and context refresh just fits better for using it from your mobile phone and for these sort of like more random small task that you want to chop and change and constantly iterate over time, which is how I sort of think of the personal assistant side of these tools. So, who do I think is this is the most useful for for people in construction? Well, number one would be people who do a lot of work away from their desk. So, this

6:46would be supervisors, foremen, site engineers. I remember when I was a site engineer, I would constantly be emailing myself reminders so that when I got back to my desk, I would have this series of unread emails that I would go into and check things. GrokBot is more or less the same thing. You can obviously just take it a lot further. For example, you're walking around on site, you write you realize, "Oh, I have to raise an RFI for that." You want it to go and draft the RFI and add a draft RFI to your RFI register. Or you get a supply delivery, you take a photo of the delivery docket,

7:15you send it to GrokBot, and you get it to store it in the delivery docket folder. There's just a ton of really small, simple tasks that you don't necessarily need the most complicated workflows or the Fabels or um GPT-6 Astras of the world to do. They're just very, very simple tasks that you'll do a lot and often consume a fair bit of your day. So, I think basically, the way I would think of this is the personal assistant function and more tailored towards the type of people who are walking around on site and not spending

7:43a lot of time working at their desks. Obviously, like the project engineers, the project and managers, the contracts admin, that they're at their desk, they can easily use or it's probably better for them to use Claude at to use tools like Claude or ChatGPT. I don't really think Grok Bot has a good like a Grok Bot isn't a good substitute for a tool like that. For those sorts of jobs, you're not really doing like small admin tasks, you're doing more sort of tasks within a predefined workflow, which is where I think having a much more structured approach to how you apply AI and having more control over

8:15each skill and what exactly it creates works better. Okay, so now we understand what Grok Bot Grok Bot is and where it sits. I want to go a little bit deeper on what Grok Bot specifically is doing and managing behind the scenes. So, the first one is context and memory. You don't have to create new fresh chats in Grok Bot. You don't have to explicitly tell it to remember things. You don't have to set up skills. Basically, what Grok Bot is, it is in a framework where the agent prompts itself to do those things. There is no option to create new chats. You can only create new bots and

8:50new group chats where you have multiple different bots in them. On top of that, you connect got Grok Bot to your external application. So, you can connect it to Gmail, Google Drive, whatever you want. Within a Grok Bot, you can set it to run tasks on a routine. So, for example, everyday, can you please go through my to-do list and send me a quick summary of the most urgent and outstanding

9:16reports. Run this everyday at 8:00 a.m. So, I can set that and Grok Bot will create a scheduled task to do this. If you ever want to see what skills, memories, or scheduled tasks are, there isn't a button or place you can go to on Grok Bot, you simply have to ask it. For example, can you please give me a summary of what skills are installed and

9:39what routines are running? And what GrokBot will do is will tell you what it is set up in the background. So, anytime you actually want it to like see things or know things, you just look you just ask it to tell you what they are. There isn't a place you can go to access these like there is in ChatGPT or Claude. When you click on your specific bot, you can see more information about it. So, I click on my project assistant, I can see the routine that is running. I can see any media I've uploaded into the bot, but I can also see the cloud computer that all my bots are running

10:15on. So, basically every single bot there is, each has together all the bots have a a cloud computer. So, this is like GrokBot can run both in the cloud and on your local desktop. So, I can ask it to read and write files onto my desktop. For it to do that, it has to be my computer has to be on for it to be able to do that, but it can also store its own files in its it can also store its own files on its own personal computer. That means you can run GrokBot from both the cloud, your mobile when your computer's off,

10:48and you can run it from your desktop. And it has this same shared workspace to keep track of things. You can also it also has a browser in it that it can actually go and search the web. So, I can say something to GrokBot like, "What is the weather like today in Melbourne?" I just say that. Talk about that last word. And it's told me that it is 15° and overcast right now with a northerly breeze getting to a top of 23°. It obviously did that by actually going and looking it up online. So, to get started

11:20with GrokBot, it is super super easy. You just go to x.ai/bot or just Google GrokBot. I run it running it on Windows, so you download it for Windows, you sign in. In terms of pricing, you can get a specific Grok Bot subscription, but I actually pay for Cursor. So, Cursor is like an AI coding platform like Claude or ChatGPT that I use for building apps and things like that. With the $60 a month plan, I can use my Grok Bot subscription within that. If you ever want to see your actual usage, you can click on your name, click on weekly usage, and you can see what percentage

11:55you've used. What I have heard, and I haven't been using Grok Bot a ton, is the usage doesn't last long. The credits are obviously quite expensive. Once you install Grok Bot, it will actually first prompt you to connect your apps, which is obviously where the real power from these tools comes in. And it will also weirdly prompt you to create your first routine or scheduled task. I think the reason behind them doing that is because they really want to drive home this idea that you can set it up to run autonomously. I sort of don't think that is the um like the best way to first set it up and

12:28use it. And also kind of funny that all these AI tools seem to always recommend setting up this like morning brief routine. I would have thought by now with the billions probably of chats people have created in AI, they'd have a little bit of better idea of use cases. I actually don't know anyone other than YouTubers who get a morning briefing done every single day. I'm not 100% sure that is the best way to use AI. But anyway, it will prompt you to set up your first routine and and it will suggest setting up and running a morning briefing. If you do actually want that, you can set it up. But what I would

13:00recommend is actually just creating your first bot. The first bot I would experiment with is try to set up a personal assistant that just manages your to-do list. Now, there's going to be two components to this. There's going to be the scheduled task that runs in the background, so you connect it to your email, whatever messaging platform

13:17you use like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Basically, go and get it to search through that and keep your to-do list up to date. Then you can also, when you remember to do things, you can message it and add it to your to-do list. So, one important point to make is for your personal assistant to work and be able to run from your phone and from the computer, it needs to be set up to run in the cloud, which effectively means you need to have your to-do list stored in some sort of cloud environment. That

13:40can be a Google Sheet in Google Drive. It could be something in SharePoint. I personally use Notion, but I know a lot of construction companies don't. I really like having a Notion to-do list, and then I like having it in something an app like that where I can access it from both my phone and the computer. It's quite a useful framework for thinking about these tools that's like you have the tool. The tool is designed to do work, but you always want some user interface or database that stores the truth. That's going to apply to literally everything that you do across construction project management or just

14:11personal productivity. Then, as I said, to create your first bot, I would use some sort of like voice dictation tool. I use WhisperFlow, but you can also just dictate directly into GrokBot, and then I would just spend a minute explaining who you are, what your business is, what you want to use it to do, some example use cases, and then just get it set up like that. And literally download the app on your phone, log in with the same account, and just start experimenting and seeing what you like and don't like with it. There are pre-built bot templates that you can add. For example, you can add in a project manager, which

14:43you can have You can have a TradBot, which I don't know what a TradBot is, but it watches your personal emails and calendars. So, RSVPs but RSVPs don't slip. Basically, yeah. Are these pre-built bot templates? I think way for Contractor OS, and what we'd like to do is sort of play with turning our skills into some of these and see how they run, but we just haven't done that yet. Now, with the bots, there is no shared team workspace, so everyone has to have their own bot. So, creating a template bot per project or per function, and then sharing these could be one way that you

15:17actually get your team to use them. Okay, one very important point to understand before I explain the architecture of how I would set this up for a construction team is that the bots can communicate to each other. For example, if I'm preparing a construction estimate in my construction estimator bot, I can say something like, "Can you please create a list of trade packages we should get quotes for for this project?" And then send those as

15:42instructions to the quote manager bot. Bob bot. So, what this can now do is it this bot can send an instruction to my quote manager bot. Now, this is an important concept to understand when we talk about how to set this up for a construction business. You can see that message has actually gone to my quote manager bot, which has now started working on the procurement task for that project. Okay, so why does that matter? Because it's how we actually want to set up this architecture for our bots and our Grok bots for a construction project. Now, as I said, I would probably not be really

16:24doing this unless I had small simple jobs. Probably a little bit better suited to residential contractors and companies that do smaller projects. But for me, somebody who's always worked on big projects, I don't necessarily think this is the architecture you want to go. I would just be using Grok bot as a personal assistant and then just

16:40building on top of those capabilities. But if you do want to set it up for your construction company, what I would recommend is create template bots for each project and each function of your business. And then you want to make sure the bots are aware of each other. So, project one could be the specific assistance for one construction project. That is the assistant that

17:03manages all the work for that project. That bot delegates to your other bots. So, your estimating bot, your planning bot, your procurement bot, your contracts admin bot. You scope out these bots per function. But the project two So, these are the sort of the specialist bots at performing specific tasks. The project two assistant can delegate to those same bots. Now, if you want to roll this out across a company, you can create template bots for each of these and then actually just share these bots with people. To do that, all you do when you've created a bot is you go click on the export button and click create

17:36template. Then, everyone in your company will be using the same template bots and you only need one per project and one per function. I would not go create a specific thematic bot for every project. I would create one estimating bot that the project assistant delegates the project specific information and requirements to. In the same way as I did that procurement example, then once you create your like set of template bots, then all you do is the you create a new project assistant per project you work on and I would always have your own personal assistant, which is more about managing your own to-do list. So, that's

18:11it. That is Grok Bot. Honestly, I think the video was probably a little bit long and over the top to explain it. It is generally like super easy to use, probably way easier to use than like any of the other AI tools I've used, which I think is really good. But, obviously, when you when the tool does more and more stuff under the hood, you have less control and flexibility over it. That's why I think it's a good fit for small contractors or as a personal assistant, but it isn't a good replacement for a tool like Claude code or ChatGPT work, where you can run these long complicated

18:41construction workflows.