Quick answer: A subcontractor who never answers inside your construction platform is often not ignoring you at all: check first whether they ever activated the account. Procore’s own support documentation says invite follow-up emails go out at three, seven and 14 days and then stop. Diagnose with the Four-Door Test below, then move the chase to phone and SMS.
Why won’t my subbie answer anything I send through the platform?
Because the message never left the platform. The agents Procore ships are in-platform agents: they read project data, draft a response and hand the draft to a person who has an account. We have read Procore’s documentation only for this page, so treat that as a statement about Procore rather than about every construction-management platform. Procore’s AI agent library, read on 22 September 2026, lists Contract Review, Daily Log, Deep Search, RFI and Submittal Review agents as its featured five, plus a wider pre-built library including Bid Leveling, Change Analysis, Drawing Analysis, Field Observations, Financial Analyst, Photo Analyzer, Schedule Analyst, Scope Writer and Site Safety agents, and Agent Studio for custom ones. The Procore AI agents page describes the design plainly in its own FAQ: agents “gather data, cross reference, and draft, but they don’t execute final decisions independently”, and Procore AI is “permission-aware by design”, so “a user can only query, analyze, or automate workflows using data they are already authorized to view in Procore”.
Read that back with your unresponsive formwork subbie in mind. An agent that is scoped to what a user is authorised to see in the platform cannot do anything at all for a person who is not in the platform. The RFI Agent will draft you a beautiful, pre-populated RFI. It will not ring the bloke who has to answer it.
And the licence is not the blocker, which is the first thing most head contractors get wrong. The Procore pricing page says the model includes “unlimited users, including not just your employees, but all other collaborators like clients, subcontractors, and vendors”, and that there are “over 3M individual Procore users today”. The seat is free. The subbie still has to receive an email, click it, create a password and remember it. That gap between a free seat and an activated account is the cheapest thing to rule out, and it is diagnosable in about five minutes.
The Four-Door Test for a subcontractor who never logs in
This is our framework and it has a handle so you can use it in a meeting: the Four-Door Test. Four causes, one cheap test each, one fix each. A note on the order before you use it: we have not published a frequency distribution for the four doors, because we do not have one. The order below is an elimination order, cheapest check first, and doors 1 and 2 are the two your platform can answer without contacting anybody.
| Door | What it looks like | The test (five minutes, no phone call) | The fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. No activated account | They are in the Directory, items have been assigned to them, and there has never been a single reply from them in the platform | Open their Directory record and check whether any activity in the platform has ever come from them, not just items addressed to them. Procore’s project Directory documentation says follow-ups after an invite go at three, seven and 14 days, and that “after 14 days, the follow-up email is automatically discontinued”, so an invite sent more than a fortnight ago is no longer being chased by anything | Re-invite from the Directory (the documentation says the Re-invite button becomes available if the user was previously invited to the project), then ring them and stay on the line while they set the password. Activation has to be done by a human on a device; no agent, in-platform or otherwise, can do it for them |
| 2. Account live, notification never lands on a person | They log in occasionally, but the item you are chasing was never seen | Check who is actually on the item’s distribution list and which mailbox that address resolves to. The Procore RFI advanced settings page documents an Enable Email checkbox, per-role Email Event checkboxes, and daily overdue reminder emails that stop once the RFI is 45 days past due | Put the individual doing the work on the distribution list rather than the shared office address, and send the question itself by SMS rather than a link back to a login screen |
| 3. Wrong person on file | Replies used to come and then stopped, or you get a bounce, or the mobile rings out every time | Ring the mobile in the Directory, then ring the main line on the subcontract. If the mobile is dead and the office tells you he finished up in July, it is door 3 | Update the Directory record and the contract notice address the same day. A stale contact does not fail loudly, it silently breaks every future chase on that package |
| 4. Reachable, choosing not to answer | They answer you about next week’s pour, but not about this variation | Ask a neutral, easy question on the same channel. An answer to the easy question and silence on the hard one is a commercial position, not a communications failure | Stop chasing on comms channels. Put it in writing to the contract notice address and escalate under the contract. From here the clock that matters is a legal one, not a follow-up cadence |
The quotable version: doors 1 to 3 are channel problems and are yours to fix; door 4 is a contract problem and belongs with your contract administrator. Mixing them up is what turns a two-day admin fix into a six-week dispute.
How many follow-ups, on which channel, before I escalate?
Here is the ladder we would run, and the reason the whole thing is compressed into ten business days rather than spread over a month: if the same unanswered variation comes back at you as a payment claim under the NSW security-of-payment Act, your window to respond is short and its outer edge is set by statute rather than by your programme, and your subcontract can make it shorter still. The ladder is a proposed rule, not a measured result, and every interval is in business days from the day the item was raised.
| Elapsed | Attempt | Channel | What it distinguishes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | Item raised | In-platform, with its email notification | Nothing yet. The platform due date is set in calendar days after creation per project, and the documentation notes the due date respects the days set as working days for the project, so day 0 in your programme and day 0 on the RFI are not the same day |
| Day 1 | Follow-up 1 | SMS to the individual’s mobile, with the question in the message body and no login link | Doors 1 and 2 from doors 3 and 4. Any reply at all proves a reachable human is on that number |
| Day 2 | Follow-up 2 | Phone call to the same mobile, voicemail if unanswered, then one more SMS | Confirms door 1 or 2 if they answer and say they have never logged in |
| Day 3 | Follow-up 3 | Phone the subcontractor’s main office line taken from the subcontract, not from the Directory | Door 3. The office knows who replaced them; the Directory does not |
| Day 5 | Escalation 1 | Written notice to the contract notice address, in the form the subcontract requires | Door 4. A written notice that is also ignored is evidence, not a chase |
| Day 10 | Escalation 2 | Hand to the contract administrator or superintendent | The matter is now commercial. Ten business days is the outer edge because of the statutory boundary below |
| Any day a payment claim arrives | Stop chasing, start responding | Payment schedule, in writing | See the statutory clock below. The window is the earlier of the contract period or 10 business days. |
Two cautions. The intervals above are ours, not a regulator’s, and nothing in any security-of-payment Act requires you to follow up at all. And the ladder only has value if it is run every single time. If nobody on your team can honestly say it was run on every unanswered item last month, that is the moment to automate it, not a particular headcount.
What the NSW Security of Payment Act actually says about the clock
This section is New South Wales only. Every state and territory has its own security-of-payment legislation with its own periods; we have not read those instruments for this page, so we are not going to paraphrase them. The instrument below is the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 1999 (NSW), consolidated version in force from 20 August 2024. Read the Act yourself at legislation.nsw.gov.au. Route disclosure: that site blocks automated requests from our network, so we read the text from the Internet Archive capture of the same page taken on 23 January 2026, and we cannot confirm from this network whether an amendment has commenced since that capture. Nothing here is legal advice.
| Step | What the Act says | Section | The limb that narrows it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is this actually a payment claim? | A payment claim must identify the construction work (or related goods and services) to which the progress payment relates, must indicate the amount claimed, and must state that it is made under the Act. Three requirements, all of them mandatory | s 13(2) | All three limbs. An email asking for money that does not state it is made under the Act is not a s 13 payment claim |
| Replying with a payment schedule | The respondent may reply by providing a payment schedule (s 14(1)). If the respondent does not provide one within the time required by the relevant construction contract, or within 10 business days after the payment claim is served, “whichever time expires earlier”, the respondent becomes liable to pay the claimed amount on the due date for that progress payment | s 14(4) | “Whichever time expires earlier.” Ten business days is an outer limit, not the period. If your subcontract says five, five is the period |
| When a subcontractor’s progress payment falls due | A progress payment to be made to a subcontractor under a construction contract “other than an exempt residential construction contract” becomes due and payable on the date occurring 20 business days after a payment claim is made, “except to the extent paragraph (b) applies”, or on an earlier date as provided in accordance with the terms of the contract | s 11(1B) | Two narrowings: exempt residential construction contracts are dealt with separately under s 11(1C), and a contractual earlier date displaces the 20 days |
| Principal to head contractor | Fifteen business days after a payment claim is made, or an earlier date provided by the contract, again excluding exempt residential construction contracts | s 11(1A) | A provision in a construction contract has no effect to the extent it allows payment of a progress payment later than the s 11(1A) or s 11(1B) date (s 11(8)) |
| No schedule and no payment | An adjudication application on that basis cannot be made unless the claimant has served written notice of an intention to apply, within the 20 business days immediately following the due date for payment, and the respondent has been given an opportunity to provide a payment schedule within five business days after receiving that notice | s 17(2) | Both conditions, not either. The application must then be made within 10 business days after the end of that five-day period (s 17(3), paragraph e) |
The practical reading for a head contractor: the longest you can safely leave an unanswered variation drifting is shorter than the shortest realistic chasing cycle most sites actually run. That is the whole argument for compressing the ladder into ten business days.
The part an AI agent can do, and the part it cannot
The in-platform agents are good at what they are built for: drafting the RFI, cross-checking the submittal against the spec, turning site photos into a daily log. That work is real and it is not what is failing here. What is failing is contact, and contact happens on a phone number, in a language the person actually speaks, at a time they are not on the tools.
That is the job AI agents for construction project management are configured for at Zian: autonomous agents that work live phone, SMS, email and WhatsApp against a contact record, outside any construction platform, and log the answer back through the API or Zapier into whatever your project runs on. Zian agents are credited with 28x more contact attempts in the platform’s own live counters, which is the only number that matters when the diagnosis is door 1 or door 3: somebody has to actually get the person on the line. The pacing is not blind repetition either; the approach to AI follow-up pacing is what keeps a ladder like the one above from turning into harassment, and the same multi-channel outreach orchestration logic decides whether attempt three is a call or a text. Zian AI is in partnership-application beta.
The honest limits, because they matter more than the pitch. An agent cannot activate an account for someone: door 1 always ends with a human creating a password. An agent cannot make a commercial decision: door 4 belongs to your contract administrator and, if it becomes a payment claim, to whoever drafts your payment schedule inside the s 14(4) window. And an agent cannot fix a Directory nobody maintains, which is what door 3 comes down to. If you run fewer packages than your coordinator can genuinely ring in an afternoon, do this by hand; the same logic applies to AI phone agents for Australian trades and service businesses, where the crossover is about consistency rather than volume.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my subcontractor never log in, when the licence is free?
Because activation is a separate act from invitation. The Procore pricing page describes a model with unlimited users including subcontractors and vendors, so cost is not the barrier. Invitation is the barrier. The Procore project Directory documentation states that after an invite is sent, an automated follow-up message goes at three, seven and 14 days, and that after 14 days, the follow-up email is automatically discontinued. If nobody rings them inside that window, the invitation simply goes quiet.
How many times should I follow up before I escalate an unanswered RFI?
Our ladder is five contacts in five business days across three channels, in-platform, SMS, then phone, then a written notice on day 5 and escalation to the contract administrator on day 10. The reason for ten rather than thirty is the statutory boundary in New South Wales, where the window to serve a payment schedule is the earlier of the contract period or 10 business days after service. Your own programme dates may pull it tighter.
Can an AI agent chase a subcontractor who has no login?
An in-platform agent cannot. The Procore AI agents page states that Procore AI is permission-aware by design and that a user can only query, analyse or automate workflows using data they are already authorised to view in Procore, which scopes those agents to people who hold an account. An agent that works the phone and SMS channels against a contact record is not scoped that way, because it never needed the person to be a platform user in the first place.
How long do I have to reply to a payment claim in New South Wales?
Section 14 of the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 1999 says the respondent may reply with a payment schedule. Under s 14(4), if no payment schedule is provided within the time required by the relevant construction contract, or within 10 business days after the payment claim is served, whichever time expires earlier, the respondent becomes liable to pay the claimed amount on the due date for that progress payment. The contract period can be shorter than 10 business days, and if it is, it governs. This is general information, not legal advice.
Is an email asking me for money a payment claim?
Not automatically. Section 13(2) sets three requirements: it must identify the construction work or related goods and services the progress payment relates to, it must indicate the amount claimed, and it must state that it is made under the Act. All three. Whether a particular document meets them is a question for your contract administrator or your lawyer, not for a checklist on a website.
Does Procore send SMS reminders for overdue items?
The Procore RFI advanced settings page documents email notifications, per-role email events, and daily reminder emails for overdue RFIs that stop once the RFI is 45 days past due. SMS is not among the notification options documented on that page as at 22 September 2026. We were not able to walk the Procore RFI release notes, which require a sign-in from our network, so treat this as a statement about that page on that date rather than about the product as a whole.
Where every figure on this page comes from
| Figure | Who published it | Link | Date read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent library as listed on that date: Contract Review, Daily Log, Deep Search, RFI and Submittal Review featured, plus Bid Analyzer, Bid Leveling, Change Analysis, Drawing Analysis, Drawings and Specs Specialist, Fast Search, Field Observations, Financial Analyst, Lessons Learned, Meeting Minutes Publisher, Photo Analyzer, Procurement Log Creator, Schedule Analyst, Scope Writer and Site Safety, and Agent Studio | Procore Technologies | procore.com/ai/agents | 22 September 2026 |
| Procore AI is permission-aware by design; a user can only query, analyse or automate workflows using data they are already authorised to view in Procore; agents draft but do not execute final decisions independently | Procore Technologies | procore.com/ai/agents | 22 September 2026 |
| Unlimited users including clients, subcontractors and vendors; over 3M individual Procore users today | Procore Technologies | procore.com/pricing | 22 September 2026 |
| Invite follow-ups at three, seven and 14 days; after 14 days the follow-up email is automatically discontinued; the Re-invite button becomes available if the user was previously invited to the project | Procore Technologies (support documentation) | Invite or Reinvite a User to Join a Procore Project | 22 September 2026 |
| Enable Email, per-role Email Events, daily overdue RFI reminder emails, not sent once the RFI is 45 days past due; RFI due dates set in calendar days after creation, with the due date respecting the project’s working days | Procore Technologies (support documentation) | Configure Advanced Settings: RFIs | 22 September 2026 |
| s 11(1A) 15 business days, s 11(1B) 20 business days, s 11(1C) exempt residential contracts, s 11(8), s 13(2) three requirements, s 14(1) and s 14(4) 10 business days or the contract period whichever expires earlier, s 17(2) and s 17(3) | NSW Parliamentary Counsel’s Office, Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 1999 (NSW), version in force from 20 August 2024 | legislation.nsw.gov.au act-1999-046 (read via the Internet Archive capture of 23 January 2026, because legislation.nsw.gov.au blocks automated requests from our network) | 22 September 2026 |
| 28x more contact attempts | Zian AI (first-party, published on zian.ai) | zian.ai | 22 September 2026 |
Apply For Partnership if you want the phone-and-SMS half of that ladder run for you. Zian AI is in partnership-application beta and places open in order.