Overview
Founded in 1977, CDH Partners is an Atlanta-based architecture and interior design firm with nearly 50 years of experience designing spaces that strengthen communities across the Southeast. Serving clients in education, healthcare, corporate, community, and light industrial sectors, CDH blends creativity with purpose—delivering designs that are functional, enduring, and human-centered. A certified Woman Business Enterprise (WBENC) led by CEO Melissa Cantrell, the firm is recognized in PSMJ’s Circle of Excellence and the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, reflecting its continued growth, innovation, and commitment to design excellence.
The Challenge: Meeting Minutes Slowed Project Delivery
When Mary Roberts moved from Senior Project Architect to BIM Manager at CDH Partners, she was asked to bring in “new ideas, new software, new ways of doing things.” The firm has a pragmatic culture on technology adoption: if a change doesn’t make day‑to‑day work easier, it won’t stick.
One persistent pain point that Mary identified was writing and formatting meeting minutes. As Mary put it, “It’s typically an intern-level task, but with our firm’s focus on experienced staff, it often fell to project architects already managing design and coordination.” As a result, documentation could slip down the priority list. Even when notes existed, they had to be rewritten and formatted into CDH’s Word template, with the firm’s liability and response language, before they could be sent out.
“It really takes time to read your notes, make them digestible, and then put it in our Word format.”
Cogram stood out as a potential solution: an AI platform built specifically for the AEC industry, with many of the nation’s leading architecture, engineering, and construction firms relying on Cogram as a cornerstone of their AI strategy. One of Cogram’s key products automates meeting minutes in a firm’s custom style and format. Uniquely, Cogram goes one step further and can draft minutes in a firm’s custom template. Mary highlights that as a key differentiator over generic notetakers:
“Cogram creates minutes in our template, which I think was the biggest plus for us.”
Rollout: Champion-Led Pilot, Firm-Wide Guardrails for AI
Adoption began with a champion‑led pilot. Mary handpicked staff who were excited to test an AI tool for meeting minutes. After a high-touch onboarding session led by Cogram’s team, CDH then shared a recording and documentation of the onboarding sessions so the rest of the studio could learn at their own pace.
As usage grew, CDH encountered an AEC reality: some clients don’t yet allow the use of AI notetakers in meetings. To address this, CDH set firm‑wide guardrails so use of Cogram aligns with client requirements:
- By default, Cogram does not auto‑join meetings; people invite it when it’s appropriate.
- They standardized the notetaker’s name to “<FirstName> — CDH Notetaker” so meeting participants can see clearly who invited the notetaker.
- For clients with blanket prohibitions, CDH can also enforce a domain blocklist so Cogram cannot be enabled for meetings with those clients.
These controls keep the technology in step with the etiquette of client work. In Mary’s words:
“We’re trying to lean into AI, as safely as we can, so that we can stay competitive with the largest firms.”
Tuning Output and Results: Decision-Centric, Skimmable Minutes
Over the first few weeks of usage, the team at CDH also collected feedback on meeting minutes and finetuned the level of detail that Cogram produces. CDH used Cogram’s custom Insights capability to prompt minutes to be more decision‑centric and concise, with the option to use a higher‑detail version when needed. “Once we backed off on the detail level, no one’s complained,” Mary said. This right‑sizing matters; architects want documentation they can skim and send, not another document they need to rewrite.
After a successful pilot, CDH now automates meeting minutes across the firm with Cogram’s AI. The impact shows up every day: meetings are consistently documented, and minutes are drafted in the right format the first time. Teams don’t lose an afternoon reviewing hand-written notes and typing up a template document. Instead Cogram drafts the full template minutes in seconds after virtual meetings.
Exploring next steps with AI
Cogram also proved itself on site: one senior architect using Cogram’s mobile application for field work on a walk‑through:
“He put it in his front pocket… [Cogram] caught everything we said and all the decisions we made.”
With meeting minutes automated with AI, CDH is exploring what comes next. They’re evaluating Cogram’s project workspaces and Outlook add‑in that can summarize and automatically file emails into the right project, then surface them via deep search. The potential is straightforward: pull minutes, field reports, drawings, and project email into one place so Cogram’s AEC-specific AI Assistant can answer questions like “What did we decide about the curtain wall install?”, instead of an architect rummaging through folders. Cogram’s AI Email Management solution also avoids the trap of important messages going missing because someone forgot to drag them into the right project mailbox.
Takeaways for AEC Firms Starting with AI
CDH adopted Cogram’s AI capabilities to remove a known drag on project delivery. The result is that minutes show up on time, in the right shape, with less retyping–so architects can get back to the work only they can do.
If there’s a playbook here for AEC peers, it’s simple: start with a workflow that’s universal and cumbersome, like meeting minutes (or email filing), and automate it with AEC-specific AI that can work within guardrails. Pilot with people who are eager to try new AI capabilities; their momentum will pull others along. And tune AI’s style and level of detail to what architects and engineers need.
