AI for fire and smoke restoration: one schedule from board-up to pack-back.

A fire loss is rarely one job. On the night it is a board-up and perhaps a tarp; within days a contents pack-out; then structure cleaning and odor work, a rebuild with its own trades and permits, and finally a pack-back into a house the family has not lived in since the fire. Each stage is in different hands, and each can start only when the one before has finished properly. Meanwhile the family is living elsewhere and asking, reasonably, what is happening.

Supervised AI assistants can hold that chain together on paper: a master schedule showing who is on site when and what each trade is waiting for, a contents inventory drafted from the crew's photos, and a weekly update for the family that the owner reviews and sends. They do not decide what is salvageable, how odor is treated, what the Restoration Work Plan says or what the carrier is told. This page, the fire and smoke entry in Aevrion's home-service industries guide, summarizes the back office; the kitchen fire article follows one job's hand-offs, and the pack-out inventory article sets out the contents record in detail.

From the restorer's side, the job runs in roughly the order below. Trades and timings vary between losses, but the dependency does not: a stage that ends without leaving the next what it needs costs days later on. The table is Aevrion's reading of the work, not a requirement of any standard.

The IICRC's page for ANSI/IICRC S700, the Standard for Professional Fire and Smoke Damage Restoration (first edition, 2025; checked on 15 October 2026), sets out its scope briefly. The standard covers assessing the presence, intensity and boundaries of fire residues and odors in a building, in building systems such as HVAC, and in contents, and the restoration cleaning and fire odor management of buildings and contents; it also addresses contractor qualifications, administrative requirements, the development of a Restoration Work Plan, the documentation of project-related events and compliance with Authorities Having Jurisdiction. Its scope is fire events other than wildfires. The same page notes that a new consensus body has begun revising it.

The page is just as clear about the edges. Among the things it says the standard does not comprehensively address are reconstruction, building demolition other than for assessment, mitigation or source removal, and situations such as wildfires, chemical fires or industrial fires that pose environmental hazards. It lists occupants with special requirements, and exposures affecting occupants, among those topics too. Questions of that kind go to the appropriate professional, and an assistant drafting for a family stays off them entirely.

The residue and odor assessment, and the Restoration Work Plan built on it, are the restorer's professional work; an assistant can check that a plan is on file before a stage starts, but it never drafts the plan or interprets the standard. The rebuild then follows the local building department's requirements for that job, along with each trade's own, so the master schedule has to carry both worlds.

Grok Bot's unit of work is a named Bot with a single job and a conversation of its own, running on a persistent cloud computer and handing back drafts and files that someone checks. Nothing in its documentation covers telephony: a Bot does not take the loss call, leave a voicemail or text the homeowner. Nor does it name a connector for restoration, estimating or pack-out software, so reading a job file or a contents platform means a custom integration or supervised browser use where the vendor permits it, subject to testing, with logins and two-factor steps handed back to the owner.

Board-up dates, boxed contents, a displaced family and an open invoice each draw on different sources and need a different approval boundary, two of the reasons the documentation gives for creating a separate Bot; it also advises the smallest roster that does the job, so an owner might run Coordination alone and add the others as jobs demand. The four roles are Aevrion's arrangement, not ones the documentation names. Each one keeps the owner's standing limits as lasting rules, no message to a family, trade or carrier and no item marked for disposal, which the documentation treats as guidance rather than a control the Bot cannot cross.

• COORDINATION

  Keeps the master schedule across every stage and trade, drafts scheduling emails to subcontractors, and lists what is blocked and why.

• CONTENTS

  Turns the crew's photos and notes into an inventory draft, keeps the custody record current and flags gaps for a person to resolve.

• UPDATES

  Drafts the weekly update to the household from the schedule and the owner's notes, for the owner to edit and send.

• BILLING

  Tracks estimates, supplements and payments outstanding on each job, and drafts document submissions that the owner sends.

Based on the Grok Bot documentation at docs.x.ai as checked on 15 October 2026. Its statements on Bot rules, Bot-to-Bot messaging, routine triggers, connected apps, approval expiry and payments were rechecked against docs.x.ai and Cursor's help pages on 26 October 2026. The trade examples are Aevrion's illustrations, not documented Grok Bot use cases. Aevrion Ops is an independent consultancy. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a partner of xAI, SpaceXSI or Cursor. Grok Bot is named here only to describe it.

Without a master schedule, board-up dates sit in the on-call log, pack-out in the contents crew's calendar and the rebuild in email threads with several subcontractors. The Coordination Bot keeps one view of all of it: each stage's planned and actual dates, who holds it, and what it is waiting for.

Consider an illustration that is not this series' kitchen fire: a fire in an attached garage that sent smoke through a two-story house. The schedule shows that the drywall crew cannot start upstairs until the electrician has finished and any inspection the permit requires has passed, and that the bedroom contents cannot come back until the painter and the flooring installer have left. When the electrician slips a day, the Bot proposes the dates that move with it and drafts emails to the affected trades. The owner accepts or rejects the new dates and sends the emails, which appear as editable drafts to send or discard.

At six each morning a scheduled routine can rebuild the blocked list from the company's own job records (the documentation allows scheduled runs no closer together than five minutes). If that routine ever reaches something that needs a yes, the request lapses after about ten minutes (Cursor's help pages say thirty) and nothing runs, so it posts the blocked list, drafts the trade emails and stops. The records stay the source. Grok Bot's documentation is plain that what a Bot remembers cannot replace the authoritative record, and a date remembered from last week is how a cabinet installer ends up at a house with unfinished walls. The kitchen fire article in this series follows one job's hand-offs through a schedule like this, week by week.

Contents are hard to reconstruct afterwards: what was taken, in what state, where it went and whether it returned. The Contents Bot drafts the inventory and keeps the custody record, and a person verifies both against the boxes. Crew photos reach it through the owner, since every Bot sits inside one person's account.

Declaring something beyond saving is a person's call, made with the family, and nothing is discarded before the property owner's consent is on file. The companion piece on pack-out inventories covers the record, the photo route, the custody trail and the pack-back sign-off in full.

For the household the job is mostly invisible, and its questions are easy to foresee: when can we go home, where is the piano, why has nobody been there this week? A weekly update can answer them before they are asked, provided the owner sends it every week.

The Updates Bot builds it from the master schedule and the owner's notes: the week's progress, the confirmed dates ahead, who is holding up what, and any decision or signature needed from the household. The owner reads it, edits it and sends it from the Updates Bot's own conversation. It is not instant, by design: an unconfirmed date does more harm than a day's wait.

The draft stays in the restorer's lane: no coverage, living-expense payments or claim talk, which belong between the family and their insurer, and nothing about health. Questions it cannot answer go back to the owner.

Some of a restorer's fire work arrives through carrier programs. Contractor Connection, which Crawford & Company runs, lists board-up, odor removal and temporary housing among the residential services its network offers (as checked on 15 October 2026). Any program's expectations of the restorer come from its own documents, filed by the owner where the Billing Bot can read them. A program portal the Billing Bot reads is signed in on the one computer all four Bots share, and separate Bots are not a security boundary; if it must stay apart, it goes under a separate user account.

The family, meanwhile, is working through a claim of its own, and a restorer may be asked for help with its hardest parts: listing what burned, and asking who pays for living elsewhere. In Texas a statute draws the line. Insurance Code §4102.163, in the text read on 15 October 2026, says a contractor may not act as public adjuster for a property it is, or may be, contracting on, nor advertise that it will adjust that claim; a license under the adjusters' chapter or the insured's power of attorney makes no difference. Owners in other states confirm their own position with a qualified professional.

On a fire job that boundary lands in two places. The Billing Bot assembles the documents a submission needs, the owner sends them, and nothing it drafts takes a position on coverage or living expenses. The family's replacement list stays the family's: the restorer can hand over its own photographed record of what could not be saved, with no values attached.

An assistant records each of these once a person has decided it, and proposes none of them.

• SAFETY AND THE BOARD-UP

  Whether a room is safe to enter once the fire service has handed the house back, which openings are boarded, and when a crew goes in.

• THE WORK PLAN

  The residue and odor assessment, the Restoration Work Plan and the odor treatment method.

• CONTENTS

  Salvage or replace, and any disposal, which needs the property owner's documented consent.

• REBUILD

  Scope, permits, change orders and the call that a room is ready for its contents.

• ESTIMATES AND PAYMENTS

  Every estimate line, supplement and payment. No Bot takes or makes a payment; a payment step on any site is completed by the owner, who takes over the computer. Cursor's help pages add that a card saved in the Bot's Vault can be used at checkout without asking each time, so this design saves no card there.

• WHAT THE FAMILY HEARS

  The move-home date and every other date the family is given, and the wording when one slips; the same holds for anything sent to a trade, the carrier or an adjuster.

Putting out a fire uses water, so a fire loss can leave a drying job beside the smoke and residue. Water damage restoration has its own page in this series, built around the daily drying log; this page covers contents and the coordination of many trades. Mold remediation has its own guide in this series, built around state licensing.

Give the Coordination Bot the records of two closed fire jobs, from board-up to pack-back, and ask for the master schedule each should have had: who held each stage, when the next could have started, and which dates the family should have heard. It sends nothing. The owner sets that version beside what actually happened, and the differences it exposes, a trade on site too early, a box with no return event, a week without a family update, become the brief for everything after it.

Aevrion Ops can scope that first step and what follows: the schedule format, the inventory record, the Bots' standing rules and approval boundaries, and custom integrations to the job and contents software already in use, built only where the vendor's terms and API permit and tested before anyone relies on them. If the hand-offs are where your fire jobs lose time, contact us to scope it; the workflow automation readiness assessment is a smaller first step.

1. A fire job is a chain of hand-offs from board-up to pack-back; the back office keeps the next stage ready.
2. The IICRC's S700 page scopes in residue and odor assessment, the Restoration Work Plan, documentation and AHJ compliance, and covers fire events other than wildfires; reconstruction is among the topics it does not comprehensively address.
3. A Coordination Bot keeps one master schedule from the company's records and drafts subcontractor emails that the owner sends.
4. Calling an item unsalvageable is always a person's decision, and nothing is discarded without the property owner's consent on file.
5. The displaced family gets a weekly update drafted by a Bot and sent by the owner, and never a date nobody has confirmed.
6. Texas Insurance Code §4102.163, read on 15 October 2026, bars a contractor on the job from serving as the property's public adjuster; in this design the Billing Bot only assembles document submissions, and the owner sends every carrier or adjuster message.