Inside the Build: Rock Control × TacEdge — A Voice-First H&S Platform
What happens when geotechnical anchor work and major-project management need the same thing? You build it once and let the field do the typing with their voice.
Some projects you build for one customer. Some you build for a whole sector. RockControl is the latter.
In 2025 and into 2026, we worked with Rock Control (rock anchors, geotechnical, drill-and-grout work in the South Island) and TacEdge (project management for major construction) on a single problem that kept showing up in different uniforms: the people doing the work in the field were drowning in paperwork at the end of the day.
Drill logs. Anchor test results. Toolbox talks. Pre-start checks. Site inductions. Incident reports. Drug-and-alcohol records. Plant inspection. Lift studies. Permit to work. Every one of those, on every site, every day, by every person.
The pattern is the same wherever construction touches geotechnical work:
- The form is paper or PDF.
- The site is loud, dirty, often raining, often dark.
- Gloves are on.
- The phone goes back in the pocket because typing on a touchscreen with cold wet hands is the worst thing in human history.
- At 6pm, the foreman sits in the ute and tries to remember what happened at 9:30am.
- By the time the H&S manager gets it on Friday, the value of the information is gone.
We built RockControl to flip that pattern.
What we shipped
Voice-first field forms. The field worker hits a button on a phone or tablet and just talks. The platform listens, structures the answer into the right fields of the right form, and produces a clean digital record. No typing. No flicking through dropdowns. No "I'll do it later".
Drill, grout, and anchor-test logs. Specific forms for the very specific work Rock Control do — diameters, depths, grout volumes, test loads, deflection readings. The thing that used to live in a notebook that occasionally got rained on is now searchable, exportable, auditable.
Safety meeting recording with AI summaries. Toolbox talks, pre-starts, and team briefs get recorded. The platform produces a one-page summary with action items, attendance, and decisions. Auditors love it. So do crews — because no one is taking notes during the meeting anymore.
Configurable per customer. Same codebase, different customers, different brands, different workflows. Per-tenant configuration for forms, signoffs, escalation routes, and report templates — so what works for Rock Control's drill teams doesn't fight what TacEdge needs for major-project oversight.
The collaboration with TacEdge
TacEdge brought the project-management expertise. They understood what major construction firms actually needed — the chain of evidence, the audit trail, the way an Engineer-to-Contract review actually works. AiTearoa brought the AI engineering and the voice infrastructure. The result was meaningfully better than either of us would have shipped alone.
What we learned working with TacEdge is that the value isn't in the AI — the value is in what happens to the people doing the work when the AI removes the friction. A foreman who can capture eight forms in twenty minutes by voice, while walking the site, is a foreman who has time to actually do the foreman job — looking out for the crew, catching issues early, training apprentices.
That's the actual return on investment, and it's not in any spreadsheet.
What it looks like in practice
A Rock Control drill team member starts a job. They open the app on the phone in their high-vis pocket. They tap the mic. They say:
"Anchor sixteen, six metre depth, twenty-eight millimetre bar, grout fifty-four litres at twenty MPa, test load complete to fifteen kilonewtons no deflection, witnessed by Hemi."
By the time they've put the phone back in their pocket, that's a structured record in the system, attached to the right job, signed by the right person, ready for the H&S manager and the engineer of record to see — without anyone typing anything.
Multiply that across a year of jobs and tell me the back office hasn't reclaimed weeks of senior people's time.
What we're building next
More of this, faster, for more sectors. If you run a field-heavy operation in New Zealand and you're tired of paper or PDF forms swallowing your team's evenings, get in touch.
Daniel Thomson runs AiTearoa. RockControl was built in collaboration with TacEdge for Rock Control Ltd.