How a Construction CEO Built an AI Product: Henry Chart of CFS

CFS Group is a UK manufacturer of engineered products for the built environment — founded in 1990, the business designs and manufactures proprietary systems that keep building façades, brickwork and structures safely in place. As CEO, Henry Chart makes sure engineers can trust every calculation. So when Henry decided to use AI, a co-pilot wasn't enough, he worked with Kowalah to build Clariti, an AI-native structural engineering design platform now used by engineers across Europe.

Clariti is an AI-powered specification platform for the AEC sector — the intelligent layer that sits across the structural specification stack. It uses a chat interface and real-time 3D visualisation to guide engineers through anchor channel specification to EN 1992-4 standard. The architecture has a deliberate philosophy: calculations are always deterministic, verified by qualified engineers. AI handles the user interaction layer only. In a safety-critical domain, this isn't caution, it's the only viable approach. Henry calls it making engineers feel like superhumans, not replacing them with bots.

Alongside Clariti, Henry has been rebuilding CFS itself as an AI-native company. His internal purchasing assistant is on version 40. He runs a chief-of-staff AI agent. His office team just ran a workshop where every person built their own named agent. CFS practices exactly what Clariti preaches.

In this spotlight session, Henry shares the unfiltered story: the decisions, the scope explosions, the documentation chaos, and the big vision, owning the specification layer between design tools like Revit and product manufacturers, in a market where the nearest competitor generates £40M from a static product database.

What you'll hear:

• Why Henry chose to build an AI product rather than adopt existing tools — and what that decision cost him
• The architecture decision that made Clariti trustworthy: deterministic calculations, AI for interaction only
• Managing a software build as a non-technical CEO: what he got wrong, what he'd do differently
• Inside CFS's internal AI transformation: purchasing assistant v40, chief-of-staff agents, and team-wide AI adoption
• The big vision: owning the construction specification layer and what tier-1 VCs think of it

Who should attend:

Business leaders and founders in traditional or non-tech industries who are deciding how far to take AI — whether that means building a product, transforming internal operations, or both. Also valuable for anyone thinking about AI architecture in regulated or safety-critical contexts.