Mukesh Jain, the Amazon AI executive who architected Rufus, the generative AI assistant credited with driving more than $12 billion in commercial impact during peak sales, is leaving Amazon to tackle one of the world’s largest untapped technology frontiers: construction.
Jain has been named chief technology officer at Kaya AI, a startup developing agentic predictive intelligence software for mission-critical construction projects. Kaya’s platform targets inefficiencies across procurement, supply chain, and project execution, with a focus on high-stakes projects such as data centers, advanced manufacturing facilities and infrastructure, where delays and cost overruns can be exceptionally costly.
At Kaya, Jain will lead the development of Amber, a domain-trained AI “knowledge worker” explicitly built for construction. Amber can interpret drawings, specifications, submittals, requests for information, supplier quotes, schedules, equipment lead times and OFCI/OFE data, unifying them into a single project graph to support real-time decision-making and connect teams across complex builds.
In addition, Jain will help advance Kaya’s Mission-Critical Procurement (MCP) Planner, a small language model fine-tuned on construction metadata that links design intent, supplier availability and logistics execution, addressing one of the biggest drivers of cost and schedule overruns in large projects.
“Rufus showed that AI can guide millions of decisions in real time,” Jain said.
“Construction is even more complex, and the opportunity to create value is exponentially larger.”
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