vBrief

vBrief began in practice. Its co-founder, James Wright-Zhang, is an ARB-registered architect and RIBA member who led multidisciplinary teams on complex projects as a Senior Architect in National and International contexts. The company's starting point was the gap he lived with: endless client changes, complex systems, and no tool that let an architect stay responsible for their own work without losing days to reconstructing what was agreed. He founded vBrief Ltd in London in 2024 with Libo Shen, a software engineer with more than ten years building software for professionals, including six at Google and two as Head of Engineering at P.ai.

vBrief is an AI-assisted project information management platform for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). It understands the need for flexibility in practice, and combines the focus of a notebook, with the structure of a knowledge base, and the utility of a project management system.

It takes the emails, documents, meeting notes and chats a project generates and turns them into one verified project record. The AI reads what comes in and pre-tags the requirements, risks, suggestions and asks inside it; a person reviews each item beside its original source before it enters the record. Every item is attributed and one click from where it came from, and the same record feeds the views a practice works from: briefs, risk registers, change logs, task lists and timelines, with export to Excel, CSV, JSON and PDF.

The company's mission is keeping professionals in control. AI speeds the reading up; the professional decides what is true, and the record keeps the evidence of who decided what, against which source. vBrief works with architects and AEC project teams from solo practices to leading international practices, and the product has been shaped through workshops, feedback sessions and live-project pilots with its initial practices, and through conversations with PI insurers and practice and design-technology leads. Project data is hosted in the EEA on Microsoft Azure. James is also the author of The Omission Gap (April 2026), an independently published preprint on SSRN, and writes and speaks on the intersection of AI and professional competence in professional practice.