Amazon's Rufus Architect Leaves to Build AI for a Trillion-Dollar Industry: Construction
Thursday, January 22, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Kaya AI the agentic predictive supply-chain intelligence platform for mission-critical construction, announced today that Mukesh Jain, the Amazon AI leader behind Rufus, and more than $12B in AI-driven commercial impact, has joined the company as Chief Technology Officer. Jain's move marks a significant AI leadership transition into the industrial and infrastructure sector.
Jain built Rufus from concept to a platform serving hundreds of millions of users. As TechCrunch recently reported, Rufus helped drive record-breaking Black Friday sales, highlighting the system's commercial impact and real-time decision capabilities. Before Rufus, Jain built and led Amazon's Product Graph, the knowledge system powering more than 30 AI applications across the company.
Kaya is bringing that level of applied AI sophistication to construction, one of the world's largest yet least-digitized industries. With demand for data centers, clean energy, and semiconductor infrastructure surging, the industrial sector is now the next major frontier for enterprise AI.
AI Built for How Construction Actually Works
At Kaya, Jain will lead development of Amber, a domain-trained AI knowledge worker built specifically for construction. Amber understands drawings, specs, submittals, request for information, supplier quotes, schedules, and equipment lead times, OFCI/OFE equipment data, and unifies them into a single project graph that supports real-time decision-making.
"Rufus showed that AI can guide millions of decisions in real time," said Jain. "Construction is even more complex, and the opportunity to create value is exponentially larger."
Fixing the Most Expensive Bottleneck in Construction
Kaya is also launching its Mission-Critical Procurement (MCP) Planner(TM), powered by a proprietary small language model fine tuned for construction meta data which connects design intent, supplier availability, and logistics execution. Procurement delays are the number one driver of cost and timelines in mission-critical projects such as data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.
"Procurement today is chaotic and fragmented," said Ojonimi Bako, Co-Founder and CEO. "With Mukesh's leadership, Amber becomes construction's first AI knowledge worker, coordinating documents, vendors, and workflows so teams prevent delays before they happen."
Growing Adoption Across Mission-Critical Builders
Kaya has been built and designed in collaboration with industry leaders including Suffolk, Haskell, and ARCO Murray, and was named a Top 50 ConTech Startup of 2025 after winning the Supply Chain category at Cemex Ventures' 2024 competition. Adoption is accelerating across mission-critical builders because Kaya's partnership model prioritizes speed, iteration, and measurable impact.
"Construction needs founders who understand the entire system end-to-end, not just a single workflow," said Eric Whobrey, VP of Innovation at ARCO Construction. "Kaya's leadership sees the full picture design intent, procurement, logistics, and field execution and they're stitching it together with AI in a way that unlocks step-function gains across the industry."
Beyond the pace of development, industry leaders are choosing Kaya for its ability to remove operational friction across procurement and supply-chain coordination.
"Kaya's technology solves the real, day-to-day challenges construction procurement teams face," said Jonathan Miles, Director of Supply Chain at Haskell. "It's not just about digitizing tasks - it's about connecting the dots across design, procurement, logistics, and execution. By adapting to how companies work and providing full visibility into the supply chain, Kaya enables companies to manage spending strategically, reduce risk, strengthen supplier relationships, and improve coordination across teams."
About Kaya AI
Kaya AI is the predictive supply-chain intelligence platform for mission-critical construction. Kaya unifies owners, contractors, and suppliers through an AI-native project graph that delivers end-to-end procurement intelligence from submittal to installation. And follow on LinkedIn
Learn more at usekaya.ai and follow on LinkedIn.
Media contact: Nick Selz, 406159@email4pr.com, +44 779451 3085
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SOURCE Kaya AI
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