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For decades, the home services industry often trailed behind the latest and greatest technologies — websites, SEO and digital marketing to name just a few. But no longer! Today, home services are on the leading edge of adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). There is an overabundance of AI software companies in the market today specifically to help plumbing and HVAC contracting businesses streamline operations and boost efficiency and profitability.

AI dominated the discussion at Nexstar Network’s annual Super Meeting event this year, held Sept. 24-27 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. With more than 900 contractor members attending, the event was designed to help owners make connections, learn how to take their businesses to the next level and harness emerging technologies in the industry.

Keynote speaker Rocky Ozacki, founder and CEO of the NoW of Work — a business transformation firm whose primary focus is helping leaders build future-proofed, resilient teams that are anchored on cultures of innovation and agility — explained very simply, “If you don’t adopt AI, you risk falling behind. And companies that fall behind this future will find themselves becoming redundant.”

Ozacki notes that the AI revolution is going to happen quickly.

“Wasn’t there a time when pharmacists had to mix their own chemicals?” he said. “If you're wearing glasses today, opticians used to grind lenses from scratch. There were the librarians — remember those card catalogs? I'm definitely old enough to remember those. Graphic designers once only did things by hand. Nowadays, these jobs are still important, but they don't look anything like they did in the past. So when we think about the future work in the home services, there's very little question in my mind that your future is going to be anchored on AI. We don't live in a linear world anymore. We live in an exponential one. It's going to happen fast.”

Matt Lane, division manager of Albany, Georgia-based SafeAire Heating & Cooling, was part of a panel discussion about using AI successfully in a contracting business. His company had piloted Rilla earlier in the year and everything went great the first few weeks — until the summer hit and his team got busy. So they decided to shelve it and relaunch after the busy season.

“We got into Rocky’s program to relaunch Rilla, and it’s going so much better,” he says. “I’m still reserved in a lot of areas. We have to make sure we’re governing this thing. Every time a new product comes up — we’re using ChatGPT to do this, should we allow that or should we not? We’ve got some work still to do when it comes to putting policy in place. If we put policy around it and we put those guardrails, I think people will continue to feel better about it. We are encouraging people to use it in their everyday lives. There are still people that are scared the cell phones cause brain cancer. And that’s fine. Even with our techs, we made it (using AI) optional. We didn’t just say, ‘Hey, you have to do this.’ But there may be a day and time we do. Six years ago body cameras with police officers were not common. Now, there’s not a police officer out there that doesn’t’ have a body camera.

“Just like Rilla — it protects the technicians in the homes,” Lane continues. “Yes, there is the coaching aspect of it, but there are other benefits other than the coaching. You’re going into someone’s home — alone with the customer — and there’s liability there. To have that conversation recorded is invaluable. If a customer calls in and says, ‘Hey, your guy said there was a lifetime warranty on this product and if we replace this capacitor, and if anything else ever broke, it would be covered.’ We’ve all had those conversations — ‘I think you may have misunderstood him.’ Now you can go back and see, was it the way he said it? Or did he just outright lie? And if that is the case, now I have a character issue with the employee that we need to talk about. But it provides protection for them, too.”

Tysen Chen, founder, Avoca AI, notes that AI is a complete game-changer for the home services industry for several reasons.

“AI in the past was something that only large enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, could really afford to use,” he says. “And we're in a very interesting point in time where, for the first time in history, this technology is now much more available and it's a complete game changer for the home services industry. AI is completely changing the game at every step of the equation in terms of being an excellent home service company. Starting from the top, with Avoca — being able to take calls the right way across all the different channels and being able to close leads effectively across every channel at the highest booking rate possible. That's where Avoca is. Then you have Probook in the next layer, which is changing the game of dispatching by using AI to optimize right call, right tech and optimize profits on the dispatching layer. Then you have our friends over at Rilla taking AI into the field and   helping companies close deals and do better work in the field than ever before. So really, at all stages of the game, AI is changing how we work in home services and that will only continue.”

According to Co-Founder and CEO of Probook George Eliadis, AI can either rmake you more money or save you time — and in home services, AI does both.

“Making decisions in a data-driven way and using historical data to make better business decisions, that's how you enable better sales,” he says. “In our case, we're very dispatch focused, and so using historical data to get techs to the right calls helps you sell more, it helps the techs turn over more leads. Now on the time saving side, AI can automate tasks that were previously mundane, human, manual items, and so that's the other side of the equation. Doing it in an automated way that saves time, ultimately saves you money, because there's tasks that would ordinarily take a person several hours of data view can get done in a much shorter time span.”

Sebastian Jimenez, founder and CEO, Rilla, notes that HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors are actually probably the first early adopters getting AI into real business applications.

“There’s a lot of new money in the space, there’s a lot of private equity coming in,” he says. “There's a lot of contractors who have become really successful over the past decade, especially that COVID accelerated. Home Services is probably one of the hottest industries in the world right now. The smartest people in the world are literally building AI applications for home service contractors because of how hot this industry is right now. So the way that it's revolutionizing the trades is you could literally think of any application in AI in your business, whether it's marketing a call center, lead generation, sales, or doing a Manual J calculation. Literally every business process that you have as a home service contractor today will be touched by AI, if it's not already.”

The bottom line is contractors need to start exploring how AI can create efficiencies within their businesses if they haven’t already before they fall too far behind the early adopters.

“You could have the best product in the world that’s the easiest to use and has the most awesome technology — great AI — and it’s still going to require you, as a business, to build your business around the new technology,” Jimenez explains. “There’s going to be friction in implementation. You're going to have to learn how to implement this new technology, no matter how good it is. Early adopters — they already had a year to figure this all out. By the time you get on it — it's like you're not just behind because you're not on it — you're gonna be behind because of all the learning that you're going to have to do to catch up to early adopters.

“I know most people are wary of being the early adopters of new technologies because new technologies go wrong all the time,” he adds. “But with AI, really as a contractor, you don't want to miss out on it, because it's like missing out on SEO back in the late 2000s. Even worse, I would say because a AI’s going to be a more transformational technology. If you don't want to fall behind, you better catch up soon!”