AI for trades businesses: what actually works
If you run a plumbing, electrical, HVAC or roofing business doing $1M–$20M, here's where AI moves the number — and where it's a waste of money.
Trades businesses get pitched AI constantly. Most of it is rubbish. Here's the short version of what we've now seen work across 15+ trades businesses in the $1M–$20M band, and what we'd ignore.
What actually works
Three things, in order of impact.
- Missed-call recovery. A voice agent on your after-hours line + an SMS auto-reply on every missed call during the day. This is the single highest-ROI build in trades. Most owners are missing 1 in 3 inbound calls and most of those never call back.
- Quote follow-up. A simple agent that re-touches every quote at 48 hours, 7 days, and 14 days. Branch by job size. The big quotes get a human nudge, the small ones get a templated SMS. Win rate goes up 15–25% with no extra office headcount.
- Schedule fairness. One live view of every job, every van, every day. Not a Gantt chart — a single screen the dispatcher actually opens at 7am. Most trades businesses are losing 10–20% of billable hours to scheduling slop they can't see.
What's a waste of money
We say no to these even when clients ask:
- AI marketing content. Trades businesses don't need 80 LinkedIn posts. They need their phone answered.
- Chatbot on the website. Customers calling a plumber want to call. They don't want to chat.
- AI 'lead generation' from cold outbound. Two years ago this might have worked. Now everyone's inbox is poisoned. Don't do it.
How to know if you're ready
If you're under $1M, fix the basics first — get on a proper job-management system, get your phones reliable, get your invoicing automated. AI on top of chaos is just expensive chaos.
If you're $1M–$20M, you're in the sweet spot. Pick the missed-call leak first. Run it for 60 days. Then go to quote follow-up. Then scheduling. In that order.
AI in a trades business is not a chatbot. It's the office staff you can't hire, working the phones nobody answers.
What we'd build for a trades business doing $5M
If a $5M trades business came to us tomorrow, we'd build three things over 90 days. After-hours voice agent + missed-call SMS in month 1. Quote-follow-up sequence in month 2. Live schedule view in month 3. By month 4 the owner has 6–10 hours back per week and somewhere between $300k and $1.2M in recovered revenue annualised. Same staff. Same vans. Different leak.