Some are diving in, some are playing wait-and-see. The biggest impacts so far are in the office. Concerns center around cost, training, and change management.
ServiceTitan, through Thrive Analytics, surveyed more than 1,000 contractors across various trades about how they’re reacting to the foundational shift artificial intelligence (AI) will bring to the industry. The results, included in our report, The State of AI in the Trades 2026, spanned the spectrum.
How to think about those results, though, is clear, according to ServiceTitan Senior Vice President of Product Vincent Payen. Contractors need an automation mindset and a trusted partner. But more on that in a moment.
The results of the survey, conducted by Thrive Analytics from Oct. 23 to Nov. 12, 2025, largely mirrored what Payen and ServiceTitan are hearing from customers. The results showed:
Widespread optimism: 54% are very or somewhat willing to invest in AI in the next 1-3 years, with another 18% neutral, signaling an appetite for the technology.
Varied adoption levels: While 12% of respondents have already embedded AI in their processes, 35% haven’t used AI in their businesses at all. The rest are somewhere in between.
Most impact (so far) in the office: Administrative tasks lead current usage (59%), followed by marketing and sales (51%).
Trusted partners are favored: 59% of the survey respondents who have adopted AI use features embedded in their existing software. But 42% of those respondents also leverage outside tools.
ServiceTitan, Payen says, works hard to earn that trust from current and potential customers. And while much of the industry’s experience with AI so far leverages point solutions—like offering better wording on a job summary or honing the language in an email—the next step is far more important: AI that powers automation across a contracting business.
That’s what best-in-class contractors expect—and deserve.
“We have extremely smart customers who are extremely pragmatic and understand what automation can do for their business,” Payen says. “We are looking at how they run their business and the automation opportunities, and we're leveraging the AI capabilities we believe fit the best.”
Those answers, with a technology that’s moving as fast as AI, will evolve. ServiceTitan will evolve as well, Payen says.
Biggest benefit today: Efficiency and productivity
The biggest benefit seen by the most contractors from AI in their businesses today is in increased efficiency and productivity, cited by 74% of respondents.
That’s to be expected, Payen says, as that’s the area, mostly in the office, where AI functionality is available in the trades today, in AI tools that drive demand and smooth office operations.
Take call booking, for instance, at a company that has a 20% drop rate for incoming calls.
“There’s an AI solution for that, and it’s pretty easy to adopt and have good outcomes,” Payen says.
And it’s happening now, for ServiceTitan customers across the country, including Gulfshore Air Conditioning and Heating in the Florida Panhandle. There, an automated marketing campaign built in Marketing Pro can acquire a lead, ServiceTitan’s AI virtual agent can take the call from the customer and book the job, Dispatch Pro can make sure the right technician for the job is dispatched, and that technician can arrive at the job site without a human having touched the process.
That automation is powered in large part by AI functions built into ServiceTitan products.
“The tasks required for a fully automated job are, arguably, the most mature AI products today,” Payen says, “at the intersection of the most mature AI solutions and the ones that are easiest to adopt and leverage.
“The impact is huge.”
The competitive advantage is significant
While the contractors in the survey who are already using AI see clear benefits—74% say they expect the technology to improve efficiency and productivity, 51% say it should enhance decision-making—most have not yet recognized what ServiceTitan sees as the clear benefit: Only 10% say they expect AI to provide their business with a competitive advantage.
That’s an opportunity for those who embrace AI and automation to outdistance competitors who don’t, ServiceTitan CEO and Co-Founder Ara Mahdessian said in his keynote address at Pantheon.
Agentic AI, he says, can automate workflows and make every contractor more efficient, raising profit margins to perhaps 40% by reducing overhead. Companies that automate, he says, will dominate lead acquisition and technician hiring, avoid the race to the bottom, and provide a top-tier customer experience.
“Most of the supporting workflows—appointment booking, scheduling, dispatching, payroll, inventory, financials, etc.—are purely cognitive, which means they absolutely can and will be automated,” Mahdessian told the crowd of contractors.
"If we are to thrive, we have to automate these workflows.”
The contractors who do—and their customers, Mahdessian says—will win.
And the winning won’t stop with the office.
AI for your whole business
As a steward for the success of customers, Mahdessian at Pantheon pledged continuing efforts to get better, including making both the Core products and the Pro Products as automated and as meaningfully effective as possible for every customer.
Mahdessian also put some responsibility for resilience on the audience, because AI “is about to have far greater impact on the quality of life than anything we’ve ever seen.”
That, for contractors, includes management, the office, and technicians.
ServiceTitan Co-Founder Vahe Kuzoyan, at Pantheon, introduced Atlas, ServiceTitan’s AI-powered assistant built into the software and leveraging native data, to address that full-business need.
“As opposed to Siri, who lives in your phone, or Alexa, who lives in your home, or even ChatGPT who lives in the Internet—Atlas lives in your business,” Kuzoyan told his Pantheon keynote audience. “He completely understands your data and has the full power of ServiceTitan behind him.”
“This isn’t just an integration, it’s much more than that.”
In practical terms, Atlas removes the need to “speak ServiceTitan.”
“With Atlas, ServiceTitan speaks your language,” Kuzoyan said. “Even if it’s Armenian.”
Finding a seamless solution
Survey respondents were asked to point out their barriers to AI adoption, and lack of training and integration complexity tied for the top response, at 44% each. That was followed by difficulty understanding how to use AI tools (38%) and unclear ROI (37%).
Interestingly, only 18% of respondents cited employee resistance as a barrier.
As AI matures and becomes more mainstream for contractors, Payen expects adoption to grow.
“I don’t think (some survey respondents) have AI yet that truly helps them think about their business differently,” Payen says. “It's coming. And it’s going to lead to a world where you think about your business as what's fully automated, what's human-assisted by AI and what's fully human.”
How contractors accomplish that automation and AI integration, Payen says, is important. While the majority of contractors surveyed (59%) already use AI features embedded in their existing software, 42% are leveraging outside tools, including popular consumer solutions such as ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot, Google Gemini and others.
The questions with those standalone tools, Payen says, is whether they integrate well into business processes. The right solution, he says, includes a suite of AI automation built by a trusted partner such as ServiceTitan, with embedded AI features built to scale into the future.
“A collection of disconnected AI agents that don't understand what's happening with the others, that’s going to lead to problems,” he says. “If you have AI agents that drive demand but are disconnected from the AI agents that do your pricing, your booking, your customer support, your outreach, you're going to end up with conflicts.
“That's the biggest risk. And why the choice of platform and solution is going to be so important.”
ServiceTitan, Payen says, is building toward a product that is simpler to implement and interact with, but capable of complex actions spanning the business, from Marketing Pro to drive leads to Field Pro to empower technicians to billing and purchase orders.
“The industry is in the kindergarten AI phase,” he says. “Contractors are still doing very simple things, usually one task. With full understanding of the business and the agents, we could take complex actions across the board.
“We owe it to our customers to have powerful products that are all connected, that understand each other, and that can take action across various areas of the product to get to great outcomes.”
In other words, stop operating, start automating.
“For contractors,” Payen says, “that should be the dream.”
