“By a show of hands,” Vishal Laddha asked The Roofing Process Conference crowd, “How many of you have tried and/or implemented AI in your current businesses?”
Laddha, the senior director of exterior strategy at ServiceTitan, peered into the audience of roofing contractors and noticed that roughly 40 percent were raising their hands.
“Kudos to you,” Laddha said. “Because you need to figure out what you need to do, right now, in order to set yourself up for success in the future.”
That was the sentiment of ServiceTitan co-founder/CEO Ara Mahdessian’s and Laddha’s keynote session, as both reiterated the importance of automation and leaning into AI — and doing so from one main source.
Mahdessian listed multiple AI tools that contractors might already be using to help them increase revenue and decrease cost: sales coaching tools, tools to optimize ad spend, AI voice agents and tools that automate purchasing, scheduling and payments.
“(But) you guys (need to) have a central command center to manage all those automations from,” Mahdessian said. “Because all those things will start to interfere with each other. It'll take way too much effort for you guys to set up and manage. Then, the cost of complexity will overwhelm the value from automation, and so (utilizing AI and automation) in one, centralized way is going to be very important.”
Laddha has seen this challenge play out in real time.
Before joining ServiceTitan in 2025, he spent eight years at GAF, where he brought technology to contractors like GAF QuickMeasure, GAF WeatherHub and GAF ScopeConnect to name a few.
“We built tool after tool. But guess what? All of those tools didn't talk to each other,” Laddha said.
He saw contractors use that technology along with other tools for lead generation, marketing, sales coaching and back office.
“Contractors would bolt on tool after tool into their business, but the data wasn't syncing across all of them,” Laddha said. “Either it was a manual process of moving data from one system to another, retyping in the homeowner's name, the address, the details of the sale. That leads to errors. That leads to a very manual process that takes time.”
Seeing that challenge is a big reason why he joined ServiceTitan.
“I saw the vision of an end-to-end, single platform,” Laddha told the crowd. “That is one thing that the (roofing) industry is lacking: a true end-to-end, single platform. I learned about how much (ServiceTitan is) investing into the future, in terms of automation and AI. I was like, ‘This is going to be the dominant platform, and I want to be there as they do that.’”
The software, which first started in plumbing, HVAC and electrical, is a great industry fit, Mahdessian explained.
“Roofing is very much about winning at the sales and marketing game,” Mahdessian said. “In retail, that might be digital ads or another form of advertising, and in insurance, that'll be canvassing, whatever your source of marketing is, and the selling piece. That's where ServiceTitan is the strongest.
“But the secret sauce is how ServiceTitan really helps contractors become way more effective marketers, generate far more leads and revenue for whatever their marketing investment is, and then separately help them become really, really good at selling with high close rates and high average tickets.”
As for the investment piece? Mahdessian told the crowd that ServiceTitan represents the biggest investment in the trades when it comes to research and development.
“We spend a quarter of a billion dollars each year just on product development,” he said.
And a lot of that investment and focus comes in the form of AI and automation.
“One thing I believe that contractors can do now is start thinking about the future,” Laddha said. “How are you going to streamline your data, end-to-end? The only true way to do that is to have a single platform.
“Because as you think about automation and AI, it's only as powerful as the data it can read.”
