Abhishek Mathur built Facebook Live on a rooftop.
He and a small team sat on top of a Facebook building during an internal hackathon — they called it Code Under the Stars — and built the product from scratch. Billions of streams later, it's easy to forget it started that way.
Before that, he helped build the first version of .NET at Microsoft. And Office 365.
At Figma, he led the engineering push into AI.
The through line, he said on a recent episode of ServiceTitan's Toolbox for the Trades podcast, has always been the same.
"My role has been to build tools to elevate others, to make them more productive, make people more successful," he said.
It's a clean line. It also explains why ServiceTitan offered him the role — and why “Abhi” Mathur, who joined the company in March as its Chief Technology and Product Officer, said yes.
The gap is real — and it's widening
Mathur doesn't reach for cautious language when he talks about what separates contractors who are using AI from those who aren't.
"The difference is not 0.25," he said. "It's often 2X or 3X."
That tracks with what ServiceTitan is seeing in the data. According to ServiceTitan's 2026 AI in the trades report, 35% of contractors haven't used AI at all. Meanwhile, contractors who have adopted AI tools are pulling ahead on booking rates, close rates and operational efficiency in ways that are hard to close once the gap opens.
The direction of travel is clear. ServiceTitan's 2026 Commercial Specialty Contractor Industry Report, drawn from a survey of more than 1,000 commercial construction leaders, found that 38% of contractors now report measurable business impact from AI — more than double the 17% who said the same in 2025.
What AI in the trades actually looks like
For contractors wondering what purpose-built AI for the trades looks like in practice, ServiceTitan is building it.
ServiceTitan’s AI Voice Agent, available as a standalone or through Contact Center Pro, handles incoming calls around the clock: booking jobs, rescheduling, managing customer requests, all without a CSR picking up the phone. One contractor used the feature to field roughly 7,000 calls during a single January winter storm.
Second Chance Leads, available through Phones Pro or Contact Center Pro, uses AI to scan every unbooked call and flag the ones most likely to convert with a follow-up.
Dispatch Pro optimizes the board automatically, factoring in job value predictions and recent technician performance.
Atlas, the AI sidekick ServiceTitan unveiled at Pantheon 2025, lets contractors interact with the platform in plain English — asking it to run reports, dispatch technicians or surface insights — and can take direct action, like throttling marketing spend when schedules are full or triggering campaigns when demand is light.
These aren't future features. They're in use now.
Toolbox for the Trades host Jackie Aubel found that out firsthand — as a customer, not a ServiceTitan podcast host. A new condo owner in Los Angeles, she called a ServiceTitan contractor to troubleshoot her Nest thermostat and realized partway through the call that she was talking to an AI Voice Agent.
The agent booked her appointment, gathered her information and flagged the call for a human follow-up. About 15 minutes later, someone from the office called to confirm. When the technician arrived, he'd already listened to Aubel describe the problem.
"It's so helpful to me as a tech to have that information," he told her. Going back to a company without ServiceTitan, he said, felt like working in the dark.
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‘A happy contractor'
Mathur's vision for where all of this leads is disarmingly simple. When asked on the podcast to describe what a fully AI-enabled contractor looks like, he didn't reach for a technical answer.
"A happy contractor," he said, "who is mostly focused on their customers and their craft of trade — and not worried so much about demand generation, handling calls or customer escalations."
That, he said, is the destination: AI handling the logistics so contractors can do what they actually do. The tools get out of the way. The work gets done.
His advice for contractors trying to find a starting point is equally direct. Don't chase every new tool. Pick a platform, go deep, measure what it does for your business. The complexity of managing seven different vendors — each with their own login, their own support relationship, their own failure point — costs more than it saves, he said.
His framing for what that platform should feel like is telling. Not a dashboard you query. Not a report you run. Something more … human.
"The best chief of staff you could imagine," he said, "who could think about all the domains in your business — and remind you at the right time."
The goal, he said, is for AI to feel invisible, woven into the platform contractors already know.
"You should be able to talk to ServiceTitan," he said. "You should be able to get a human-like response."
For contractors still deciding whether any of this applies to them, Mathur's answer is simple: it does.
"Not doing anything," he said, "is probably not the right answer."
ServiceTitan co-founder Vahe Kuzoyan put it a different way at Pantheon 2025, before Mathur joined the company.
"Doing business without fully utilizing AI," Kuzoyan said, "is kind of like saying, 'Oh, we don't use computers at our company.'"
The contractors who figured out computers first didn't just survive the shift. They built something.
The window is open. The math is clear. The only real question left is when to start — and whether waiting another year is a strategy worth the cost.
