On a Sunday night just before Christmas 2025, a furnace stopped working at a home in Northern Nevada.
The homeowner called Riley Plumbing Heating & Air. It was late. No one was in the office. No dispatcher was on duty. No one was working at all.
The call was answered anyway.
An AI voice agent took the customer's information, checked the schedule, found availability, and booked the job for the next morning — without a human touching it. The technician arrived the next day, made the repair, and installed a smart thermostat to monitor the system going forward.
Total ticket: $1,060. Captured on a Sunday night before Christmas, when most of the competition was dark.
"The AI agent was on call," says Lawrence Riley, who owns the Northern Nevada shop. "They never sleep."
That job wasn't a fluke. It was the result of a full year in which Riley's team committed to something most contractors are still debating: going all in on AI, from the office to the field.
The results were hard to argue with. Riley Plumbing Heating & Air finished 2025 with 19% revenue growth. Its call booking rate climbed 75%. Average deal size increased 170%. The shop earned Bryant Dealer of the Year after a 94% increase in HVAC system purchases — a number Riley attributes directly to not letting calls go to waste.
"I don't think a lot of contractors who don't have these tools know how many opportunities they're missing," he says.
Riley's shop now answers zero inbound calls manually. Every call is either booked online through Scheduling Pro or handled by an AI voice agent, then routed through Dispatch Pro, which finds the right technician and schedules the job automatically. There is no dispatcher.
"Who has a dispatcher that can answer five phones at once?" Riley says. "One little Pro Product to fix that. Incredible."
His team took some convincing. Riley's method: Show them what comes off their plate.
"It's not to take their jobs," he says. "We give them superpowers. It's here to enhance everything, and to make them 10 people."
In one case, an employee spent three full days every week listening to and classifying call recordings. AI now does it in minutes. Three days handed back.
When someone at Riley tries to do manually what the AI is built to do, they get a text from the boss. It contains an alien emoji. The message: Don't fight the AI.
"I send the alien emoji to my team at least once a week," Riley says.
Where the industry actually is
Riley is not typical. Not yet.
ServiceTitan commissioned Thrive Analytics to survey more than 1,000 contractors across the trades about how they're approaching the shift AI is bringing to the industry. The results, published in The State of AI in the Trades 2026, showed an industry that's optimistic but still finding its footing.
Only 12% of respondents consider themselves AI innovators. Another 34% are experimenting. The rest are somewhere between watching and waiting. Some 35% haven't used AI in their businesses at all.
The barriers are real. Lack of training and integration complexity tied as the top obstacles, each cited by 44% of respondents. Difficulty understanding how to use AI tools came in at 38%, and unclear ROI at 37%.
Interestingly, only 18% cited employee resistance — the fear contractors most often voice — as a barrier.
Most of those who have adopted AI are doing so through point solutions: a tool that writes better job summaries or sharpens the language in a marketing email. Useful. But limited.
"I don't think some survey respondents have AI yet that truly helps them think about their business differently," says Vincent Payen, ServiceTitan's senior vice president of product. "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."
The risk of doing it in pieces
Most contractors who are adopting AI are reaching for whatever's available — and 42% are using outside tools alongside their core software. ChatGPT for email drafts. A third-party answering service. A scheduling app that doesn't talk to the dispatch board.
Payen understands the impulse. But he sees the risk clearly.
"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."
Riley sees it the same way from the field. A third-party answering service, he says, might be excellent at what it does but still has limitations.
"If they can't see where all of your guys are, where the closest guy is to the closest job, and who's the best tech — it's kind of a voicemail message service," Riley says.
The power, he says, is in the connection. When the AI voice agent can see the dispatch board, and the dispatch board knows each technician's skills and location, and Field Pro gives the tech a pre-job brief before they knock on the door — that's when the automations stop being individual tools and start being a business.
"When it all works together, and the AI is talking to each other," Riley says, "it's kind of amazing."
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One step at a time
Riley didn't build all of that overnight.
Phillip Kent didn't either. The marketing director at Cooper Heating Cooling Plumbing and Electrical in the Denver area started with one automation: a single SMS campaign triggered on Day 10 of an unsold estimate.
It wasn't AI. It was a text message, sent automatically to a customer whose interest might be fading, at the moment data suggested it was most likely to matter. Kent built it in Marketing Pro, using information already in the Cooper database.
"Last time I checked, that text message campaign has gotten $1.8 million in revenue year to date," Kent says — and he said that not yet six months into 2025.
If the SMS didn't convert, the automation didn't stop. An email drip followed, with new incentives on the 14th day, the 21st and the 30th.
"It usually doesn't get that far," Kent says.
From there, he partnered with Cooper's CSR and dispatcher, Savannah Balde, to connect marketing campaigns directly to call center workflows through Scheduling Pro — customers receiving personalized texts and emails with the ability to book at their convenience, aligned in real time with the dispatch board. Then came an automated thank-you campaign that has generated 4,700 five-star reviews at a 4.8 average.
"I leverage the heck out of that," Kent says.
Cooper and Riley are at different points on the same path. Kent built one automation that worked, then built another. Riley spent a year building them all and now runs a shop where the AI handles the phones, fills the board, and coaches the technicians.
Both started with a single step. And Payen has a name for the destination.
"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."
» Looking for more? Automated marketing: Right touch, right time, right cost breaks down how automated marketing campaigns work, including the Day 10 text message sequence that generated $1.8 million in recaptured revenue.
The full ServiceTitan Automation Playbook is coming soon, a practical guide to end-to-end automation for contractors told by the operators already running it.
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