The main reason Dalber Soto drove 20 hours from his home in Rogers, Ark., to the 2026 International Roofing Expo (IRE) in Las Vegas can be summed up in two letters.
“AI,” Soto said with a laugh.
By attending his first-ever IRE, the owner of Leak Solutions & Roofing hoped to bring back plenty of useful tips and information — especially around artificial intelligence — to the shop he’s been leading for just over a year.
“There are so many different types of AI. What is the best option?” Soto said. “It’s overwhelming and it’s a lot. But it’s also really exciting and helpful.”
For Soto and every other IRE attendee, those feelings were on full display.
Of the more than 700 exhibitors at the Las Vegas Convention Center, countless were selling their version of the technology, and almost 10 breakout sessions were dedicated to the topic, stressing its importance and the need to adapt quickly. And while each vendor and speaker had their own take on how AI will impact roofing, everyone agreed on one, integral factor:
AI is only as good as the data you put into it.
“With the advances in technology that are happening around AI and automation, people are starting to realize that having all of your data in a single ecosystem is very important in order for AI to be able to optimize your business end-to-end and seamlessly orchestrate between different automations," Vishal Laddha, Senior Director of Exterior Strategy at ServiceTitan, said at IRE.
“If it can’t read the data end-to-end, it doesn’t know what happened after a certain stage.”
That’s why a common topic among the breakout sessions focused on easily accessing data across your business.
“How many of you have a weekly scorecard where you’re entering certain KPIs of marketing?” Anissa Westfall, the Chief Marketing Officer at Westfall Roofing in Tampa, FL, asked the crowd during her session about marketing tips when times are tough. Only a few hands raised.
“Every single week, as the CMO, I go through five or six KPIs, such as leads, phone calls, new website visitors, etc.”
During Scott Siegal’s talk about what to consider when adding new product lines, the president of the Certified Contractors Network stressed knowing your numbers first.
“Everything should have a system and a process to it. From sales, marketing, production, operations, financials, KPIs, you need to understand the metrics behind whatever product or service you’re thinking about adding,” he said.
Later, he doubled-down on that point.
“If you want to scale your company, you want to scale the sales and grow your profits, you need to understand it completely and it needs to be simple.”
That’s the key, Laddha explained: Simple.
“Contractors are starting to understand the value of a true, single, end-to-end platform, and not piecing together three, four or five different softwares,” Laddha said on the Roofers Coffee Shop podcast at IRE.
That includes AI. ServiceTitan’s 2026 Roofing & Exteriors Market Report revealed that only 4% of exterior contractors use AI features built directly into their CRM, while 25% use external LLM tools (such as ChatGPT or Gemini).
Those who are using AI built within their CRM have a head start, Laddha explained. Because with clean and easy-to-access data from one central platform, the AI can do the rest. ServiceTitan’s AI sidekick, Atlas, is doing just that for ServiceTitan customers.
“To be able to log into your platform in the morning and say — ‘How did I perform yesterday? Which sales reps had the highest close rates?’ — without having to create custom dashboards, without having to create reporting that comes to you. The AI can just give you that information now,” Laddha said.
And that’s just now.
“The technology landscape is going to evolve very rapidly, especially over the next six to 12 to 18 months in the roofing space,” Laddha added. “That’s why ServiceTitan has made it a core priority to embed AI into our platform.”
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