By the time the launch of ChatGPT put the earliest capabilities of Artificial intelligence (AI) into the public consciousness in November 2022, ServiceTitan was already aggressively pursuing the benefits of the technologies for the trades.
The goal? Bringing cutting-edge capabilities to home and commercial services contractors, based on data compiled from the best in the industry—ServiceTitan customers—as quickly as possible, to transform businesses in the trades.
Recently, ServiceTitan brought together a virtual roundtable of some of those within the company charged with using Artificial Intelligence and other technology to make every contracting business job easier and more intuitive, and every employee much more productive.
They include ServiceTitan Vice President of Data Christian Posse, Senior Vice President of Product Vincent Payen, Vice President of Product Tamar Rosati, Senior Director of Product Management Deanna Kawasaki, and Principal Product Marketing Manager Melani Deyto.
One thing that became clear from the conversation: For artificial intelligence to truly benefit the trades, it can’t just be bolted on. It must be built into the bones of a business, tied to every process, and able to communicate and enable the next step across functions.
Why? Because while the Generative AI that most are familiar with, such as ChatGPT, uses databases and sources to generate text, video, images or computer code, Agentic AI can execute tasks, implement autonomous actions, and make decisions, all subject to human intervention.
ServiceTitan is not tiptoeing into AI. The strategy involves transforming everything about the trades and how contracting businesses are run.
That change demands transparency. How will ServiceTitan implement AI within the product? What are the guardrails? And why is all this necessary?
Those are the questions our panel set out to answer.
Where is AI today in terms of the overall picture in technology?
Christian Posse: “It’s important to remember that not everything is GenAI, or agentic AI. There are amazing technologies that change the game that have nothing to do with GenAI. This is just part of what we're doing. If you use AI in a very smart way, though, you can drive significant change.”
Tamar Rosati: “That’s a great point. All the products I've built over my career in technology have been in service of industries that operate in the real world. I think there's a lot of buzz around AI, a lot of putting stuff out there for the sake of having something AI out there.
“My mindset is that not every problem is perfectly shaped for a GenAI or Agentic AI solution. Other types of automations or data science models may be better tools to solve the problem.
“What problem is that AI solution solving for customers? That's the only thing I think about as I am helping to shape the AI roadmap within my areas.”
Christian Posse: “We’re forecasting, seeing the future. It's an evolution. But at ServiceTitan we are moving naturally, without doing a big 180. It's a continuation of that message from three years ago, two years ago, one year ago, with Titan Intelligence."
When you think of AI in the trades, what does success look like?
Christian Posse: “Everything is very data driven. We ask our customers all the time. 'Did that change your business? Do you see an improvement in your average ticket?' So success is very data-driven, very customer-centric, and the technology has to work."
Vincent Payen: "We're not thinking about AI as, 'Let's do marketing automation or let's do contact center automation.' We're thinking about AI as, let's automate business functions, things that a human would actually do. We have been putting together the puzzle pieces over the past few years to achieve this, which is very different than “simple” point solution workflow automation."
What difference does it make when an AI solution is native to a single data set, rather than using outside solutions?
Vincent Payen: Native AI will have a significant advantage versus what a third-party AI can do because of the data access, the ability to tie actions to outcomes for optimization proposes and the ability to perform complex actions requiring multiple parts of the product to be orchestrated. We’re in a phase right now where thousands of AI startups are trying to solve point solutions. Our belief is that the magic is going to come from the connection of this AI, and the connection of these agents, to our internal data, because the standalone, out-of-system agent that doesn’t have access to ServiceTitan data is always going to be limited in the context it has and the actions it can take."
Tamar Rosati: “Exactly. What ServiceTitan is doing is different from a Gemini or a ChatGPT, or even some of these AI coding tools where you're starting from a blank canvas and you're doing research or building a new website using Generative AI. Integrating Agentic AI into actual real life workflows is a totally different ball game."
Deana Kawasaki: “With AI, everything's about data. ServiceTitan is sitting on just a monolith of data already, everything from user behavior, buyer behavior, pricing replacements. …
Melani Deyto: "We know what happens from the moment a lead comes in all the way through, what actions were taken, and whether they succeeded or failed. It's a closed-loop system, and all those data points are unique to the trades.”
Tamar Rosati: “And that data comes from everywhere: capacity, scheduling, dispatching, technician performance. There's so much optimization of the business that's possible because machines are good at looking across everything and coming up with recommendations or optimizations that a human wouldn't be able to come up with.”
How should contractors think about the role AI will play in their businesses in the future?
Christian Posse: “You have to keep up and position yourself at the forefront, not be reactive or be following a fad that will change next year. Last year was LLM, this year it is Agentic AI. Who knows what it's going to be tomorrow? It's changing that fast.
“With Agentic AI, a lot of partners will tell you about what I call a localized experience. You talk to Vincent (Payen) about all of what he wants to do, and he will give you the whole spiel. He’s tying AI together in a way that is bigger, and can be bigger, because we control the data set.”
Vincent Payen: “I truly believe that we are in a transformative moment for the trades. Ford introduced assembly lines to car making in 1913 and transformed the car industry in the process. I would approach this similarly — there is an incredibly powerful, new way of running trades businesses. It is not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when” to embrace the change. So contractors should think about where they are today, be very clear about the end state they want and start adopting AI to get there with real intent as I believe it will be existential for most businesses.”
Christian Posse: “We said, 'Hey, this is part of what we're doing, and how we're doing it.' But if you use AI in a smart way, you can change the game.”
Tamar Rosati: ““I’ll give you an example. A technician driving to a job can listen to a summary of what’s going on with the customer, thanks to AI, but once they’re onsite, they still have to fill out a form. Their hands might be dirty, and they’re having to take out their phone and fill in a bunch of information.
“Imagine if they just had their headphones in and could just speak through their inspection and their evaluation? They’re narrating as they go, and that's populating all the critical details about that job.
“And then imagine AI taking that and auto-generating the estimates. I don't know how many clicks that takes in the app, but it's a lot. We can change that.
“We want technicians applying their expertise, not doing a bunch of busy work on every single job. We need to pull the basic automation of tasks into the core product.
“But that's only the first hierarchy of value. I think the next hierarchy of value is actually where we produce differentiated outcomes and decisions because AI has this unique ability to connect the dots across multiple aspects of the operation.”
All of this seems like it’s moving very fast …
Vincent Payen: “Yes, but we feel like we have the foundation of a product that has been built for the past 10 years, ServiceTitan, that effectively creates a fertile bed to actually develop these initiatives.
“And the fact that we have these new capabilities and have the chance to work on that product is pretty fascinating.”
We’ve talked about the benefits. What do we need to protect against?
Christian Posse: "When you think about using AI in a product, you have to be in measuring the ROI. I'm spending a lot of time just thinking about one thing – hallucinations.
“Perhaps the next generation of AI will solve that, but not this one, so I spend 90% of my time saying, 'How do I prevent that?' It's not fun, it's not sexy, but that's how I'm spending 90% of my time.
“If you think about it, the agentic experience is real-time, it's customer facing. You can't mess up. You cannot have a hallucination in the middle of it."
Tamar Rosati: “That also speaks to the speed aspect. There's a lot of stuff that’s put out there for the sake of having something AI out there. And my mindset is that not every problem is perfectly shaped for AI to solve it.
“I'm very focused on finding those really unique opportunities where AI is perfectly shaped to solve this problem, and taking more of a customer problem back lens.”
At Pantheon in 2022, ServiceTitan CEO Ara Mahdessian addressed AI in the trades, introducing Titan Intelligence. He outlined that day how the product would implement AI technology: Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly. With Agentic AI entering the ServiceTitan product, where are we on that scale right now?
Vincent Payen: "I think we're in between walk and run. I think you're going to see us feel like we're running in the next 12 months, and I think fly is likely.
“But the definition of fly is going to change. Maybe we'll be thinking we're flying, and there will for sure be new capabilities enabling new features and new heights to achieve, and we're going to be, 'Actually, maybe we were just running.' “
Melani Deyto: “AI is going to change everything about the trades, about how businesses are run. This is a new tool set. These are tools that give businesses the opportunity to succeed wildly, if they adopt the tool set we're giving them."
Christian Posse: “But it’s not just about the existence of AI. It’s about the fact that AI is the tool that gives us the opportunity to solve problems we couldn’t solve before.”
Deanna Kawasaki: “We’re not limited by what’s possible, we’re only limited by how quickly we can deliver those possibilities.”
Vincent Payen: “We're extremely lucky to be working in this industry at a time. There is an immense business appetite for transformation, we have technology capabilities that we couldn't dream of two years ago and we are building them on top of a closed loop system that's both the data source of truth and system of action allowing us to deliver game changing AI experiences… and we’re just getting started!
