When the Cloud reshaped the digital world more than a decade ago, ServiceTitan Co-Founder and CEO Ara Mahdessian’s task was to convince contractors it was their future, but the industry was behind the curve.
With AI, he said in Tuesday’s keynote address to open Pantheon 2026 in Orlando, ServiceTitan’s task is to make sure the home and commercial services industry leads the transformation.
To that end, at Pantheon 2025, the AI-powered, self-running contracting business was a concept. ServiceTitan launched Max with 50 contractors who would help build on that idea.
A year later, Max is no longer just a concept.
Now, more than 30 AI agents draw on context across demand, field, and office to help customers better understand their business, determine what should happen next, and then execute and coordinate that work across connected workflows.
But rather than optimizing each workflow in isolation, Max can orchestrate nearly the entire business. ServiceTitan’s Max customer base will approach 700 by the end of the year, Mahdessian said.
The AI-powered Max package is now available to every residential in-home contractor, plus a limited pilot has launched for commercial and roofing contractors.
“The AI race is upon us,” Mahdessian told the thousands of contractors in attendance. “But … you are a different leader. AI is still emerging, but you are already leading — from the front. Last time, we had to convince you to catch up. This time, the trades are in a much better position.”
Big tech spent about $1 trillion over 10 years on cloud infrastructure, Mahdessian told the audience, but spent $1 trillion this year alone on the AI buildup.
“The magnitude of this investment only makes sense if AI can completely revolutionize how we operate a business – a business that runs itself, and a business that gets better every day. That is what this is all about.”
The trades example
To illustrate the importance of that point, Mahdessian broke down a residential service business into the tasks a contractor needs to get right, every day. They fall into three buckets: Generating demand, booking jobs, and selling the work.
Contractors know all those tasks matter. Doing all of them at once, and expertly all day every day, is another matter.
Human teams hit two limits: time and speed. A marketer can't re-tune ad spend every time capacity shifts.
A CSR can't take a call on one line and also answer a text within 15 seconds, before the customer turns to a competitor.
No manager can review every call and field recording to coach every employee every day.
"The only way to be great at everything, concurrently, all the time,” Mahdessian said, “is to automate it."
What a year it has been
Building a brigade of AI agents alongside Max customers, Mahdessian told the crowd in Orlando, revealed two effects:
Small gains in leads, booking rates and average ticket compound into large revenue gains.
The added revenue carries a higher margin, so profit grows faster than sales.
Mahdessian walked through a hypothetical contractor. With 10,000 leads, a 60% booking rate and an $800 average ticket, the business brings in $4.8 million. At a 10% margin, that means $480,000 in profit.
Improve each of those three metrics by 10%, and the same contractor generates 11,000 leads, books 66% of them and averages $880 a ticket. Revenue climbs to about $6.4 million.
“But the best part is, costs don’t have to increase proportionally,” Mahdessian said. “More leads from the same marketing budget, and more appointments from the leads coming in, and more revenue from the same truck rolls. A good chunk of the additional revenue from each truck goes straight to the bottom line.”
Revenue in that hypothetical only increased by 33%, he said, but profit doubled because the margin increased from 10% to 15%.
“That is how disproportionate this effect is on profit vs. revenue,” Mahdessian said. “If we can shrink the connection between revenue growth and cost growth, for the next two decades we don’t have to talk about profit margins anymore. We can celebrate them instead.”
How ServiceTitan Max helps us get there
That’s because the agents within Max will work together to get the best outcome, not just accomplish a single agent’s primary goal. There is shared context and shared judgment among the agents, Mahdessian said.
“What the voice agent hears, the dispatch agent will know,” he said. “Each agent works from the same formulas. We built a best-in-class lead scoring that predicts how much any appointment might be worth based on all the signals – what was said on the call, all the details about the home, the homeowner, the equipment and so-on. We built something similar for demand forecasting.”
Mahdessian gave an example: A customer tells the voice agent her car is stuck in the garage and she needs to drop off the kids tomorrow. The voice agent books the high-value job for that afternoon, but the dispatch agent lacks that context and sends a low-level tech.
With Max, and the voice and dispatch agents, working together, that doesn’t happen.
“That car stuck in the garage gets the senior tech,” Mahdessian said, “and he knows why he’s there.”
There is also coordinated action and arbitration, built in.
“(And) one agent can ask another to act,” Mahdessian said. “A plan no longer stops at the agent boundaries. …
“When several agents can act, the system decides which one does, based on the highest estimated value for the lowest expected cost.”
What Max means today, and for the future
What does that mean for a business?
“Outcomes improve assumptions, assumptions improve judgments, and judgments improve the next decision,” Mahdessian said. “It’s a system that gets better over time.”
Mahdessian described the path to that reality in five steps. Level 1 is asking AI within ServiceTitan. Levels 2 and 3 automate workflows. Level 4 is coordinated automation, as in Mahdessian’s example.
And Level 5, what Max ultimately enables, is a system that learns after every decision.
Most contractors on ServiceTitan, Mahdessian said, are at Level 2, where they’re automating individual workflows. He called that “the beginning of the transition” to an AI-enabled business.
The room for growth is evident, and Mahdessian said the trades are better positioned to take advantage of AI than most industries.
“The world has spent the past year asking what will AI replace?” Mahdessian said. “(Contractors) are at the bottom of that list.”
That makes the AI technology transformation distinctly different from the introduction of the cloud.
“Last time, you caught up,” Mahdessian said. “This time, you will lead.”
