Troy Beers was the last guy to the ChatGPT party.
He came to the trades during COVID to help a lifelong friend run Gardner Plumbing, and ended up buying the company in January 2026. Under his watch, the shop in Murrieta, California has grown 40% to 50% year over year.
That's where AI comes in.
Gardner runs 50 to 55 jobs a day with just a couple of people in the office. Beers knows that sustaining and scaling that kind of growth without expanding the back office requires automation. That meant shedding his resistance to AI, playing around with ChatGPT and leaning heavily into ServiceTitan’s AI suite of tools.
“I was at a Toolbox Live and (a fellow ServiceTitan customer) said it really well. He said, ‘I feel like every dollar I put into ServiceTitan, I'm investing in AI and automation.’
“And that's where we're at, too.”
One Roof
At Pantheon 2025, Beers got his first look at Max — ServiceTitan’s most complete AI-powered package built to automate a shop's entire operation, from how leads are captured and booked to how technicians are dispatched and invoices are closed.
Beers lobbied for Gardner to be one of the first shops to try it. "I was asking everybody and their mother," he said.
That same instinct — wanting everything under one roof — drove a separate decision: moving his virtual agent off a third-party platform and onto ServiceTitan. Beers named his AI virtual agent Penny Pipes, because “we're a family-owned business and we like to not take ourselves too seriously.”
Right away, Penny Pipes rid Gardner’s office of a frequent headache.
The shop works with home warranty companies whose automated systems flag status calls throughout every service window. One partner alone sends 20 jobs a day — with multiple departments often calling about the same job without coordinating.
That meant it was not uncommon to receive five calls on the same job in 10 minutes. "By the sixth call, I'm barking at them," Beers said. "(Before Penny Pipes), I was just spending all my time dealing with those types of calls — it wasn't leaving time for retail or care for customers."
Those calls no longer reach the office, thanks to Penny Pipes.
“(With Penny Pipes), the need to talk to a person is probably down to about 10% or 15% of the time,” Beers said. “Which is massive for us.”
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‘The Right Horse’
Gardner eventually upgraded to the Max Package. For Beers, Max is the logical extension of a philosophy he'd already committed to: one platform, everything connected, specialized support at every level.
"It's ServiceTitan's infrastructure that makes it all work better," he said, adding that third-party softwares don’t talk to each other, which makes them difficult to manage.
"Having everything in a very orderly fashion right in one place gives us a more complete picture of the customer experience.”
None of it, Beers said, would be possible without ServiceTitan's investment in AI and automation.
"I feel smarter every day that we picked ServiceTitan," he said. "We picked the right horse."
