Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the day-to-day for contractors around the world. But with new AI tools every day asking for big investments, it's hard to weed through which technologies will truly transform your business and which ones are more of a flash in the pan.
Two masterminds behind ServiceTitan’s AI features and roadmap—Christian Posse, Vice President of Data, and Henry Cheng, Director of Pro Product Strategy—join Sena Sadeghi, Sr. Manager of Customer Programs, for a recent webinar to show you what to consider when evaluating a new AI tool and how ServiceTitan helps you succeed in the new era of AI-driven workflows.
>>Ready to see how AI can transform your business? Watch the full webinar on-demand.
In the following recap, you’ll learn:
7 areas to evaluate before working with a new AI vendor
How ServiceTitan approaches AI
7 AI features available today in ServiceTitan and Pro Products
Running Your Business Manually is Expensive and Chaotic
While ServiceTitan has helped many contractors in the trades move away from pen and paper to a digitized platform to run their businesses, others still continue to use very manual processes—despite all the new technologies on the market, Cheng says.
“We're in this whole new paradigm today, where there's a whole set of new tools and technologies [AI and Language Learning Models] that we can build to help you reach the next stage of growth and the next pinnacle of what technology can offer the trades,” Cheng says.
“Whether that’s managing your ads, lead gen, dispatching, or manually managing your price book and field diagnostics. These are all areas that are right for disruption,” he adds.
But there are also hundreds of technology providers out there every single day claiming that they can do “X, Y, and Z.” So, how do you know which AI tool will have the most benefit for your business? How do you pick the right tools to help you achieve your business goals?
Cheng says the two most important factors when choosing an AI tool fall into two buckets.
“There are AI tools that are going to replace or augment existing functionality that are core to your business. Like, ‘I’m going to start trusting AI to take calls from customers,’ or ‘I’m going to trust AI with automated dispatching,’” he explains.
“There's also another bucket of tools which is like, ‘Hey, this is amazing. I'm going to try it. If it works, that's fantastic. This is something brand new, but the downside is relatively limited.’”
7 Areas to Evaluate Before Working with a New AI Vendor
The seven things to look for in an AI partner are:
Customization
Integration
Data Privacy and Security
Ease of Setup
Legal and Compliance
Total Cost of Ownership
Future Adaptability
1. Customization
Think customization first, then AI second, Posse advises, because your AI solution can be tailored to meet your specific business needs.
“It’s actually bringing AI exactly where you are and from there, automate and then optimize,” Posse says. “The second aspect of customization is the ability for the system to learn, to learn on your data, on your process, on your behavior, so that over time it's even more tailored to what you need.”
The level of customization control also matters. Instead of fully automated or not automated at all, you should be able to decide when and how you use AI to improve business operations.
“That customization is super important,” Posse says. “You may say, ‘Hey, I'm okay for the voice agents to handle everything under the sky.’ That's one extreme. Versus, ‘Hey, I just want the low-value type of call to be handled by the AI voice agent.’ And as soon as I determine that this call is actually a high-value job, let's bring back the human person.”
Many contractors give customers a choice to either talk to an AI voice agent immediately or wait on hold a little longer to speak to a live representative, Cheng says.
“I think offering customers the choice is incredibly important,” he adds.
2. Integration
The second thing to look for in an AI Partner is deep integration.
“At ServiceTitan, we bring these technologies and we deeply integrate within our entire ecosystem. And so, suddenly, you can do things that a third-party solution that is not integrated cannot do,” Posse says.
For example, ServiceTitan’s AI Voice Agents gain immediate access to all of your company data and knowledge, including the job histories of existing customers. This integration allows you to tailor or customize the AI Voice Agents to handle that past history and answer customer calls. Or you can decide which calls are better left to your humans.
“These kinds of things you can only do if you have deep integrations,” Posse says. “Suddenly, you’re also opening, let's say, the voice agents, to all of the other cool AI solutions that we have within ServiceTitan.”
With ServiceTitan data automation, you can determine in real-time the actual value of the job as soon as a call comes in, which gives you the ability to set job-value thresholds for who handles the call, whether it’s live CSRs or an AI agent.
And deep integrations, especially those found within ServiceTitan, allow the AI tool to learn much faster, Posse adds.
3. Data Privacy and Security
When using third-party AI solutions, data privacy and security are paramount.
“You need to make sure they provide the same level of privacy and security that you expect from ServiceTitan. And that's not always the case,” Posse says.
Are they protecting your customers’ personally identifiable information? How much data are they keeping? Will they use your data and interactions to further train their AI models?
4. Ease of Setup
Your AI partner should start working for you the moment you sign up for a product, with no need to struggle through pages and pages of setups and customizations.
“It should be working out of the box, and the out-of-the-box solution should be already powerful,” Posse says. “But then, if you want to override the system, you can customize.”
With Dispatch Pro, as soon as you sign up, you can start using it to assign jobs to field technicians. With AI Voice Agents, you immediately decide when and how to use it when answering customer calls.
“The ease of setup is very important. We want the time to value to be essentially zero instantly,” Posse says.
5. Legal and Compliance
With new technology comes new regulations, but many state and federal laws are still murky when it comes to disclosure about the use of AI when dealing with customers.
Are you required to inform the customer that they’re speaking to an AI voice agent? Or that the call is being recorded? Or do you need to give customers a way out of speaking to AI?
Talk to your own attorneys for legal advice, but Cheng recommends offering a proper opt-in and opt-out for whatever AI tool you use.
6. Total Cost of Ownership
When considering the total cost of ownership, you need to compare the total amount you spend on the AI partner against its ROI.
“Sometimes, there are tools that say, ‘Oh, we're cheaper than the rest, but if it performs not as well, then your total cost of ownership and your ROI is a little off. There are also other tools that will say, ‘Oh, here's a really low rate, but then we have XYZ add-on services,’” Cheng says.
“There's myriads of costs like text-to-speech, LLM (Language Learning Models), data storage, upkeep. So, keeping in mind your total cost of ownership is really important,” he adds.
And don’t be distracted by the next new, shiny object, Posse says.
“What you really want is to be in place with a partner that will ensure that they will stay on top of the technologies, but also that they will not force you to switch all the time because that's extremely costly,” he says.
7. Future Adaptability
The final area to explore with AI vendors is their future adaptability to you and your business. Will the AI tool get “smarter” over time? Can you customize the AI tool to help your business grow?
How ServiceTitan approaches AI
“We’re not just trying to build AI tools for the sake of building AI tools, but we really want to leverage the three key pillars that we think will make a difference in your everyday lives and drive real business income,” Cheng says.
The three key pillars behind ServiceTitan’s AI tools include:
System of Record at scale—all of your customer information, job data, equipment, inventory, payments, technician skills, capacity availability, etc., reside in ServiceTitan. This allows us to tailor AI tools specifically for your business.
Closed Loop System—for every AI solution ServiceTitan offers, the accuracy, success, and output goes directly back into feeding other components of the system, creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
System of Action—ServiceTitan not only collects, presents, and manipulates your customer data, it can now perform actions based on that data.
At Pantheon 2024, ServiceTitan industry leaders promised to help contractors automate every step of the customer sales funnel, from demand generation to service delivery. And while it may have sounded like a stretch then, Cheng says, there are ServiceTitan customers doing just that on the platform today.
“The future is already here,” Cheng says.
“Marketing Pro will help them optimize their campaigns and demand gen, and once a lead comes into Marketing Pro, a customer can either book a job through Scheduling Pro on their own or call in to a voice agent that can book for them,” Cheng explains. “The voice agent in Scheduling Pro will determine the job type, the zone, the technician, and then hand it off to Dispatch Pro, where then Dispatch Pro will automatically assign the right tech to the right job.
“This isn't going to be how all businesses are going to run, but these are tools that are available to you to use when and how you choose,” he adds.
7 AI Features Available Today in ServiceTitan and Pro Products
Sadeghi says the following features are available today in ServiceTitan, as either part of the core package offerings or with Pro Products:
AI Field Assistant
Job Value Predictor
AI Voice Agents
Second Chance Leads
Equipment OCR (Optimal Character Recognition)
Financing Plan Optimizer
AI Coaching
Here’s a brief look at each:
AI Field Assistant
Think of AI Field Assistant as your technician's personal assistant out there in the field to retrieve information. Ask questions like: When was the last time we were here? Who was the last technician at this job? Are there any open estimates for this customer?
Available in the current mobile app as well as the new field mobile app.
Job Value Predictor
The Job Value Predictor tool analyzes factors like technician performance, historical job outcomes, job characteristics, and even upsell potential to estimate the expected revenue of each incoming job.
Available through Dispatch Pro, an add-on product that uses AI-powered job value predictions to decide which tech gets which job.
AI Voice Agents
AI Voice Agents—automated virtual agents powered by Titan Intelligence—are designed specifically for the trades to handle incoming calls at all hours, book jobs, reschedule jobs, or manage customer requests—all integrated within your ServiceTitan dashboard.
Available through Contact Center Pro, ServiceTitan’s full-fledged contact center solution.
Second Chance Leads
Second Chance Leads uses AI to analyze the transcripts of every unbooked call, then flags those calls deemed the most promising for rehash opportunities, Cheng says.
“Not only does it have a real impact on your business to potentially capture unbooked jobs, but it also saves hours and hours of your call center team from manually going through and reviewing each call every single day,” Cheng says.
Available through Contact Center Pro (or Phones Pro), an add-on product with new capabilities such as AI Voice Agents, unified inbox features, multichannel support, and better CSR management tools.
Equipment OCR
With Equipment OCR automation, you can now scan the nameplates of each piece of equipment and the system automatically captures and stores that information in your ServiceTitan account. This allows contractors to quickly capture model numbers, serial numbers, installation dates, and manufacturers, Sadeghi says.
Available only in the new Field Mobile App.
Financing Plan Optimizer
The Financing Plan Optimizer works to optimize the recommendations for your financing plans, based on your historical performance, using Titan Intelligence to create those tailored plans for you. Plan recommendations range from conservative (optimized for highest margins, but lower conversion rates) to balanced (optimized for higher potential returns by balancing margins and conversion rates) to aggressive (optimized for highest conversion rates, but lower margins).
“It’s that middle ground that we recommend,” Sadeghi says.
Available for GoodLeap, Greensky, and Service Finance plans with Integrated Financing.
Boost Sales with AI Coaching
Cheng says the Boost Sales with AI Coaching tool falls into the second bucket of choosing an AI vendor, “where it’s really all just icing on a cake.” This tool gives you visibility into nearly every aspect of your business operations to help you spot missed opportunities and provide better coaching to help techs close more sales.
“Most importantly, what we care about here is actually making your techs better when they're in the home with the same resources that you have,” he says.
Available through Sales Pro, an add-on product that captures and analyzes in-person interactions between your technicians and customers to identify areas for improvement.
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More ServiceTitan AI Features include:
Equipment Replacement Predictor
Automated Invoice Capture
Invoice Summary Generator
Invoice Email Generator
Benchmark Report
Ads Optimizer (Marketing Pro)
Review Response Generator (Marketing Pro)
Call Summarization and Sentiment (Contact Center Pro)
AI enabled cameras (Fleet Pro)
Price Insights (Pricebook Pro)
Auto Proposal Templates (Pricebook Pro)
Configurable Services (Pricebook Pro)
Smart Recommendations (Pricebook Pro)
>>What AI tool would you like to see ServiceTitan roll out next? Watch the full webinar on-demand to see what customers are asking for.
