What’s preventing contractors from embracing AI to help run their businesses?
According to ServiceTitan’s 2026 State of AI in the Trades survey, one of the biggest AI challenges for contractors is a lack of real-life use cases and ROI to guide them.
That’s why we invited Lawrence (Brook) Riley, owner of Riley Plumbing Heating & Air in Northern Nevada, to share his incredible story of AI-fueled growth in a recent webinar. His team fully embraced AI in 2025, from the office to the field, with ServiceTitan and Pro Products.
The result? 19% revenue growth and new levels of productivity.
In this recap, Riley joins Principal Industry Advisor Chris Hunter to discuss how his team integrated AI into their everyday workflows to grow Riley’s call booking rate, increase productivity, and drive revenue growth.
Here are some highlights from their fireside chat.
The AI Success Blueprint
To achieve success with your AI blueprint, ServiceTitan first recommends focusing on four key areas:
Optimize your ServiceTitan account
Make a list of all of your routine work
Evaluate the AI solutions that can help you improve
Build a team of advocates to power up with AI
To build a bullet-proof AI blueprint, it’s also important to understand the current state of AI in the trades. The 2026 State of AI in the Trades survey of more than 1,000 contractors across the country in various trades and roles showed only 12% consider themselves AI innovators, while another 34% are actively experimenting.
“Not that many people are actually dipping their toe in the water and trying to figure out how in the world we make this work for them,” Hunter says. “Luckily, Riley is definitely one of those AI innovators, and we’re going to hear firsthand and learn from him how to make this thing work for you.”
One of the most important questions to consider is where to implement AI and automation to help improve your key performance indicators (KPIs).
“How do you really think it can help? Because we all know AI—it can't replace contractors, but it can replace the chaos. Right? And that's exactly what it's designed to do,” Hunter says.
According to the ServiceTitan survey, 59% of contractors say they want to use it for administrative tasks, 51% for marketing and sales, and 39% for both customer service and communications and field operations.
Riley Plumbing Heating & Air focused on those four key areas described above and then fully implemented AI into all of its processes to achieve astounding growth.
“You guys have absolutely crushed it,” Hunter tells Riley.
Not only did Riley achieve 19% revenue growth, the team achieved a 75% increase in its call booking rate, a 170% increase in average deal size, and a 323 TitanScore—the current highest score of any ServiceTitan user.
Improving your TitanScore is super critical to achieving success with AI, Riley says.
“My team and I are really on board with that,” Riley says. “It’s a great barometer to watch the company.
Riley also won Bryant Dealer of the Year in 2025 after achieving a 94% increase in the purchasing of HVAC systems, which the owner attributes to not letting any calls go to waste.
Where to Start When Implementing AI
Riley suggests starting with TitanAdvisor to make sure your core ServiceTitan account is fully optimized before embracing the AI features and capabilities.
“Your core setup (job types, business units, etc.) is going to be more important than ever,” Riley says. “It's reading all your capacity, all that stuff. TitanAdvisor is a great way to get all that going. It's a road map of what to do next.
“We take it very seriously, and we have a love-hate relationship with how the points fluctuate,” Riley says. “We look at it every morning to see what we haven't done, what we need improvement on.”
For example, Riley says the business lost five points overnight recently after the team failed to respond to a recent review. He used the moment to coach his team to respond to reviews in a timely fashion, and earned those points back.
“It's a great coaching tool,” he adds. “But most of all, if we're getting to the AI stuff, a lot of these cool products won't work without your core ServiceTitan setup, and TitanAdvisor is a great way to get that dialed in. It gets you started, and takes you all the way from A to Z.”
Other ways you can lose points in TitanAdvisor include not following up with customers, entering too many materials for inventory, not setting up accurate costs, and more.
Just start clearing all of the little hurdles in TitanAdvisor and racking up points, and your progress will continually build momentum.
“Follow [ServiceTitan’s] process. Do one step at a time, and all of a sudden, you'll be there,” Riley says.
Before implementing AI features, one of the most important things you can do is to get your Adaptive Capacity strategic rules set up correctly.
With ServiceTitan, you can now use the AI-powered Atlas sidekick to set up your Adaptive Capacity strategic rules. Just email your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to gain access, and Atlas will guide you through rule creation and offer smart recommendations.
Getting this right is super important, Riley says.
“That is where your AI dispatcher is going to read all of your technicians’ [skills], where they're at, and when you're available. It can see your schedule. It can see who's busy. And then with Atlas and Adaptive Capacity, it knows when to book, and it knows when the high-value job is— in a second—without a dispatcher having to think about it.
“That's why I think it's so important to have all this core stuff set up in ServiceTitan,” Riley says. “What a peace of mind for a business.”
ServiceTitan’s integrated AI, including its AI Voice Agents, does so much more than most third-party phone-answering services. It not only answers your calls, it also helps customers book appointments and ultimately increase your revenue.
Other services might “be the best AI answering service in the world, but if they can't see where all of your guys are, where the closest guy is to the closest job, and who's the best tech, it's kind of a voice mail message service,” he adds.
The Evolution of AI in the Office
For Riley, the day-to-day routine before AI included endless to-do lists, missed calls, missed opportunities, and manual dispatching. And his team’s call-booking rate hovered way below 50 percent.
After implementing ServiceTitan’s Pro Products, including its AI Voice Agents, Riley’s call-booking rate remains consistently over 80% now.
“It’s getting better every day,” Riley says. “It’s been at 100% all day long. I’ve been watching it. And missed calls? Who has a dispatcher that can answer five phones at once? One little Pro Product to be able to fix that. Incredible.
“I don’t think a lot of contractors, who don’t have these tools, know how many opportunities they’re missing,” he adds.
To get your team on board quickly and easily, just show them how many duties can be taken off their plate if they use AI to answer calls, schedule jobs, and dispatch technicians.
“We answer zero inbound calls now. So, no one has to answer the phone at all at our company.
It's all outbound calls, all follow-up. We still need you,” Riley explains. “It's not to take their jobs. We give them superpowers.
“It's here to enhance everything, and to make them 10 people,” he adds.
In one instance, an employee spent three full days listening to and classifying call recordings. Now, AI can do it within minutes, and that employee gained three full days to do other tasks.
“Huge time saver,” Riley says.
There’s also no dispatcher at Riley Plumbing Heating & Air. All calls are either booked online through Scheduling Pro or by AI Voice Agents answering the phones, then they’re routed through Dispatch Pro, which automatically finds the right technician and schedules the appointment.
Riley’s best advice about implementing and finding success with Dispatch Pro?
“Stick with it, learn it, and let it do it. Just put the call on there and let it be. If you're set up correctly and your core is down, it will do what any human can do, in a second—dispatch the closest, the correct tech to the right job, ” he says.
Pay attention to your job types, job duration, and job skills for each business unit. Then, set up your Adaptive Capacity strategic rules before implementing Dispatch Pro.
“When you get to Dispatch Pro, you're going to see how that all works with your capacity,” Riley explains. “And, eventually, when you’ve got all these little hurdles done, when it all works together, and the AI is talking to each other, it's kind of amazing.”
In addition to AI features, Riley uses ServiceTitan automations for automatic call booking confirmations via text and email, payment collection reminders, marketing campaigns, and even to craft persuasive sales texts when customers inquire through SMS.
The Evolution of AI in the Field
Riley also utilizes Field Pro to gain better visibility into his technicians’ performance.
Field Pro provides pre-job briefs that include relevant information, such as:
How much the customer has spent with the company
Sentiment from the customer’s past three CSR calls
Customer concerns
Open estimates
Once the tech enters the home, the field app automatically starts recording the interaction. For diagnostics, the app allows field techs to scan the nameplate on equipment to find the exact model and serial number. They can then use the AI agent, Ask Atlas, to sift through the equipment records and find the information needed to proceed with the diagnostic process in a matter of seconds.
Riley also uses Field Pro to quickly find out whether a technician makes the right offers to a customer simply by pulling the recording and asking it to summarize the information in bullet points.
“It bullet-pointed me right to the point. My guy did offer it. He did his job, and I didn't talk to the customer or my technician. And I didn't even have to listen to the call recording,” Riley says. “That’s a time-saver.
“And, again, superpowers for the technician.”
Atlas for Adaptive Capacity is part of the core ServiceTitan package. AI Voice Agents, Scheduling Pro, Dispatch Pro, Field Pro, and Marketing Pro are add-ons. Ready to get started? Schedule a demo today!
Four Pillars of AI
When considering which AI platform to adopt, ServiceTitan recommends looking at the following four pillars:
Is it integrated and native with the software you’re using? ServiceTitan only accesses the data within your account; so good information in, good information out.
Does the AI offer privacy and security for all of the information in your account? At ServiceTitan, your privacy and security are top priorities.
Does AI improve and close the loop on your workflow intelligence? Or is it only good at one part, but not the whole thing? ServiceTitan connects the dots for the entire process, from marketing lead to the follow-up happy call and everything in between.
Is the AI easy to implement? Our goal at ServiceTitan is to make it as easy as possible.
Riley’s AI Automated Workflow
Here’s an example of how an HVAC service call went for a Riley Plumbing Heating & Air customer on a Sunday night, right before Christmas 2025.
A customer called to report her furnace wasn’t working.
The AI Voice Agent answered her call and automatically scheduled it for the next morning through Dispatch Pro.
The tech dispatched to the job the next morning, and he arrived with the Field Pro app to record the interaction.
The technician made the HVAC repair and installed an AI-smart thermostat to monitor the system.
Total ticket = $1,060.
On a typical Sunday before the holidays, no humans are working at Riley, and this type of call probably would have gone unanswered. With AI, Riley answered the call, booked the job, and captured a new opportunity.
“The AI agent was on call. They never sleep,” Riley says, and the AI thermostat helps him monitor his customer’s future HVAC needs.
The customer certainly appreciated his company’s prompt service in this 5-star review:
And Riley sent the customer a review request using Marketing Pro, and then responded via automation.
After utilizing Field Pro to analyze the service call, Riley and the tech reviewed the strengths, growth areas, and next steps for the interaction.
So, after fully embracing AI and ServiceTitan Pro Products for an entire year, Riley achieved incredible success.
“When they used Dispatch Pro alone, their average ticket increased 170% over what it was manually before. He's focusing on TitanAdvisor because TitanAdvisor is leading him down the path of what's improving his business and what's working, what's not, what can be improved on,” Hunter says. “It's his daily gauge of how to make this thing happen.”
To make it all work seamlessly with full team buy-in, Riley says explaining “the why” is super important.
“You’ve got to explain why we're implementing this, what it's going to do, and what superpowers it's going to give you,” Riley says. “I send the alien emoji to my team with the ‘Don't fight the AI’ text at least once a week. If I see anybody trying to fight the AI or doing a manual task, I send them the alien emoji.”
And finally, nominate a ServiceTitan champion to your team. Ask them to complete the ServiceTitan Certified User Program, so it’s not just you with all of the knowledge.
“If they don't understand, they're going to fight it,” Riley says.
