Solving the Three Layers of Predictive Maintenance in Commercial Trades

The equipment never goes down. That's the pitch reshaping how the trades think about service.

Not repair. Not maintenance plans. Uptime — sold, delivered, and guaranteed.

Leila Rookstool, senior industry advisor for commercial at ServiceTitan, comes to this conversation with four generations of trade in her blood. Her great-grandfather ran a coal company that became a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing business — pen-and-paper service calls giving way to data-driven diagnostics.

"AI is fruitless without that strong data foundation."

Rookstool frames predictive service around the customers with the most at stake — the ones on service agreements. "I really look at it through the lens of the experience that we're creating for service agreements customers."

Evan Smith, group product manager at ServiceTitan, spent years building conversational AI for Best Buy before making the jump. He sees predictive service extending past the traditional work order life cycle — scheduling, diagnosis, parts, close-out — into something closer to a standing promise.

"One way to express the future is in terms of uptime as a service, where the customer is not paying for on-demand service… What the customer is paying for and expecting from the contractor is that their equipment is never down."

Technicians already benefit from this shift. Make-and-model context now travels with them before they arrive on site.

"A technician can walk in not with a blank slate or starting from scratch, but instead are starting from the most high probability recommendation of what they're probably gonna find there."

Speed matters as much as accuracy. Two contractors can offer identical maintenance plans — same price, same coverage — and the faster one wins the account.

"The contractor who delivers the proposal to the customer first is gonna win."

Rookstool ties it back to data discipline.

"I'm proud to be part of a team that recognizes garbage in, garbage out."

Smith describes Atlas flipping the daily routine for business owners entirely.

"Instead of asking the question, 'What should I pay attention to today?' ServiceTitan and Atlas effectively telling the business owner, 'Here's what you should pay attention to and why.'"

Rookstool's closing thought cuts straight to what's broken today.

"Let's stop operating in these disparate spaces and let's bring all of this together… I would just say let's kill the disparity."

Leila Rookstool and Evan Smith recently joined Amanda Salvatore on the "Toolbox for the Trades" podcast to discuss:

• [6:22] The trades’ evolution from reactive to predictive service and what that looks like in practice

• [13:27] How ServiceTitan is helping move the industry closer to predictive services through as shared data foundation

• [19:45] Confronting existing data gaps that prevent contractors from utilizing true predictive analytics

• [25:07] Why the future of the trades will focus on uptime as a service over repair

To hear more stories from the trades, subscribe to Toolbox for the Trades on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.

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