AI in the trades: what changes when the paperwork disappears

A trade business has two jobs — the work and the paperwork — and AI is deleting the second one. This talk walks through which parts go first and in what order, what it does to the economics of a two-truck operation, and why the people doing the physical work are the last to be affected rather than the first.

Who this is for

Home services and field service operators, franchise networks, PE-backed roll-ups, and the software companies selling to them. Works for a room of owner-operators and for a room of executives; the examples change, the argument doesn’t.

What the room walks out with

The specific order in which admin work becomes automatable, and why that order is about judgment rather than difficulty
What happens to margin and capacity when intake and collections stop consuming owner hours
Why estimating is the interesting one — and why the knowledge is already sitting in five years of invoices
A straight answer to the question everyone in the room is actually asking about their own job

Formats

25 minutes · 45 minutes · 60-minute workshop with a working session

I built the software about three thousand contractors use to run their businesses, and a residential fund that runs every renovation through that same software. So this talk is not a forecast. It is what we have already watched happen to a specific set of very small companies, and what I think it means for the rest.

Delivered at

Oct 2025 — Dnipro AI Summit, San Francisco

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