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Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fast-evolving technology that can handle, or provide assists for, many of the day-to-day tasks that eat up an HVAC contractor’s time and resources, two HVAC influencers said at the recent AHR Expo.

Josh Crouch, founder of the marketing firm Relentless Digital, and Tersh Blissett, founder of the Service Business Mastery Podcast, spoke to contractors on the first day of the Expo at Chicago’s McCormick Place. The pair, who have HVAC backgrounds, said AI can be employed in an answering service or a chatbot, for outbound dialing, as a technician’s assistant, or to respond quickly to customers’ online reviews, among other tasks.

MARKETING PERSPECTIVE: Josh Crouch, founder of the marketing firm Relentless Digital, spoke during the AHR Expo about the many uses of artificial intelligence in HVAC contracting businesses. (Staff photo)

But it also needs to be used carefully, they said, as any information put into an AI-empowered program could end up in the public realm.

“AI, artificial intelligence, it can’t think for itself,” Crouch said. “It’s just repeating things that you put into it, or someone has put into a database, whether it’s a large-language model, where you have chats, or actual voice agents that are speaking.”

“Keep in mind that all that data is saved,” said Blissett. “That information is going to be available if it’s not already. ... So be very cautious (with) the information you put out there.”

Programs that can duplicate a specific person’s voice are “getting better every single week,” Blissett added, and people need to be wary of scam attempts in which the voice of someone known to them is being mimicked.

Crouch said AI can be used for business management tasks that contractors don’t necessarily want to spend time doing, or that may not be their strong points, such as answering customer calls, answering phones after hours, or conducting outbound dialing campaigns.

“Things like that are where we see a lot of use,” he said.

Blissett, who founded Service Emperor Heating Air Conditioning Plumbing Electrical in Savannah, Georgia, said his company uses AI to automatically respond to online customer reviews. Responding quickly to reviews is important and, should there be a negative review, “it’s going to add a lot of empathy and take the conversation offline,” Blissett said.

“But I haven’t actually had a one-star” review since implementing the system, he added. “So I don’t want to test that.”

AI, Crouch said, is also good for planning, gaining business insights and understanding business data quickly. “How many of you guys have done any of your planning that takes, like, two, three days?” he asked.

“So you can compress those three days into 10 minutes and then go vacation,” Blissett added later.

AI, added Crouch, “makes things faster and enhances the human ability to do their job by giving it data insights, transcriptions, things like that, so you can quickly analyze what’s going on out in the field or in your office.”

AI is not going away, the technology improves at a rapid pace, and its adoption is “gonna move way faster than the transition from Yellow Pages to digital,” Crouch said.

“And if your head’s in the sand for six months, four months, the advancements are extraordinary,” he said. “So you really want to start learning.”