Let me say this without hedging: I am proud of the trades. Not as a slogan. As a field report. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, home services — the operators I work with are leveraging AI like a boss. They are outsmarting most of the vendors at this point. Staying up all hours of the night. Creating and shipping prototypes. Doing deep research. Learning faster than I have ever watched an industry learn.
I could not be more proud. And if you are still pitching them like they are behind, you are the one who is behind — the room is ahead of the stage.
What I used to see — and what I see now
I used to not be able to get contractors to read their own reports. Dashboards sat unopened. Monthly PDFs became wallpaper. The honest ones told me they did not have time — and they were right about the old format. The report was written for the agency, not for the owner.
Now I watch them do deep research on their websites: what is wrong, where the opportunities are, what the customer journey is actually doing. They feed their AI their reports and learn rapidly — asking better questions every week. That is not “playing with ChatGPT.” That is operators using AI to build judgment and tools, not waiting for a vendor webinar to tell them what they already feel in their numbers.
How they are outsmarting vendors
- Prototypes overnight. While a vendor schedules a discovery call for next month, a shop has already tested three workflows and killed two.
- Receipts over rhetoric. They ask infrastructure questions — behind the curtain — because they have burned themselves on demos ( demo ≠ product).
- Learning velocity. Deep research on their own properties beats generic “AI for business” decks. They know their entity gaps before the salesperson invents them.
- Refusal to be talked down to. Rookie speakers and costume experts lose the room fast — don’t take the mic unqualified, expert or novice.
Why that pride has a business consequence
It is also what is making them flock to CI Web Group. Not because we shout louder. Because when operators move this fast, they want a partner who already rebuilt on an intelligence layer — 320 to 38 — and who will not sell them a scraped ai.subdomain that competes with their site or a ghost retainer with no monthly work. They want builders. They recognize builders.
That flocking is a compliment to them, not a trophy for us. They raised the standard. We have to meet it.
What vendors should feel in their chest
If your product roadmap assumes the trades are slow, your roadmap is wrong. If your marketing still says “even contractors can use AI,” delete it. If your support team cannot keep up with owners who paste your own reports into an agent and find the holes, you will lose them to someone who respects their speed.
Being early used to look lonely — I know that tax. Watching an entire trade community catch the wave together does not feel lonely. It feels like the bet paying off for the people who keep civilization running.
To the owners pulling all-nighters on prototypes: you are not behind Silicon Valley. In many rooms you are ahead of the people selling you software. Keep the learning velocity. Keep the standards. The industry is better because you refused to wait for permission.
Action
Owners in the trades: keep going. Ship the prototype. Feed the report. Ask the curtain question. Demand partners who build tools, not fog. If you want that caliber of partnership, start at Work with Jennifer. If your association wants a keynote that respects how far the room has already come, book Jennifer — customized, not recycled ( what a thousand stages taught me). And if you want the letter written for the kitchen-table reader inheriting this decade, read Hands Up.