Foreword

There is a contractor sitting at their kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon.

It is the only quiet hour they will get all week. The trucks are parked. The phone has stopped ringing. Their kid is in the next room. There is a coffee that has gone cold next to the laptop. And on the screen, in another tab they keep clicking away from and clicking back to, is an article about how some new AI tool is going to write a thousand service descriptions in a minute, or answer the phone in their voice, or schedule the next twelve months of jobs without asking permission, or something else they do not entirely understand.

And they are sitting there wondering whether the business they spent twenty years building is about to be either saved or finished by something they cannot see, did not ask for, and do not yet know how to evaluate.

That contractor is who I am writing this book for.

If you are that contractor: I have been working alongside you for twenty years. My company, CI Web Group, has served thousands of home service, trades, and contractor businesses across the United States since 2006. We work with HVAC companies, plumbers, electricians, roofers, garage door techs, and the suppliers who serve them. Daikin selected us as a preferred digital marketing partner in 2008. Ferguson selected us as a preferred digital marketing partner nationally. Service Nation — the largest trade association in the home service industry — recently selected us as a digital marketing and technology partner. We work with over one hundred independent distributors across the country. We have helped over one thousand customers across most of the United States and Canada. We have been a home service, trades, and contractor agency since the year my son was eight years old, and we have not done anything else since.

I have spoken on over a thousand stages in those twenty years. I have written a new presentation every single time. There is no recycled keynote in my catalog. Every audience I have stood in front of — in convention centers, in hotel ballrooms, in distributor showrooms, in association meetings from one coast to the other — got a presentation that was built for them, the week of the event, on the most current state of the industry I could give them. I am telling you that not because the number is impressive but because it is the most accurate single description of how I work. I do not repeat myself. I do not coast. The book in your hands is the same way. It will be different next year because the industry will be different next year, and I will rewrite it for you, the way I rewrite the keynote for every audience that asks me for one.

There are very few people on the planet who have spent more time inside this industry, watching how technology arrives in it, than I have.

Four years ago, I made a bet that the rest of my industry thought I had lost my mind for making. I exited paid search and social media management, two of the largest and most profitable service lines in the agency industry, and I told my team, my clients, and my industry that CI Web Group was going to focus on building our own web infrastructure, local SEO, AI search, and agent optimization — years before that was even a thought in anyone’s mind. Then I right-sized my own company, ahead of the wave I knew was about to break across the entire services economy: from 320 people to 250. From 250 to 140. From 140 to the 38 I am writing this with — a powerful 38 who chose this ride. Thirty-eight people who chose to evolve instead of defend, who challenge themselves, challenge each other, and challenge the status quo daily, who have reinvented themselves and everything we are, everything we do, everything we build, everything we ship. I have looked across a table at people whose work was about to be done by an agent and told them the truth about what was coming. I have sat with the people who survived that transition and the ones who did not. I know which version is which, and I know why.

I am not writing this book from the outside. I am writing it from inside the cab of the truck. From behind ten screens of code and AI agents. From both positions at once. That is the only place from which the next decade of this industry can honestly be written about, and it is where I have built my career to be standing.

I should also tell you why I am writing it now.

CI Web Group turned twenty years old on January 13, 2026. I turned fifty the year the agency turned twenty. Years ago, sitting at a desk in Dallas, I wrote a goal on the calendar: when the agency hit twenty years and I turned fifty in the same window, I would write the book. That was the deal I made with myself. It was the kind of deal I have made with myself before, and the kind I have always honored. The first one was that I would be an entrepreneur by the time I turned thirty. I left corporate the week before I turned thirty and launched CI Web Group three months later. I will tell you about that goal, and how I built the agency around it, in Chapter Three.

This book is the second goal.

I am writing it on the calendar I set myself years ago, in the year both milestones converged, exactly when I told myself I would. I want you to register that, because it is the most concise statement I can make about how I operate. I set goals on the calendar. I hit them on the calendar. The book in your hands is the latest piece of evidence of that pattern. The operating arguments inside the book are arguments I have made under that same pattern. If you want to know whether to trust what I am about to tell you about the next decade of the trades industry, the strongest single piece of evidence I can offer is that the book exists at all, on the deadline I set myself two decades ago, ahead of any other promise I might make in these pages.

I am operating, in other words, on a clock my father and my mother both taught me to honor. They are why this book is on time.

One last thing before this Foreword closes, because I want you reading the rest of this book with the right expectations. I have not figured this out. CI Web Group has not figured this out. The five operators I am going to name as the leadership coalition for the trades industry have not figured this out. The AI transition is not the kind of problem that gets figured out and stays figured out. The technology shifts every quarter. The consumer behavior shifts every quarter. The competitive landscape shifts every quarter. The operators who are succeeding in this environment are succeeding because they have built operational discipline for living inside the not-yet-figured-out, not because they have arrived somewhere stable. We are fully building and rebuilding in flight. Speed and data are our advantage. We ship the heaviest-lift work first, even when it is imperfect, gather the data on whether it is working, and rebuild based on what the data tells us. We pivot fast. That is the operating philosophy underneath everything in this book.

Read this book as a snapshot of what I have learned so far, not as a finished playbook. I will be wrong about specific predictions. I will be wrong about specific timing. I will probably be wrong about some of the specific operators I am about to credit, and right about some of the specific operators I am about to critique, in ways the next two years will reveal. The directions are right. The directions are what I am asking you to absorb. The specifics are my best read of a moving target, offered honestly, with the acknowledgment that the target will keep moving after the ink dries.

Here is what I am going to give you between this Foreword and the last page.

I am going to tell you, in plain language, exactly what I think is going to happen to the trades industry in the next twenty-four months. I am going to tell you which kinds of contractors I expect to win the AI decade and which kinds I expect to lose it. I am going to tell you the specific moves I made at my own agency — the ones that worked, the ones that did not, and the ones I am still in the middle of. I am going to introduce you to the technologies that actually matter for a contractor in 2026 and 2027 — the ones worth paying attention to right now, the ones worth waiting six months on, and the ones worth ignoring entirely. I am going to give you the framework I now use to evaluate every new AI tool that lands on my desk, which is roughly twenty per week. And I am going to tell you, by the end, what I would do if I were starting your business over from scratch in the world we are all about to be operating in.

By the time you finish this book, you will know what to do on Monday morning.

That is the promise.

By the time you finish this book, you will know what to do on Monday morning.

Now — if you are not a contractor, but you have one in your life, or you run a different kind of small or mid-sized business that is staring down the same wave, or you are an employee whose job is starting to feel less stable than it did a year ago, or you are a parent thinking about what kind of career your children should be preparing for in a world that does not yet have words for the jobs they will hold: this book was written for you too. The contractor at the kitchen table is the audience I built it for. The rest of you are welcome to read over their shoulder, and what they take away from this book will be useful to you in your own version of the same questions.

This is the first edition of a letter I plan to write every year for the rest of my career.

Each edition will add what we learned, what we lost, and what we built — the milestones, the misfires, and the moments that turned out to matter more than we knew at the time. Eventually this letter will become a record of how an industry made it through the steepest technological transition in human history. Written in real time. By someone inside the change rather than reporting on it from a distance. I am committing, in print, to writing you again next year. And the year after. And the year after that, for as long as I am able.

There is a reason I am writing it that way, and the reason has a name.

His name is Dallas Kevin Bagley-Slone. He is my grandson. He was born on October 19, 2025, six years and thirteen days after my father, his great-grandfather, died on October 6, 2019. Dallas is the youngest member of the family this book is also about. He is too young right now to read any of this. By the time he is old enough, the world he is growing up in will already have rearranged itself around technologies that did not exist when he was born.

I want him to have an honest record of what this era felt like from the inside. I want him to know what his great-grandfather built, what his grandmother built, what his father is building, and what his mother and his father’s best friend are building right now in the next room. I want him to know what we got right and what we got wrong. I want him to know that we were aware of him while we were making the decisions that would land on him.

This book is part of that record.

It is also, I should tell you honestly, the most personal book I will ever write. It is the story of my father’s life, my grandson’s arrival, and the twenty years of work in the middle that I have given my career to. It is grounded by Kevin Michael Bagley’s patience and awakened by Dallas Kevin Bagley-Slone’s arrival, with everything in between being the work that runs between them. I am writing this book because nobody else can. The line of this book runs through four people, and I am the one in the middle who is still standing and still able to write it down.

So — to the contractor at the kitchen table — here is what I want you to do.

Read this book in the next seventy-two hours. Mark it up. Argue with it. Take it to your team meeting on Monday and put it on the table and tell them what you are going to do differently because of it. Then come find us at JustStartAI — the community of more than a thousand contractors who are doing exactly what this book describes, in real time, alongside each other. The book is the map. The community is the road. You should not have to walk the road alone, and you do not have to.

To everyone else — read it the way you would read a letter from a friend who has been a few steps further down the road than you and is doubling back to walk with you.

This is Letter One.

There will be more.

— Jennifer L. Bagley

May 2026