This audio is automatically generated. Please let us know if you have any comments.
Alok Chanani is the co-founder and CEO of BuildOps, a software platform for commercial and industrial service contractors. The opinions are the author’s own.
The most interesting thing happening in artificial intelligence right now is not in Silicon Valley. It’s in a Dallas machine shop where a second-year technician just diagnosed a chiller problem in minutes using context that used to live exclusively in the head of a 20-year veteran.
While the tech world is tied up in knots debating whether AI will eliminate jobs, skilled trades are showing the rest of us what AI is really good at today. Not as a replacement, but as a capacity multiplier. This distinction makes all the difference in the world.
AI’s blind spot
I’m deep into conversations about AI right now. And I see two camps clearly emerging.
One is all about anxiety, the fear that AI is going to hollow out entire functions, and perhaps entire companies along with them.
The other is to do the same job, faster and cheaper.
alternative
Permission granted by BuildOps
Both miss the bigger story. There is a third reality right now, and it’s moving fast enough that by the time most leaders recognize it, the gap will be hard to close. It’s not that AI reduces what exists. Expand what is possible. The real question is not how to do the same work with fewer people. It’s what’s possible when every person on your team has capabilities that didn’t exist a year ago.
If you’re not already asking this question, you’re building your strategy around yesterday’s version of what a team can do.
How businesses are using AI today
I co-founded BuildOps, a platform for commercial contractors – the people who physically go into a building and make it work. No amount of AI will install a cooler or pull cable through conduit. The work is irreducibly human.
And that’s exactly why these workers have discovered the best use of AI in construction faster than the rest of the industry.
Because the core of their work has always been physical, the conversation was never “Will AI replace us?” Instead, long before AI made its mainstream debut, they asked, “How do we do it?” Answering that question is something AI is good at today, something that gives them a clear advantage in figuring out the best way to do physical work.
This clarity, forced upon them by the nature of the work, is the same clarity that every industry, not just construction, needs right now. Once you stop worrying about what AI takes away and start paying attention to what it adds, you’ll make better decisions, in any industry.
The construction narrative
The replacement narrative falls apart the moment you look at what is actually happening on the ground.
When we surveyed hundreds of commercial contractors last fall, 78% said AI can improve the way they work; 80% said it will be essential to stay competitive three years from now; and 81% said they feel confident in their ability to adopt it. They are not people preparing for a wave of layoffs. They are getting ready to do more.
This pattern shows up everywhere: small, focused teams trying and achieving things that were out of reach 18 months ago. Not because they got bigger. Because each person on the team was more capable.
AI is changing what a small, focused team can credibly attempt. This is happening, to some degree, in every industry. But it’s really evident in construction with on-site equipment.
Beyond cost reduction
The easy way to use AI is as a cost reduction lever. Ask him for summaries. Use it to shave minutes off a workflow. Celebrate the incremental gain.
The most difficult and important move is to treat it as an ability change.
If you go into this moment asking “How many people can I cut?” you will get a smaller company. You might hit your margin goal this quarter and then spend the next few years wondering why you’re losing market share to competitors you’ve never heard of.
If you go in asking “What can my people do now that they couldn’t do before?” it is a completely different trajectory. This is how a team of 40 people starts operating with the strength of 100.
But this only happens if you are willing to redesign the work itself. Job descriptions, team structures, even who you hire first all change when you assume that everyone on your team has access to an ever-improving skill set.
Stop measuring AI by what it removes. Start measuring it by what it unlocks.
The trades came to this conclusion before most workers because they had no choice. When someone has to be on the job fixing fasteners in place, you can’t entertain the replacement fantasy for long. You have to ask the more interesting question: How can this person do this job more effectively when I put these additional AI tools in their hands?
You should be asking the same thing right now. Because if you’re only counting what AI can pull off, you’ll miss what matters most: what your people are suddenly capable of doing.
