AI For The Trades

Trade businesses keep our world running, but most of them operate on painfully thin margins. We talk with Fred Voccola CEO from Simpro Group about what happens when you bring practical AI to the job site and the back office, not as hype, but as an operating platform for the trades that helps contractors finish more work right the first time.

We get specific about where the ROI shows up fast: cutting “retreads” (repeat visits) by improving job prep, making sure the right technician arrives with the right materials, and optimizing routes and scheduling. Fred breaks down how AI agents can act like affordable digital staff, doing the kind of job-prep, collections follow-up, documentation, and optimization work that only huge companies can normally afford. The payoff is better job profitability, fewer wasted truck rolls, and a real chance to move from 5% to 7% profit margins toward something closer to 20%+.

We also dig into customer experience and why service expectations are rising. With ambient listening and automated documentation, the system can capture the “little” details that matter, then prep the next technician with the right context. Finally, we look at the next generation of skilled trades workers, including real-time training support via wearables, plus a preview of Simpro Lightning and its new AI brain and agents.

If you care about AI in construction, field service management, job site productivity, and the future of skilled trades, listen, share this with a contractor friend, and leave a review with your biggest question about AI on the job.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everybody, fascinating chat today with SimCro Group as we talk about the use of AI in the trades and on job sites and beyond and day-to-day operations, an area kind of overlooked in the media these days. Fred, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Doing good, having great. Thanks for having me and super pleased to be here, joining you from lovely Miami, Florida, where the weather's always great and life is good.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

One of my favorite spots, of course. Um, before that, how do you describe SimPro Group these days and your mission?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Yeah, so at SimPro, uh, we're we're a software company, and we are the leading provider uh in the world, actually. We have about 22,000 uh contractors or trades folks, mostly commercial contractors. And what we do is we provide an AI-powered operating platform for the trades. So what that means is we're leveraging uh a lot of the technologies that are available in AI to provide an end-to-end true operating platform that allows commercial trades and some residential trade businesses to run much more efficiently, to generate much more revenue. And fundamentally, what we're doing, Evan, is we're taking this industry, which is an important industry, right? The trades are the second responders of our society. A lot of people don't think about it that way. But you know, when something bad happens, after the police, the fire, and healthcare go in, you got to get the power on, you gotta get the water out, you got to do those things. The trades people are who are doing it. And these in critical, these critical like businesses, they run at like a five to seven percent profit margin on average. And that's that's tough. A lot of our customers, or not our customers, but a lot of trades businesses, especially on the commercial side, they're one or two bad months or one or two lost customers away from not being able to make payroll. So, what we do, our operating platform, it changes the unit economics of the entire industry. And it by through automating a lot of workflows and optimizing a lot of workflows, we can talk about in a moment, which is only possible through AI, it changes the profit margins and grows them from six to around 20 to 25 percent. Wow, and that I mean that's big difference. If you're a five million dollar business, say you're a commercial HVAC company, you're a five million dollar business, and you're making$300,000 a year of profit, and now you're making$1 million of profit. That that changes a lot of things. You can invest in your people, you can invest in your business, you have a security blanket. So if your largest customer leaves, you're not you know at risk of having to lay people off. And and we do that, and we do that with the power of AI. And it's an exciting time to be at Simpro. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

And where are you seeing the most immediate ROI when trade businesses adopt your AI-driven tools? What's the uh low-hanging fruit, as it were?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Yeah, it's a great question. So when we think about what these actual organizations do, most of the commercial contractors, most of the trades folks that we work with, their businesses are about getting the right worker to the right job at the right time, with the right materials, the right skill set, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what determines the profitability or lack thereof of that company really is about the profitability or lack thereof of each individual job. So if I have a if my contract is with a building maintenance company or building management company, and they have five buildings, and I'm doing the ongoing maintenance for their HVACs, and you know, I have scheduled monthly visits, and of course, if there's something goes wrong and they call me up to do it, if I have to retread that job, meaning if I show up and I can't complete what I had to complete and have to go back a third time, I'm losing money on that job or on that piece of my contract, or however you want to phrase it. So by losing money, by eliminating the need to retread or have multiple visits, we dramatically increase the profitability. So, one of the things that our platform does is how do we make sure that we don't have to go back that we can successfully complete the job? That means having the right skilled person there. How do we make sure that happens? Having them there with the right materials, having them properly job prepped, right? They have all the information they need about it, having their route optimized so we're getting the right number of jobs, having the skill set not only of the employee, but having the skill set and the personality that fit that fits that particular customer. You know, that's such an area of low-hanging fruit uh that we we come in right away and we cut the rate of retreads almost immediately in half. Wow. Yeah, I mean that and that's huge, right? Simple things like so a typical customer of ours might have 50 employees. So let's say it's Evan and Fred's electrical contractors, right? And we're serving office buildings and uh schools throughout Miami-Dade County where I live. Now, we have we have 50 employees, maybe we have 35 or 40 field technicians or field engineers. Those 40 field engineers each have one to four jobs a day, right? Now, those jobs they have to be prepped. We have to prep our field engineers with all the information they need. Now, our company, we cannot afford to hire an$85,000 a year full-time person to make sure that all of our jobs are fully prepped. So, what ends up happening is the job prep work is done by the individual field workers themselves or by you know one of the salespeople or someone does it part-time. So we don't fully prep the jobs. So 10% of the time a person goes to a job and they don't realize they need a combination to get into the electrical room. They don't have the combination, so they show up and they can't do the job. That's a simple example. So one of the things that we provide in our platform is an AI agent that is a job prepper. Wow. So this agent it's a it acts as a full-time human being and it does all the job prep work because we're looking through all one million jobs a month that we do, and every job that customer's done, and we make sure that all the people are fully prepped. The difference is we charge like$2,000 a year for that job. So now Evan and Fred's company can afford. Same thing with a collections agent, same thing with an optimization agent, a materials agent, all of that. So what we allow is the 20 or 30 or 50 or 100-person contracting firm or trade firm to have the same amount of infrastructure that Verizon has. Because Verizon has about 50,000 field service workers and they have like a thousand job preppers. So we can't afford it. And what we do is through our AI agents, we allow the affordability of enterprise modern technology right into the hands of our of our mid-sized business customers. So that's an example of that. And it's it's it's so fun to see because we're changing the lives of these businesses, and we're doing it, it's it's happening in real time.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

It's super cool. It is cool, and I'm exciting just hearing about it. Uh, I love my pool guy and my electrician plumber. I'm I'm grateful that I have these contacts with these firms. Uh, but AI is changing customer expectations, you know, my expectations around service and support. And when it, you know, when it comes to service and speed and communication, it can be tough with uh working with trade companies. Uh, I assume you're looking to change the experience side as well for the consumers, they're their customers.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Absolutely. So you you said something really interesting, and that is the expect your expectations of your pool maintenance uh person or you know, your HVAC person, or if you own an office building of your facilities management company, they're different and they should be because the technology that's available allows all of those different trades and organizations to serve you better, and if they're not serving you better, then they're not using what's available, and then you should find a new service provider. So, you know, by I'll give you a great example. Let's say you're your pool maintenance person comes. We have a lot of pool maintenance customers as uh pool maintenance companies as customers of ours. So let's say your pool maintenance um you know worker shows up and they didn't realize that they were supposed to, you know, do your chemicals a certain way this this week. This is the week they had to redo your chemicals, they forgot to do it. Well, now they leave. They tell you you can't use your pool for a day because they have to come back the next day to do it. That stinks for you. Right now, if they were prepped properly and they had our platform, that wouldn't happen. Or they brought, or maybe they showed up and they're in their truck, they were out of the chlorine that was required to do it. Oh shoot, they got to leave, they got to drive to the pool store, or they gotta drive to their warehouse. It was a Saturday when they were coming to do your pool, and you know what? The warehouse is closed, or the the they can't find a chlorine's got to come back on Wednesday. You can't use your pool for three days because it's turning green. I'm giving you an extreme case. Um, so from the end customer perspective, by having the company perform better, the service is just so much better. On top of that, one of the things that our technology does is one of the things that frustrates end customers a lot is when their provider doesn't remember the unique context about them. So let's say your house, let's say your pool maintenance person comes and you want them to use the garage entrance instead of using the gated entrance because you just got your lawn, I got new flowers in your lawn and it's all sodd, and you know, you don't want people walking on your grass. Simple example. Now you told the person that two weeks ago.

unknown 10:54

Okay.

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SPEAKER_00 10:55

Now, a new person, because the pool company company comes and they go right over your brand new grass and they mess, you know, they do something you don't like. And you're you're pretty frustrated. The reason that happens, one of the reasons, is because that company didn't document your request. And your request didn't get documented because the the pool maintenance person who was visiting you two weeks ago on Wednesday from one to three o'clock Eastern didn't document what you'd requested because it's a pain in the butt. Well, with our platform, we have ambient listening devices, we have automated documentation. So now that field technician doesn't have to go and key a bunch of notes into some system saying, next person who goes there, please don't step on Evans Daisies or you know, or on the grass or whatever. It automatically captures it. And the AI then preps the next person go through the garage. Here's the combination. You know, I don't know, Evans' son's name is Mike, he just graduated college, say congratulations. Like little things like that make a huge difference. I'm giving very simplistic examples of mostly residential experiences, but these can be massive in commercial experiences as well. For example, if there's a building and I'm the you know plumbing contractor, I'm doing maintenance on you know on bathrooms and different floors of this high-rise office building, there are certain floors that should not be maintained at certain times of the day. That information is not captured, and I go into a recording studio at two o'clock in the afternoon to go shut the bathroom down for an hour and a half to do maintenance work on it. And at two o'clock is when filming finishes on a program and all 40 people have been working for four hours, they rush to the restroom, and that restroom is closed during that time. You're gonna have a pretty frustrated tenant. Again, simplistic example, but AI eliminates all of that, it makes it so there's no thought around it. So those are just a couple of very simple examples, Evan, of how this kind of technology fundamentally changes what is one of the most important industries in the world.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Yeah, amazing anecdotes. Uh, really, they really hit home. So the trades is attracting a whole generation of uh new workers, young workers for very good reasons, digital natives, I guess we call them, uh, who have fundamentally different ideas about work and ways of working. And of course, they're on their phones all the time and not for talking, for for texting and chatting. What does AI mean for this next generation of folks entering the trades?

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Yeah, I think so. First off, the trades, unfortunately, in our society, at least in American society, in Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Europe, the trades are more focused on as a career path for young people in the United States for you know for various reasons, some good, some not so good, the trades have have not been focused on, they're focused on four-year classic university education, opposed to getting hard trade skills. And I think that's changing now, and that's good, and that's something that that needs that has needed to have happened. So when I think about what a 20-year-old, you know, young person coming out of trade school, right, or or starting their career in the trades, how their technology fluency, they grew up using phones and all the stuff that we had mentioned, right? How their technology fluency will change the trades and how that leans into AI is utterly amazing. So some of the things that we're working on at Simpro to give an example. If I'm a 20-year-old electrician, fresh out of my electrician school, I am very smart, very qualified, but I'm nowhere near as qualified as a 20-year experience technician. Just that's life. That's any job, right? That's life. So by providing them a wearable, uh, a little camera on their, you know, on their uniform, with all of our knowledge we have, all the data we have, and with our AI engine, our AI model, when that brand new, fresh out of school, entry-level electrician opens up the electrical panel, our AI is instructing them as to what to do. Wow. So now they're getting the experience of a million jobs in the last three months, and everything that's seen, and it's in their ear, you know, or it's it's communicating with them, or lots of ways of doing it. So AI is in real time helping that individual be a better electrician. So that electrician will make fewer mistakes, that electrician will get the job done faster, have fewer retreads, and that electrician can now command higher compensation because they're more productive. The company that's hiring them will make more profitability because they can do more jobs. The end customer wins because the work gets done right the first time. It gets done faster, it gets done cheaper. Everyone wins. And the more technology-friendly or receptive that that electrical tradesperson would be, the more in demand that person will be because they're now going to interact with AI in a way that's trying to have AI do the majority of the work. And, you know, people who say the trades will not be impacted by AI, they're wrong. The trades will be impacted by AI, and they are being impacted by AI as much as any other industry. So, what's important is for the trade company owners, the owners of the commercial and resi contractors, as well as the trade workers themselves, to embrace the technology because those who do not will not survive. And those who do will thrive like trades professionals and like trade companies have never done before. That's that's how it's impacting every element of that cycle. And it's happening right now. This is not this is not you know futuristic terminator stuff. This is right now, 2026.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Brilliant. What a compelling uh picture of the future of work. Really exciting. Um, so if you're a small business, maybe mid-sized trade business, where do you start with AI, with with Simpro, for example, without overcomplicating things? You probably don't have an IT guy or dedicated team, uh, maybe not as tech savvy as you would want to be. What does that process look like?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yeah, so I can talk to Simfro specifically. Um, but before talking about SIMPRO and giving you the commercial for the company that I love so dearly, I think the first thing I would do as any business owner, and I'm a you know, as an entrepreneur myself, you know, started owned many different businesses and still do, it's the willingness and not even willingness, it's the realization that AI is probably the most powerful, innovative, disruptive tool slash technology, slash innovation that humanity's ever seen. And that includes things like the written word, the wheel, fire, electricity, it's that powerful and it can be that disruptive. Disruption can be a good thing or a bad thing. If you're disruptive, it's bad. If you are the disruptor, it's very good. The awareness and the acceptance that whatever my business is, if I'm a law firm or architecture firm, or if I'm in the trades, that I need to be an AI first business, or I will be left behind. Once I've accepted that and I recognize that, then you know, you of course you select the right partner like Simpro. And when of course it's got to be Simpro, right? But no, when you select Simpro or you know, or or someone else, it's most of us, at least at Simpro, we recognize that our customers, they're not large enterprises, they don't have large IT departments, if any. So of our 22,000 customers, about 14,000 of them do not have an IT department. Oh wow. So we need to make sure, and and our larger customers, they may have 10 people at IT. That's not a Citibank or a General Motors. These are these people are overworked. They don't have, we have to make it really easy. And that's rule number one at Simpro. Make it easy, don't complicate things because the the trade business, they don't care if they're using AI or not. They just want to get more jobs done faster the first time so they can be more profitable. Our job is to deliver AI to them in a consumable, simple, and easy-to-way use, easy-to-use way, excuse me, so that the trade business doesn't even realize they're using AI. They just know that they are being told how and what to do in a way that's making their business and their technicians better. So it's our job to deliver AI easy and quickly and make it so AI is almost abstracted and they don't know it's AI, they just know that they're being given this incredible tool that helps them be so much better. But it starts with the willingness for the business to say, I have to do things a little bit differently than how I'm doing them now. Because if I'm making six, seven percent profit margin, something's wrong. And change is the hardest thing for human beings to do. You, me, you know, everyone. We don't like change. We're wired not to like change, but you know, as the philosopher Heraclitus said, change is the one constant that we deal with as humans. So I would say to the organization in question, recognize if you want to quadruple your margins and leverage the most powerful technology and tool ever in humanity, be willing to change. And people like Simpro will make that journey super easy for you.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Wow, that's uh almost a mic drop moment. But one more question. Um, what are you excited about the rest of this year? Initiatives, uh, investments. You're obviously in the hockey stick uh growth mode, but what's on your mind? What can you share about? About the next few months or quarters.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

So I am so this is my first go-around or first company I've ever started or taken over in the trade space. First, it is so cool. I the first half of my career, I started companies and and and worked with our customers were Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000 companies. Very rewarding. However, the second half of my career, I've started companies and focused on companies that deal with small to mid-sized business owners. So much more rewarding because you can change people's lives. Wow. I can't tell you how cool some of the technology that I built in my 20s and early 30s was. And our customers were like the citibanks and the HSPs, and and you know, it's it's neat seeing your technology used at those places. But there's nothing that my technology could have done that would have really fundamentally changed General Motors business, but helped it, but now I mean I sit down with an electrical contractor or a fire safety contractor, and they're using my platform, and they went from and they said, You've quadrupled our profitability in the over the last five months. You've changed my life. Like I can pay for my kids' college. I don't, I'm higher, I don't have to lay people off. Like that's rewarding. That's cool. That's just super neat. And and doing it, you know, my I was doing it for IT and technology service companies for the last 12 years of the company I started. Now doing it for the trades. The cool thing with the trades is they are providing services that allow us to exist and our way of life to exist. Without electricity, I live in Miami. I couldn't live here in the summer. I mean, I mean, people wouldn't live in Florida without air conditioning, right? A simple example. And you know what they do is it's it's really good and it's the working class of this country, and we're we're changing it. So that's very rewarding. What I'm super pumped about, uh, like tactically for the second half of the year, in about seven weeks, actually in six weeks, we're releasing something called Simpro Lightning. And this is a monster, monster drop where we are now including the AI brain into every one of our customers that upgrades to Lightning. They will have access not only to the AI brain, but to several absolutely essential AI agents that will change their business. And we're gonna give them without going into detail on the release, um, but they're agents that'll do all their job, all their job prepping, they'll do all the training of their people for them. You know, it'll do all their automated note-taking, it'll do all their recording and documentation. I mean, it does all the messaging and communications, geofencing. This is such a monster release of AI technology that we've been promising that we give our customers. It's going to change every one of their businesses. And it's it's uh it's super fun. That's uh the nerd in me loves that stuff. So I'm super proud of that.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Well, your enthusiasm is really infectious. Congratulations on the incredibly important work and onwards and upwards. Wish you all the best.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Oh, well, Evan, thank you. And and love your show. Thanks for what you're doing, and thanks for having us. We appreciate it. Definitely appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Yeah, likewise. And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode. Be sure to check out our TV show, techimpact.tv, now in Bloomberg Television and Fox Business. Thanks, Fred. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Evan.