JobTread AI Integrations w/ Founder Eric Fortenberry

Aaron Horner
What is something that you consistently hate doing in your business that you wish could be automated? It’s a great question for you to think about as you listen today’s episode with Eric Fortenberry, founder of jobtread. If you somehow don’t already know, JobTread has been the fastest growing construction management software for a few years now. And for good reason. They are always on the cutting edge of innovations in the industry. They just released an update where you can now connect your personal AI model directly into your JobTread account. And so today we’re talking with Eric all about AI, the risks, the opportunities, and what he sees as the future of the remodeling industry.

Logan Shinholser
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser and today I’m joined by Eric Fortenberry, founder and CEO of JobTread. And we’re talking all about AI. So to jump into it, Eric, if you will, we talked right off camera about the pros and cons of AI and using it in your own business. Can you share with me what you’re seeing on your side from a pro and a con perspective just to kind of kick this whole thing off?

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, I mean I’d say we’re seeing a tremendous opportunity on all fronts internally, with our customers, with the industry as a whole. I mean, I think that every AI is really for better or for worse. It is forcing a massive shift in how businesses operate. And I think with that though, it brings a lot of uncertainty, it brings a lot of concern. People are worried about their jobs, they’re worried about security, they’re worried about all sorts of things. And some of them are just challenges that I think as people and as businesses we have to learn to try to be patient with, to really continually learn and evaluate because this is a very rapidly changing environment right now. I’d say that there’s probably never been technology that has evolved so quickly that it’s just causing so much disruption just everywhere across the board.

Eric Fortenberry
And you know, again that brings a lot of excitement, but it also brings a lot of concern and uncertainty for people.

Logan Shinholser
How old are you, Eric?

Eric Fortenberry
I am 43 as of yesterday.

Logan Shinholser
Oh, nice. Happy birthday. So, so you were. I mean, cuz I’m 34, but like when the Internet became a thing, I remember that with like my dad’s pawn business where like him going from all yellow pages to like the Internet. I mean he started his company in 01. Internet I think came out in like 96, but it really wasn’t that much. It wasn’t adopted really until for businesses like the mid to late 2000s. You’re a little bit older, so you probably have a different perspective on this. But how would you compare this to when the Internet came to be and the shifts that people are seeing with their own business now that we have this AI stuff compared to when went from nothing to Internet?

Eric Fortenberry
Well, I remember being a little boy and going to the computer and the AOL dial up, hearing that little tone that we always, you know, heard, you know, when it was. When it was connecting, you know, so. So I wasn’t necessarily, I guess, didn’t. Didn’t have like, the insight, you know, that I do now to compare quite as much. But, you know, again, I think we’re seeing a lot of people who are just jumping headfirst straight in. You know, you’ve got kind of that, you know, you’ve got your early adopters, you’ve got the early pioneers who, you know, they’re. They’re willing to take on the risk. You know, they see the potential, they see the opportunity and the value that AI can create, and they’ll jump right in head first and kind of figure out what happens after that, you know.

Eric Fortenberry
But you’ve also got, you know, kind of, again, more. More the. The mainstream kind of the, you know, the little bit later on, you know, adopters, the people who have, you know, kind of, when you cross the chasm, if you will, you know, we’re starting to see some of those people, you know, dipping the toe in, getting interested. They’re hearing from others that, hey, this is incredible. You know, this is changing people’s lives. It’s changing their businesses. Like they’re now starting to adopt. But then I would say you also have a huge group of people who are just not ready yet, and they’re kind of holding back. They’re the late adopters or the laggers, the, you know, the resistance, if you will. You know. And so I think we’re just like.

Eric Fortenberry
With the Internet, I mean, we’re kind of seeing this, you know, this different sort of waves of people coming on and adopting it. You know, you hear a lot of the. A lot of the excitement, the great, you know, great stories. But you also hear, you know, those. Those. Those downsides and those. Those kind of, you know, horror stories. You’re hearing those, too. And so it’s, you know, kind of same thing with, like, the, you know, the electric vehicles, right? I mean, you know, a ton of great, you know, experiences. People, you know, Loving it. You know, you got millions and millions of hours drive and lives saved and everything.

Eric Fortenberry
But then it’s that one bad, you know, story of that one wreck where, you know, the technology, you know, failed or something, some, you know, edge case happened, you know, but that can create a lot of uncertainty. And so, you know, I think we’re going to continue to sort of see the masses adopt, but I don’t necessarily see like one day it’s just going to up and overnight 100% adoption right away. I think you’re going to kind of have this sort of generational shift as our kids grow up and take over. I mean, you know, they’re not going to know any different.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah. And I’d be curious to hear your take on when you approach this stuff. I don’t have a background in software development. I have an engineering degree, so I did a little bit of matlab in college and stuff like that. But ultimately aside, I could rip through an automation. I understand how Zapier works or things like that, where that makes sense. But looking at a lot of the AI stuff, I would say most people listening to this podcast do not have a background in software development. So we’re looking at this as basically what is called a vibe coder. That’s you speak into it kind of does the thing. You’re blown away the fact that it could do anything. And then you kind of get frustrated because like, it breaks or it’s not set up correctly, or like it works really well for just you.

Logan Shinholser
But when you try to then send it off to somebody else, you realize like, oh, this dashboard’s not actually connected to the Internet, it’s just on your computer. How are you, like, when you view this stuff with a software background, is it like, exciting? Cause you feel like, hey, I’ve always dug with a shovel. I’m really good at digging a hole. And now I have an excavator. So you really know what to do. Or is it also like kind of scary? Cause you’re like, hey, historically this has been like, my specialty is like software. And I know software really well. And now this thing’s gonna take over a lot of what we do. So I guess like you personally, how do you view all this stuff? Are you excited? Are you nervous? Is it super cool? Is it just like consuming you?

Logan Shinholser
I guess, like, what is your like, high level take on all of it?

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, I mean, I would say mostly a lot of excitement. You know, I would describe you know from my personal usage and experiment experiences, you know, and I’m also, you know, I am a software developer. I write a lot of code. I don’t develop the JobTread app. I leave that to the development team. I probably would never sleep and it would cause a lot of health issues if I was actually able to write code and add features. So sort of keep that separated. But I do all of our other like internal ops development and I would say, you know, again I would describe AI as it has made me a superhuman. It has enabled me to be way more efficient, it has enabled me to solve problems very quickly regardless what they are.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, even if it doesn’t give me the right solution the first time, it gives me a direction, it gives me, you know, insights, ideas, places to go, focus and work on. So I would say I’m very pro AI, very love it, I think from when I’m developing because again, I wouldn’t say I’m the greatest developer out there. I’m certainly not in the same class as our dev team. But it’s very helpful for me when I’m trying to figure things out or understand why something’s not working. It’s very good at being able to take in existing code and go test it a few, evaluate it, analyze it and give me feedback to help me improve it.

Eric Fortenberry
Now, on the development side, from a software developer’s perspective, and I know there’s this notion of vibe coding, I think that AI is very good at prototyping, it’s very good at getting you a very rough working prototype of something that you’ve told it that you want it to do. You know, I’ll share a story where I saw one of our clients who, you know, got really excited about this, wanted to, you know, essentially, you know, build their own kind of calendarly like scheduling solution integrated with JobTread. I was like, all right, cool. You know, and so she put a lot of time and effort into it, you know, and again, I think a lot of people think that this is like, just like a very fast process.

Eric Fortenberry
Like the reality is people are actually probably spending more time than they really should be, you know, going down this path of kind of, you know, this back and forth iteration. But she ended up building out a solution and she shared it and you know, we took a look at her like, hey, you know, that’s really neat. But you know, by the way, you just exposed all of your clients data, you know, what was happening is they were essentially taking, you know, all of Their, like every time someone submitted their web form, you know, they put all of their clients details, their name, contact information, everything into a task description on job tread.

Eric Fortenberry
And then they basically were exposing this RSS feed for all of their different sales reps. And in that feed it gave you all of the upcoming events that had all of that client detail. Now there was absolutely no reason for that to be exposed. But again, the AI just, its goal was to very quickly get you a solution and the notion of thinking through security. What is really needed here? What is the best way to deliver this solution? It just took the easiest path forward. I shared with her, I was like, hey, by the way, you just exposed all this data. She had no idea and ultimately went, took it down, went back to the drawing board, went round and round, made a bunch of updates, came back, she was like, hey, go check it out. Yeah, I mean that’s, that’s good.

Eric Fortenberry
You got rid of that thing. That wasn’t necessary. That was exposing a lot of information that you weren’t intending to. But just so you know, you just exposed your Google Places API key. So we’re going to go ahead and take that and we’re going to just run up your bill for a little while and let us know if we, you know, max out your credit card. And she’s like, wait, what?

Eric Fortenberry
You know, it’s like again, kind of this back and forth like, you know, I think that the AI sort of struggles to make, you know, really sound, you know, decisions on what, you know, should they be doing and where’s that balance between, you know, getting the job done and then, you know, all of the other implications that it takes a lot more kind of, you know, thought about, do we need that, is that safe, is that secure? You know, privacy comes into account like, and so that’s where I think there’s a lot of risk when people who are not experienced software developers go try to play that developer role. You know, it can very quickly backfire on you.

Eric Fortenberry
And again, I think if you’re just trying to create your own little, you know, your own little internal tool that’s not really, you know, doesn’t need to be ironclad, doesn’t need to be enterprise grade, you know, great use case for AI. But like, you know, are they going to really be able to take that and turn it into an enterprise level platform that is able to be, you know, completely hosted, managed, delivered as a service to other people? Probably not. I think you’re still going to need experienced developers to be able to build and maintain systems that can scale and can handle real world use cases and feedback. Because the first time something happens, it goes wrong. You have no idea how that thing works.

Eric Fortenberry
And sure you can go back to the AI and you can have it go and iterate, but that’s going to just lead to this. You fix one thing over here, you break something over here. You know, I think there’s still, you know, at least for the near future, I think developers are going to be very much needed to continue to actually build and productize and commercialize, you know, solutions that can be usable for the masses.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I kind of look at this like when you’re explaining like you did this thing, but it exposed all these things. It’s like when you use like the Waze app where like it’ll get you to your destination 3 minutes faster but like it wants you to make a left across five lanes during rush hour. So like, is that worth it? It’s like a lot of times it’s not like it’s just, I’d rather just go a little bit of a slower way. And we’ve done that here at cgn. We’re like, we’re building out stuff and we have an outsourced company that we work with that basically we can prototype stuff and give it over to them to say this is what we wanted to do. And with us they were like, hey, that makes sense.

Logan Shinholser
I see what you did, by the way your API is exposed and we’re like, oh, that’s not good. So it’s like that exact same thing of basically explaining there is a difference between the hobbyist over the weekend doing it versus like a production ready where like it has the right security and it’s not going to continuously break and then go, it broke again, fix it. And then it basically just solves for like an edge case which just for everybody listening, it’s kind of like a unique situation or like a, you know, kind of a one off if you will. But then you realize what it’s doing is it’s basically just continuously solving symptoms versus like understanding fundamentally how it works, which then leads to AI burnout, which is a very real thing that.

Logan Shinholser
You know, I was reading an article that talked all about people that are best with AI or like the best managers, because the people that are not good managers are like, build me this thing and it doesn’t do it exactly how you want. And then you get mad at the AI for not doing exactly what you want versus how you would do it with an actual direct report going, alright, let’s talk through this. How did you come up with that? Let me show you some examples of what it should look like. A lot of the downside, I think people are starting to feel it. A little bit of you think it’s going to be from point A to point B just like that and maybe a couple tweaks here and there. But a lot of times you get burned out during the process.

Logan Shinholser
And kind of what you brought up and what I just talked about with our stuff is there’s a lot of things that are happening that you don’t realize are happening unless you know to look for that. And God forbid somebody wants to come out and hack your stuff. It’s a very real thing. Let’s talk about some of the benefits then you say internal tools. What are some things that you’re seeing clients actually building out that are positive and are not going to put their business in jeopardy?

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, again, we see a lot of great successes and a lot of great use cases that people are sharing in our job Tread Pros Facebook group. And again, the biggest thing that I hear is that it is drastically saving them time. It is helping them to be far more efficient. It’s helping them to again, build out budgets for their projects or creating schedules or allowing someone to go walk a job site and then get back in the car and just start talking to Claude and be like, hey, here’s everything I learned. Can you go? And again, give me, you know, some very, you know, pointed to dos that I need to do kind of draft up, you know, what this job might need to look like.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, I see that as the biggest benefit is time saving for people to make them more efficient, to helping them get the knowledge out of their head, you know, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. You know, I hear a lot and I believe it is very good at being able to review something and give you feedback about what you might have missed. Whether it’s your estimate, whether it’s your schedule, whether it’s kind of looking at all of your daily logs and kind of giving you some insights that you might not have otherwise spotted trends that are happening, whether it’s with a particular subcontractor or one of your employees or something’s going on with this customer and helping you to communicate. I mean, responding tough emails, it is very good at and you just tell it the tone that you want.

Eric Fortenberry
And you know, how should I handle this situation? Like I think it is, you know, phenomenal at generating that content very quickly. You know, I see a lot of people who are using it, you know, again with daily logs or with their to dos, you know, being able to summarize what has happened and give, you know, the client an update.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, I think those are probably the biggest things that I’m seeing, you know, the biggest benefits, you know, and again, the more advanced, the more technical you are, which, you know, I think a lot of these early adopters of AI that they also have this sort of more technical, you know, prowess, if you will, where they have been able to deeply integrate multiple solutions, you know, by pulling them all together with these, you know, AIs and MCP servers that allow you to connect your AI to these different software solutions that can further streamline the process of getting information from one place to another. So I’d say that’s probably the biggest benefit that we’re seeing is those time savings and those kind of more advanced build outs that let people really harness the power of AI.

Logan Shinholser
So I was talking to a client the other day and were talking about marketing and basically he’s a job tread user. And their biggest issue from when we talked was like, not they need more leads. It was like even if you got more leads, it still takes a week to turn around a scope of work or like build out something for a prospect just to give them like a high level overview of what the project could cost. And ultimately I was like, look, you don’t need more work. What you need is like to solve this one constraint first. And if it’s taken you 12 hours to build out, you know, a scope in job tread, they have this new AI stuff that can do that. So can you talk to me?

Logan Shinholser
Because I see like that to me is like one of the quickest wins that a lot of people are starting to institute. And like anytime it seems like somebody first jumps in, uses Claude or whatever, they’re like AI is to connect to JobTread. When they build up like that first scope of work, it is like a revelation to them because of how different it is. So can you talk through basically the before and after of before AI, what that looked like and now with AI, what that looks like? Because I think giving people like a good use case up front will get them to see kind of the light, if you will.

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, you know, again I, I think it, it really heavily depends on, you know, what type of builder contractor you are. You know, are you custom bidding every job or are you doing kind of a very turnkey type, you know, solution or service that you’re offering, you know, for those who, you know, have kind of a very turnkey solution. It’s like, hey, you know, go look at these jobs. I need you to create, you know, a similar budget, maybe make these modifications. Like it is very good at taking existing information and kind of replicating it and setting it up in a very similar structure. Now, you know, the bigger challenge and probably that the people that, that you’re referring to are the custom builders. Every job is unique. You know, there’s a very unique set of parameters that they have to take into account.

Eric Fortenberry
And that’s where those builders before, you’re starting from a blank slate. Now, I would hope that they have built out kind of a base template, if you will, in job tread, and I would encourage them to use that as your starting point and then go and make the modifications, add and remove to it. But now the nice thing with AI is that instead of having to start from that blank slate, you’ve got something that can give you know, a, we’ll call it a rough draft of what this, this job would entail. What, what your budget, you know, should be. How do you organize it? You know, if you want it organized by trade, if you want it organized by room, if you want it organized by, you know, whatever it may be like that is.

Eric Fortenberry
The beauty of AI is that, you know, you can kind of go back and forth with it multiple times to find that structure that best meets the needs of this particular project, you know, and I would say, you know, let’s call it. It gets you know, 65 to 75% of the way there. Now, again, I don’t think that anyone should ever, you know, just trust, you know, what it spits out and take that, you know, to the bank. I think, you know, I would actually say, you know, don’t trust and verify because at the end of the day, like, you know, like, we can’t forget that, like, you are the expert, you are the builder, you are the contractor, you are the one who is responsible for the success of this project.

Eric Fortenberry
And, and so I think the biggest win is, again, it’s getting that rough draft and getting that structure in place very quickly. But you still need to go in and you still need to confirm, you know, the data, confirm, you know, what is going to be done, confirm the measurements and all of the other information that it takes to successfully Build out a full blown proposal. You know, my biggest fear from the very beginning, Logan, is that, you know, people are going to see this as the easy button. And you know, again, contractors naturally want to find the most efficient ways, you know, to do things, but you can’t let that be at the detriment of the accuracy, the quality.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, my biggest fear has been like, people are gonna, you know, are gonna basically, you know, have AI generate this fixed price proposal. You send it out, you sell it, and then, you know, a month in, you realize that, you know, something was forgotten and you know, at the end of the day, like, the client doesn’t care. You know, a judge isn’t going to care. Like, you signed a fixed price proposal and, you know, the buck still stops with you, the contractor. And so I think that people need to again, kind of take it with a grain of salt that like, this can help get me going, this can help get me off the block. You know, it’s better than starting from nothing.

Eric Fortenberry
But I would encourage people to think about like, the more context you can give it, the more examples of how you like to structure your budgets of existing, you know, or previously, you know, run jobs that were successful. Like, let it have that insight to try to give you a similar structure so that you are familiar with it. Because just like code, if you ask it to build you something and you have no idea what actually went into that, you know, it could be very hard later to modify it or to understand, well, what happened, why wasn’t that included? Like, I thought it was included, but when you go read the details, well, it didn’t really say, you know, and I think that’s where like, we’re going to have this, like, you know, this challenge of, you know, was that accurate?

Eric Fortenberry
You know, was that the intent? Was that not the intent? And again, like, when you get into this murky area, you know, it’s going to be very difficult to navigate that with your client because it’s like, well, who’s right here?

Logan Shinholser
So let’s talk about that idea of the feeding of the examples because I would say that’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned during all this is something that teaching and working with my team on this stuff of, hey, it didn’t give you the exact outcome that you wanted because it was basically one, the prompt that you fed. It wasn’t set up for that. But if you don’t then know how to exactly say, oh, make all these adjustments, the next best thing is don’t give it something that you want it to basically emulate and go through and then you can kind of. It’ll tell you what the gaps are. So can you talk a bit more about just like, let’s say in this case with JobTread, like, feeding it examples?

Logan Shinholser
Like, do you have to start from, like, here’s a proposal that I did from scratch that has worked every single time. Is it a combination or a hybrid version? Can you talk through a bit of that? Because I think that was like a big unlock for my team here of knowing it doesn’t know what a good resume looks like. You’re just saying, guess what a resume should be. But, like, there’s a lot of resumes online. There’s not a lot of like, really well done, like, proposals that they can go off of. So can you talk more about like, the feeding of the examples and like, what is a good example of it?

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, that’s. That’s exactly right, Logan. It’s, it’s, it’s all about how you prompt it and the amount of information and the guidance that you provide to the AI, you know, and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges with people. And I mean, I think we’ve had like over 1500 people have created Claude accounts and immediately connected it to JobTread in the last two weeks. And it’s like the challenge is that when you don’t understand how AI works and how to prompt it, then you know, you’re not going to get and see as good of results as somebody who understands how do you prompt the AI because, you know, the better your prompt, the more information you give it, the more direction you give it, the better the outcome.

Eric Fortenberry
And all of the success stories that we’re seeing, I know that they very much understand how to use AI. This is a new skill set that people need to, you know, to invest some time into learning and practicing. And so, you know, when you can say, hey, go look at this job and I want to do something similar, but I want these changes. Like, that will give them a much better starting point. Or go pull in, you know, this template from my catalog and use that as your starting point. Like, you know, you’re giving them much more guidance. And I think that’s where people have to realize, like, you know, it’s not about, you know, hey, go create a job. It’s about, hey, I want you to go create a job and I want it to be organized like this with this much detail.

Eric Fortenberry
I want you to pay Very, you know, particular attention to this area. You know, here’s a couple other examples, like, you know, the more that you give it, the better outcome that you’re going to get. And so that, that I think is also one of the big challenges is that, you know, AI right now it’s very, you know, like non deterministic, like you don’t really know, you know, you could do the same prompt, you know, 10 times and get, you know, 10 variations of the output. And so that’s where, you know, people have to kind of work with it and be patient, especially early on, because like, it will get better and better. It creates its own memory of what you want. And so over time it’ll continue to improve.

Eric Fortenberry
So I would encourage people who are brand new to this stuff, like, try not to get too frustrated. You know, you have to have realistic expectations. I mean, garbage in, garbage out. It’s the same as a lot of things in life, right? And so like, you know, I would encourage people though to take a little bit of time, you know, maybe even and take a couple classes or online courses, like, learn about it. Because like, this can be the most powerful tool that any of us have, you know, at our disposal as humans, as companies, you know, and I would even go as far as to say, like, I don’t see in the near term like AI just directly, you know, replacing, you know, humans and displacing, you know, people.

Eric Fortenberry
I think what’s going to, in the near term more likely displace people is it’s people using AI are going to displace the people who are not using AI. You know, when I think about hiring, like, why would I want to hire somebody who doesn’t know about AI when I could hire somebody who does? They already have gone through that learning curve and they understand how to use AI to their advantage. And really, I would say you also start to really learn, like, where can you trust and where do you really need to not trust? I think each of these different models, you know, whether it’s chat, gbt, Claude, Gemini, you know, like, there’s a lot of different flavors of AI out there and some of them are going to better than others at specific tasks.

Eric Fortenberry
And so that’s, that’s where it, you know, you’re not going to just like be able to just, you know, read a blog post and sort of know the answer because it’s constantly changing and evolving. And that’s what people need to understand is like, this is a Great tool in your toolkit. And the more you study and the more you train and learn, the better you’re going to be able to implement and to leverage and harness that power. But you can’t just think that it’s just somehow going to read your mind because it’s not.

Logan Shinholser
One thing you brought up was about hiring people that know it versus hiring people that don’t know it. How are you guys approaching this at JobTread? Because I know this is like a big thing of now. Are you basically having everybody that you look to hire? Like, great, we’re gonna run you through not only like our normal interview process, but you also have to show us how you use Claude or Claude coworker. Like, you know, like, we’re using Claude Co. Like, whatever it is. Like, are you, like, what do you. I guess, what are you guys doing at job Trail, let’s say internally first and then we’ll talk about hiring. As far as, like, is it expected for everybody now to have their own assistant? Or like, I guess, how are you guys doing it as a software company?

Logan Shinholser
And then we’ll go into like, you hiring?

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, I mean, you know, again, internally, it very much depends on your role. Right. And so, you know, marketing team, you know, obviously, probably a lot of content creation, you know, kind of drafting up, you know, post, you know, whether it’s a social post, a blog post. Like, you know, again, I would say, like, I tell people though, like, I never want them to just take verbatim what any AI has output and publish that. Like, you still need to put your thought and mold it into kind of what we want to actually communicate out there. You know, I know, you know, design, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s got ways that it can help, you know, create designs, you know, whether it’s presentations or, you know, content type, you know, designs.

Eric Fortenberry
But you know, at the end of the day, like, we still kind of just use that as ideation and not necessarily the final product. I think it’s still a little bit rough in a lot of areas. And I don’t see it. You know, again, like, you know, people joke like, well, maybe we don’t need our design team anymore. Like, no, I don’t see that at all. I see that we now have a supercharged design team who can go a lot farther, a lot faster with our existing resources because they can use AI to supplement what they’re doing.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, sales, like, you gotta, you know, draft up a response to something you know, that’s really powerful, you know, or, you know, we’ve built in things into our CRM where, you know, you can click a button and it gives you, it goes and it reads all of the previous, you know, conversations, the call recordings, the summaries, the emails, you know, the text. And it can, and it can very quickly, within, you know, a couple seconds here, like, tell you, hey, going into any meeting, this is what you need to know. Here are the things that, you know, that they previously expressed. Here are the concerns, here’s what they’re excited about. Here’s how you should think about, you know, this upcoming meeting. You know, same thing with our customer success side.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, we’ve started, you know, we’ve got a thing now that like every single inbound support email, I actually send it, I send it to anthropics Claude, to OpenAI’s, you know, ChatGPT and to Google’s Gemini and just, you know, again, more just for fun and entertainment purposes right now and just experimenting. I send that inbound email we got, I send it out and it comes back and it gives us a potential response. And I’ve done this just because I’m curious and I want to see where the team feels like, is one of these better than the other at coming up with those responses. And again, by and large, the challenge has been like, yeah, we could respond with that for the most part, maybe it’s pretty good. But the thing that our customers love about job tread is our customer service.

Eric Fortenberry
They love that when you call in, we answer the phone and we’ll spend the time to help you work through whatever challenge and like actually teach you know, same thing when you email in our support team, a lot of times they will actually go log in and actually record a video. So instead of spending time writing out a whole set of instructions or just sending you a link to go learn more about something, we actually like to show you and record a quick little 1, 2, 3 minute video explaining so that you can not only like, you know, figure out what’s going on, you know, but you’re also able to learn it.

Eric Fortenberry
You can visually see it, you know, and like that’s been like one of the most like overwhelming, you know, just responses from our customers is like, they love that we go that extra mile to take the time to do that. And that’s where again, like, I don’t want to see us, you know, steer away from and like, let customer service and that person personal aspect of what we Provide, like, I think that’s a risk with AI is that, you know, things become less personable, you know, sure, maybe quick and easy things, you know, you didn’t even really need to call in. You could have sort of maybe figured that out on your own. Or here’s, here’s like a very quick and easy answer. That, that’s one thing.

Eric Fortenberry
But like, you know, when I see contractors using AI to answer the phones now, you know, like, that’s to me, like that, you know, that I just want to immediately hang up. I think there’s nothing worse than calling in and you get this, you know, automated system that’s like, you know, please say what you want and then it like, you know, can’t understand you. And like, please press one, please press three. Like, you know, like that drives me nuts. And I understand that, like, yeah, it allows you to, you know, answer the phone every time, but at the same time it sort of takes away that relationship and that human aspect. And I think people are going to want to continue to buy from other people.

Eric Fortenberry
I don’t know who’s going to feel comfortable buying $100,000 kitchen remodel not having met their contractor and shaking their hand and knowing who they’re going into business with. Like, this is like a relationship, you know, that you’re entering into. And so like, I think that’s where, you know, we see a lot of the benefit, but we also see a lot of the challenges of like, we don’t want to lose that personal touch that I think has helped build this incredible job tread community and customer base. So that’s sales support, marketing. Obviously the developers, they use it just like any other developer would. Now I’ll share.

Eric Fortenberry
One time, one of our devs, he used AI to completely prototype an entire feature and we all got really excited about it and kind of on the surface it looked great and we’re like, okay, great, when are we rolling it out? And you know, push come to shove when they actually got into it, you know, like the code was terrible. It was absolutely not production ready. We had to scrap the whole thing. It actually set us back because the entire project had to be redone and rewritten. And that’s just an example of like, you know, on the surface level it can be fun and exciting, you know, but like, if you actually want to deliver that same high quality work that you built your company on, you know, you can’t always trust everything that AI is going to do for you.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, with the AI answering service, I am very in agreeance with you of like, I get it, if this is an after hours thing and somebody’s calling you at one in the morning, then it’s like, hey, it’s after hours. Like, but you know, we work with higher end remodeling companies and like 99% of why they win the job after, like the client sees the photos and all that kind of stuff is like them and the personal touch. And like these are all the things that we’re going to do behind the scenes. And, and if the first experience is an AI solution, it’s just like it’s, you know, maybe at some point in the future it will be there and it’s just like everybody accepts it.

Logan Shinholser
But for right now it’s, you know, if my wife calls in and it’s some AI voice for something that should feel a little bit more on like the intimate personal side, like that’s going to go very quickly because then you turn into basically a commodity. And like I get if you want to go buy a car and it’s like one for sales, two for service. But like in this case it’s not even that. It’s just straight up like we’re going to have a conversation with you. And it goes against completely because we do a huge deep dive with every prospect that comes in and goes, why you specifically, what do clients like? And a lot of it is, it’s the personal touch, it is all the little things. It’s the daily logs, it’s the weekly walkthroughs, the daily logs.

Logan Shinholser
It’s not necessarily, I just finished a project and we had daily logs. It was great. It wasn’t so much that I liked the daily logs because I love to understand everything about the project, but it was more so knowing that the project manager was having eyes on my project each day because like we had a different project that like if it didn’t go well or like there was elements that were like, why are things this way? Like, does your PM know that like this is how this looks? In this case, we knew that the PM always saw it, so it made it much easier to then go, okay, if they see any issues, they’re going to bring it up because they’re actively seeing it. So like that was a huge part of it.

Logan Shinholser
And it wasn’t so much that like, oh, we love the technology of somebody taking a photo and sending a message. It was more so we just like that somebody from your team is looking at this every single day to tell us is this right, is this wrong? And it was more of the human aspect of it underneath it all. So I’m with you on like the AI answering stuff because like that if I’m about to drop 400 grand on a home edition, like I’m not going to somebody that’s like, you know, a robo unless it’s like again, if it’s after hours, but then again, like maybe I’m unique, but I don’t think I’m calling somebody at 1am unless it’s like, yeah, no, I mean, Logan,.

Eric Fortenberry
The last thing that like anyone’s going to want is like, you know, their contractor to have completely put the project management on autopilot. And then that time that you call them, they’re just like completely unaware and uninformed and they have no idea what has been communicated. They don’t know where things are at. Like that is going to lead to a very poor feeling and create a lot of distrust. And so again, I probably sound like I’m very cautionary here and I am because I think it’s important that we all need to take a beat to understand where is this going to be a great benefit and value add, but also where do we need to maybe not fully go all in with yet.

Eric Fortenberry
And I think there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of buzz, a lot of excitement and you don’t hear as much of the hey, like maybe you need to think about these things too because they’re kind of getting buried by this, the new shiny object thing here that everyone is talking about and all the great ideas and the buzzwords and use cases. Like, you know, I think it’s very much a great tool, but we got to think about what’s the right way to implement it and try different things. You know, I mean not everything is going to work as well as everything else. And so it’s about kind of experimentation at this point. It’s about continually learning and growing from it and listening to real world feedback from your employees, your trades, from your clients.

Eric Fortenberry
Like, let’s just kind of keep an open mind about what may be possible. And the things that work cool, you know, go all in. The things that aren’t working well, let’s pivot, let’s shift.

Logan Shinholser
Are you. So back to like the hiring thing? Are you guys like implementing this within like your interview process at all where like, you know, you are having them do some sort of test or even like asking them about their view on AI, like, or is that not even in the question or convers.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, I would say we more kind of discuss it and probe like, you know, what are your thoughts on it? What, what’s your go to AI? What do you think the best use cases are? Like, it’s definitely more conversational at this point. You know, we, you know, I think one of the best moves that we’ve made with our application process is like, we require people to now, you know, record a two to three minute video and of themselves saying, you know, introducing themselves and why they’d be a good fit for this position and they submit that with, you know, their application. You know, again, like, I, I think one of the challenges is like, you know, AI can now write the perfect resume, the perfect cover letter. Like, we don’t even know what’s true anymore.

Eric Fortenberry
And what was, you know, human generated and what was AI generated. But like, you know, at least for the short term, I know, you know, there’s, there’s AI clones and videos. You know, we’ll probably, you know, get start getting replaced with these fakes. But like, you know, being able to listen and to hear and how that person communicates, you know, just seeing like those, those body language about like, you know, when do they light up, what did they get excited about? You know, that’s, that’s what we’re still looking for is, you know, the people who have the right experience, the people who are passionate, who genuinely care, who do their due diligence, they research the company, they have a good understanding, you know, of who we are, the role that we’re looking to hire and then why would they be a good fit?

Eric Fortenberry
You know, so I would actually say we’ve probably gone even more deep on the, you know, the human side of like helping us get to know you and the real you. And then we give them, you know, almost in almost all of our positions, like we actually give them a case where a lot of times, like if you’re applying for sales, for customer success, for, you know, training, for support, you know, any role where like they would be, you know, directly using job. Like we give them a JobTread. Org and we say now you gotta go figure it out, build out your organization, then you’re gonna come in and you’re gonna actually present that. You’re gonna, you know, if you’re applying for sales, you’re gonna do a demo.

Eric Fortenberry
If you’re applying for customer success or support like, you’re gonna do a training or you’re gonna kind of walk us through how, you know, you would use JobTread and kind of help us understand that, like, you were able to learn this. I. I don’t care how you learn it. You know, we ask that you don’t use one of our. One of our team members because that’s, you know, they could probably shortcut this whole, like, you know, we want to know, were you able to learn the system? Do you get it? You know, when I look at your budget, you know, I can immediately tell if you understand construction or not. You know, we are looking for people that have experience working in construction, you know, and that’s.

Eric Fortenberry
That’s something like, you know, you could kind of quickly, you know, again, copy some template or some example from a video. But, like, when we start asking you about it, like, you know, we can get to. Did you truly learn that? Do you understand, you know, why that is important, how that is working? Like, do you understand the needs of our customers or not? You know, and so I would say that, like, we’re not, you know, when I say we want people who have experience with AI I’m not looking to hire AI. I’m looking to hire, you know, the right qualified people who are going to be a good fit for our company. And again, I don’t think you can outsource that to AI right now. Like, you know, you got to get in there, you got to feel the energy.

Eric Fortenberry
You got to, you know, look them in the eyes, shake their hand, you know, let them, you know, have that opportunity to win you over, you know, with. With who they are and the skill set that they have. And I think, again, like, we’ve got a very great track record of hiring a phenomenal team. We’ve had, you know, next to no turnover. You know, I think we’ve maybe lost, like, two or three people that, you know, that we didn’t want to lose. I mean, we’ve had to let a couple people go, but, like, you know, by and large, you know, having, you know, 65 people on this team, we. We have done very good at hiring. So I don’t think we need to change or fix what’s not broken.

Logan Shinholser
You know, there’s a. There’s a guy, like, as you’re talking about, like, you know, I don’t care how you figure it out, but once we start to ask you, we’re going to figure it out, you know, one way or another. There’s a guy that’s big in the marketing world, where he has for his job applications this, like, basically, it’s called Beat Claude. And the way that it works is like, I will give you a series of questions, and what ends up happening is Claude is going to give its answer and then you’re going to give its answer, and then it’s going to anonymize whose is who. And somebody on our team, like the hiring manager, is going to review it and pick the better of the two answers. And if it picks your answer, then you get a job interview.

Logan Shinholser
If it doesn’t pick your answer, then basically that just shows that, like, Claude is better than you and why would we hire you if we can just have Claude do that thing? So I thought that was kind of a unique way of basically saying, like, if you’re only as good as what the AI is spitting out, there’s no point to them bring you in. You got to better than this thing, whether you use it or not. Ultimately, we are after the best end result. So I thought, as you’re describing, like, the. We’re going more human and we want to see these things and like, we want to hear what you’re passionate about, because as you’re speaking about this stuff, everybody can hear your voice is going up and down and things like that.

Logan Shinholser
That’s the human connection part, that a lot of these builders and remodelers and contractors, that’s why you win the job. And then AI is supposed to turn around and do it for you. And it doesn’t translate because they don’t know what the sticking points are to get excited about.

Eric Fortenberry
We have to remember, too, though, in order for you to really be great at leveraging that AI tool, you have to be a good communicator. You have to understand, you know, what it is that you’re looking for and be able to communicate that effectively to the AI. And so if you don’t have that, you know, that deep knowledge of understanding, you’re not going to know if it’s right or wrong. And you may just kind of take whatever it gives you and say, hey, here’s the answer, you know, and like, that’s what we want to make sure is like, we’re finding great, you know, communicators who are smart and they have the ability to learn and. And can write and can kind of sort of still think for themselves.

Eric Fortenberry
And it sounds like that’s kind of the ultimate output of that exercise will sort of help you understand did they do a good job or not?

Logan Shinholser
And with that Last thing I want to kind of talk through on this is, you know, you brought up earlier and you talked about like basically pulling different softwares together. And that’s something that like, you know, right now a lot of what we talked about is like you ask JobTread using your Claude a question, it creates something for you, it spits it back and it’s very like back and forth, one to one. Then you have like this next level that’s basically like a workflow and it can trigger when this thing happens and this happens.

Logan Shinholser
And you know, I’m starting to see it more and more like the JobTread Pros community where it’s like somebody has their plod, which is like a physical like audio recording device that you know, people say, hey, I record it on an in home estimate and as soon as it’s done it automatically triggers this next thing which then talks to Claude, which then talks to JobTread, which then puts the scope of work together. Can you talk a bit more about the idea of a lot of people right now are doing the very one to one of what does this cost? It goes to JobTread, it comes back and it tells you the answer and you’re like that’s amazing. But the next level up is then how do you connect these things together?

Logan Shinholser
So it’s almost as if these things are happening in the background without you.

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah, well, and again, I think the plod, you know, use case here where like, you know, if you think about the amount of data that you are capturing in a one hour conversation, it is enormous. And so for somebody else to have to come in and try to listen to that entire thing to extract all of the key points or even for, you know, let’s say it’s been a little bit and you got to go kind of revisit everything. Like, I mean that is the, you know, I think one of the best use cases of I have a tremendous amount of data.

Eric Fortenberry
You know, every single meeting that you have with someone, you know, every, you know, webinar, every, you know, virtual meeting, like, you know, every phone call, like all of that information is able to be, you know, again kind of recorded, transcribed and summarized into those actionable insights. Like I think that is exactly the best use case for this technology because like again, what would have taken you an hour to go re listen to, you know, or even let’s say you listen to it on 2x half an hour, you know, like you immediately have the key takeaways and can leverage that data to make action right then and there.

Eric Fortenberry
And so, like, I think that’s where, you know, we’re seeing a lot of huge benefits of like, you know, again, like, I can’t listen to every single sales call, I can’t listen to every single training, you know, but being able to have all of that data collected and summarized and then be able to give very, you know, specific feedback. I mean, that’s where, you know, again, like these things are like actually coaching you and giving you in real time feedback about, you know, how did that work?

Eric Fortenberry
You know, I think again, like that same notion of you’ve got all this data, but we have to turn it into information that we can act upon, you know, and that’s where I think there’s just such a huge productivity boost so that you don’t have to spend all of that time going back through all of the details. And, you know, there’s tons of different ways, you know, and different kind of systems that can collect this information. But the key is being able to have it all integrated. You know, I still see, you know, I mean, JobTread, we view us as a platform, you know, that you can create this connected ecosystem of all of the solutions that you need to run your business.

Eric Fortenberry
And so, you know, just, you know, really kind of the crux of what’s made all this possible for us is our open API. And so, you know, I tell people like, you know, when you’re evaluating other solutions, you know, because look, there’s no like magic bullet here. There’s no one system that’s going to be able to do it all. You have to find the right systems for your business. But like, the key is that they can all communicate, integrate and work together. They have to be able to play well with each other for you to truly get those productivity boosts of having all the right tools working together. And that’s where again, I think this notion of these connected applications and these MCP servers, truly they are powered because of these applications, APIs.

Eric Fortenberry
And so that is kind of the most important thing is finding the right solutions that are modern technology. They are already set up to be able to enable this programmatic integration, you know, with each other. And I think that’s where again, like AI is coming in here is kind of the, the orchestrator of all this. But they’re pulling together those solutions that have already, you know, spent a lot of time, you know, positioning themselves to be able to be connected.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, like, you know, on our side, like we have a portal that like all of our clients have access to that. Like all the leads that come through, we track it and we highlight it. We have like our own like AI tools that like will like say, is this a good one, Is this a bad one? Things like that. And like the real use case, like we have job tread that like we are connected to with all of our clients that like it can talk back and forth. Builder tread can’t do that. So it’s like you gotta basically export everything out through like a CSV file and try to upload it, which is like the whole point is to avoid that kind of stuff because it’s like it just needs to happen.

Logan Shinholser
So like from a usability standpoint, it’s so much easier than talking about like the information. We’re like, I know for us as a marketing agency, like the number one thing that we need from clients is information. And the best thing that we are now doing a lot more of is like instead of requiring you to then send us over your scopes of work or you teach us about your pricing, it’s like, can we get access to your cost catalog? Can we see your previous information? So a lot of it is now moving more into ease of information transference, if you will, between the different vendors and the different platforms that connect it all together.

Logan Shinholser
Because it’s like so much easier to write a blog post about what you charge for a kitchen remodel if we’re using your actual data of projects that you’ve already done. Which as a marketing person, ultimately that’s what Google wants to see, is they want to see more accurate stuff. We then got to add our own layer into all the SEO stuff that we know how to do. That’s different than just like we’ll write a blog post on this. Kind of like what you’re bringing up of like it’s a good ideation piece. But ultimately for us it’s great when we have different softwares that we can connect of like all together to see your analytics versus a job tread versus some design tool that we could piece everything together into one prototype. It’s so much nicer. It’s helped us.

Eric Fortenberry
And I think that again, that’s what I’ve always seen as the biggest difference between you and many others out there is like any marketing agency can come up with a blog post and can come up with graphics and imagery. And a lot of software companies do this. They got all this fancy looking marketing stuff that’s just fluff and it’s not real. Like you guys actually go deeper and get into specific projects and you share specific stories from the client, the real, you know, the real story. And you actually take screenshots from the project showing the real, you know, schedules and the real communications. And it’s not this like, you know, fictitious, you know, ideal world that positions the client as the best possible client or contractor in the world. Like, you know, it’s the real data.

Eric Fortenberry
And I find that is what actually does a phenomenal job of building trust. Like, not everything is going to be this picture perfect, you know, scenario. And I think that a lot of consumers see through that. You know, they want to hear from others who have been in their seat who have gone through the same process and they want that real transparent story. And that’s what I think. You guys do a great job of going above and beyond to capture the real stories and not just what the AI wants or what the, you know, what got made up or what the search engines want. Like, it’s the genuine, you know, story behind everything. That, that I think is what builds a lot of trust for all of the clients who you work with. And I’ve just, I’ve always really appreciated, you know, that.

Eric Fortenberry
And, and I think again, it sets the expectation that when that client, you know, decides to hire, like, they already have a real expectation of what it’s going to be like working with that contractor. Because you have surfaced and you have shared, you know, that, that real experience. It’s, it’s not a made up bait and switch. It is like, look, this is how we manage our projects. This is how we will communicate with you. Here are real examples. And again, there’s no kind of AI that’s just going to magically generate that with this, you know, massive data set like that. It would all be fictitious.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that because it’s getting to the point now where we’ve built websites using AI ourselves and we’re a website company, so we know good design. And I can tell very quickly, did somebody build their website using AI? Because it looks like Tron built it. And I’m like, those aren’t your colors and everything is very grid style. So it’s very quick to see. And I’m biased and I see it, but if I show that to my wife, she very quickly would just be like, oh, like, why does it look this way? And it’s not like, oh, does it look this way because they use Claude or AI, she would just go, well, that’s weird. I’M just gonna move on to the next. So it is that, like, that human connection side of things.

Logan Shinholser
Like, it, all this stuff, it makes it much easier to grab the human connection and like, leverage it. But ultimately it’s, we’re not quite there. I think we will get there with like, you know, her where it’s like people have their own personal assistant that they’re obsessed with. But I think for the time being, you know, the human side of it still, it’s the number one thing at the heart of it all, you know.

Eric Fortenberry
And I think what’s going to have to happen, I mean, it’s inevitable that Google is going to need to start to take into account, you know, was this an AI generated, you know, piece of content? You know, I heard a story, I believe that, I think it was an H Vac company in Florida, you know, said that like, you know, he went from being, you know, the number one, you know, listed, you know, recommended, you know, H Vac company to, you know, these, these AI, you know, sites came in here and somehow got listed above him.

Eric Fortenberry
And then people were reaching out to them and they’re getting some text message and then it’s coming from this other company and like, they thought they hired, you know, this one company and then some other contractor shows up and like, it was just a total, you know, bait and switch. They took the money and they ran. And like, that is not going to be, you know, able to play well here. And that’s not, you know, Google can’t allow that to happen. Like, we have to make sure that we have legitimate businesses who have been doing this for a long time who are going to continue to rank and continue to be recommended. And so that’s where I think there’s a lot of, you know, again, it’s a very uncertain time about how all of this is going to be handled.

Eric Fortenberry
But I do believe, you know, Google is the dark horse here. Like, they have so much data and information that they will be able to come in and help sort of discern what is real and what is not real. Because if they don’t, we are all in deep trouble. Nobody will know what’s real and what’s not. Like, I’m very worried for the future. If these systems and these protections and guardrails don’t get put into place, then it’s going to be very difficult for all of us as consumers and people in general.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I think of that. I think it’s going to be like there’s going to be a new way to figure this thing out. Like, we talk about this at our company of, like, what are ways that we can. Like, like, people still buy nostalgia. Like, there’s still a market for baseball cards, even though, like, I don’t think I’ve had a baseball card since I was, like, in second grade. But, like, what are unique things that, like, you can do to stand back out? Because in a world where everybody’s doing, you know, like, all the AI fluff that’s out there, that’s basically like the recipes that are on Google that, like, you know, you just want to know how to instapot some chicken. And it was like five paragraphs about how they went to Santorini and they had this amazing honeymoon.

Logan Shinholser
And I’m like, I don’t care about that. I’m skipping those and going right to, like, Chad or Claude or things like that. But, like, ultimately, you’re right. I was listening to a presentation two years ago, and they said, like, you know, Meta or Facebook has like 50,000 data points on each individual. They think Google has about 2 million. And it’s just because it’s what you search. It’s Gmail. It is. If you have android, it is Google Maps. It’s like, it knows so much about you that, like, when it comes to, like, the search game, like, we talk about ChatGPT because people are using it, but, like, ultimately, like, Google’s gonna be the thing, especially when it comes to, like, that sort of stuff. Like, maybe, like, the Agentix stuff is different and like.

Logan Shinholser
But I kind of look at it as, like, at the end run, it’s going to be Google number one. I think if you had to pick the top three, Claude’s number two, and ChatGPT is gonna be number three, because I think it’s just they were first to market, but I mean, Google is gonna be the end all, be all, if there is only gonna be one winner in my mind.

Eric Fortenberry
Yeah. What’s interesting, like, right now, like, Google is the only one that can actually read our help desk. And so we are having to rewrite our entire help desk and essentially are going to publish it in kind of this markdown format. You know, right now, like, we’re dynamically generating all of the content on the help desk. And so we don’t have to rewrite the content, but we have to restructure it and organize it in a way that can be consumed by all of the AIs. But, like, Google already has the ability to do that. You Know, I didn’t realize, I’m pretty sure it was chat gbt. Like it can’t actually read Google reviews, you know, like it struggles, you know, with different, you know, types of information depending on how that information is being delivered.

Eric Fortenberry
And so like that’s where though Google has been doing this for so long and it’s got the tools and the ability to consume all of this data that it already has in its data set versus like these other tools are having to discover it and are having to kind of learn it as it goes. And you know, again I think they got a long way to catch up. Even if they have sort of come out as these early, you know, first to market front runners, you know, you definitely can’t discount Google.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I agree. Cool man. Anything else on this that we haven’t covered that you would love to cover?

Eric Fortenberry
You know, I think the one other thing that I would bring up because I see a lot of people, you know, they think about, you know, the cost, you know, and they’re like, well is it worth subscribing, you know, to chat or to Claude, you know, should I pay 20 bucks a month? Should I pay 100 bucks a month? And like, you know, I heard the craziest stat ever that like I think most recently I heard that Claude, for every dollar that you spend on Claude or anthropic actually spends $18 to fulfill that request and all of that, you know, kind of to deliver, you know, that response to you and like, you know, when you think about it like that is crazy, right?

Eric Fortenberry
And so like I think from a, from a personal cost standpoint, like this is an absolute no brainer yet that $20 or even like I tell people, like start with the $20 when you hit the limit, don’t think twice about upgrading to the $100 plan. Like that is the best, most productive employee you could possibly hire. $100 A month. Like just don’t even think twice about that. Like that, that is, it is a no brainer. And especially when you think about how much value you’re actually getting because of it’s being subsidized by, you know, the underlying parent companies. I mean, you know, I think again, like we have a supply and demand issue right now. There is a whole bunch more demand than the infrastructure to actually deliver, you know, what people want.

Eric Fortenberry
And so like take advantage of that, like let these companies pay for all of this knowledge and this, you know, expertise that you can get right here right now. I see it over the long haul, like again, we are drastically, you know, building out infrastructure all over. And I think eventually, you know, unfortunately, you know, the cost in the short term here, like, especially when, you know, OpenAI Claude Anthropic if they end up going public, like, you know, the market is going to demand way better economics.

Eric Fortenberry
Like, you know, all of these, all this private equity money that is just like, you know, throwing billions and billions of dollars at this, like that’s not sustainable, you know, but like, I think once the infrastructure gets built out, then, you know, hopefully the price will come back down and then ultimately like this should become a commodity, you know, and it’ll hopefully level out because, you know, the thing that these guys, the big, you know, kind of huge guys, they’re going to start competing with, you know, you and I, running our own models on our own machines where it’s free for us to use it all day long.

Eric Fortenberry
Like it doesn’t matter how many times or how many questions or how big our context window is, as long as we have, you know, a big enough, you know, hard drive with enough, you know, compute power and memory. Like, you know, so I think that this is all going to sort of level out in the end. But like, for right now, man, like, if you’re not using AI, I think you are heavily missing out and you got to get on the bandwagon because the last thing you want to do is wake up and realize that you are getting smoked by your competition who has adopted this technology and is leveraging it, you know. So I think there’s never been a greater time than to get on this AI bandwagon. But I just, I also want to preface it with everything else.

Eric Fortenberry
Like let’s not have our rose colored glasses on here. Like we got to take the blinders off and we got to be smart and continue to think about where is it a great tool, where can it help us the most and where are the risks, where are the downsides? Where should we be even more thoughtful and make sure that we don’t take our eye off, you know, this area where like it could get us into trouble. Because I think you got to kind of keep thinking for yourself. But man, don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Like get on the AI bandwagon and start to learn to play with it, you know, again, solve your own personal problems, whatever it may be.

Eric Fortenberry
Like, you know, like there are so many things that it can help you with if you get comfortable and start using it. And that’s how you’re going to become more and more, you know, in tune with it, become a better user of it, and make sure that you don’t get left behind, because that is the last thing that I want to see. At least the job trade contractors. Like, I want you to be ahead of the curve, ahead of the game, and adopting the technology that can make the biggest impact on your business. Cool.

Logan Shinholser
Love it. We’ll end it there, everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Eric Fortenberry
Thanks, Logan.