Afew months ago I sat in on a call with a heating engineer who’d missed a job, a full system replacement, because he was up in a loft when the customer rang. Insulation dust everywhere, torch in one hand, no signal worth mentioning. He didn’t find out until that evening, but by then the customer had already booked someone else, someone who’d simply picked up first. He wasn’t a bad engineer. He was doing exactly what he should have been doing. Working.
I think about that loft a lot, because it’s not really a story about one man or one boiler. It’s the story hiding inside one of the clearest findings in our NOW Report – national research into how UK tradespeople actually run their businesses. A massive 93% said running the business causes them stress. More than half haven’t had a week’s holiday in the past year. Underneath both numbers sits the same quiet mechanism; work vanishing without a sound, while somebody’s too busy earning a living to notice it’s gone.
The latest trend
AI has become one of those words that gets thrown at everything until it means nothing. Chatbots, image generators, whatever’s trending that week on a tech blog. None of that is what tradespeople need, and most of them already know it. What they need is something that closes the actual gap in their day – the moment between a phone ringing and a pair of hands being free to answer it.
That’s the reason why we built an AI Receptionist. Not because AI was fashionable, but because that one moment, the unanswered call, was costing money and nobody had built anything that solved the problem. Voicemail doesn’t work. Most people don’t leave a message, they just ring the next name down. A generic answering service doesn’t work either, it has no idea what a powerflush is, and it can’t tell a burst pipe from someone fishing for a quote.
So ours has an actual conversation. It asks what’s wrong, how urgent it is, what the job involves, and books it straight into the diary. No hold music. No “please leave a message after the tone”.
I want to be straight about what this is and isn’t. This is not a replacement for an HVAC engineer, and it never will be. Nobody rings a heating engineer wanting to talk to a machine, they want the job done properly by someone who knows what they’re doing. What’s changing is only the moment before that, the bit where the phone rings in an empty room. That moment has always meant a lost job, but it doesn’t have to any more.
AI isn’t coming for the skill, and it shouldn’t. Nobody’s trusting a robot to fix their boiler. But the admin wrapped around the skill, the bit nobody trained for and nobody wanted, is exactly where this kind of tool can do real, unglamorous, useful work. www.powerednow.com
Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Powered Now.