Latest / Remodelers On The Rise / How to Actually Use AI in Your Remodeling Business with Eric Fortenberry
Transcript
- Kyle: Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about our partner, Jobtread. If you're still running your business on a mix of spreadsheets and sticky notes and a software tool that doesn't quite do everything you need, Jobtread might be exactly what you're looking for. It's an all-in-one construction management platform, estimating proposals, scheduling, job costing, I love job costing, invoicing, client communication, all in one place. What I love about it is how it helps you close more deals faster with professional proposals. It keeps your team on the same page. So jobs stay on time and on budget, and you actually know your numbers so you can protect your profit margins. JobTread has been named the number one construction estimating software two years running. We have a ton of our Remodlers on the Rise clients who love it. And if you've been looking for a way to get organized and grow with confidence, head to JobTread.com. dot com and check it out. Jobtread.com. All right, let's get into today's episode. What we have with today's episode is a webinar that Eric Fortenberry, the CEO and founder of Job Tread, did for our Remodelers on the Rise community. What I think I need to remind all of us, myself included, is to take a deep breath related to AI. Okay, we don't have to do it all. AI is not the answer to everything. Does it save time? Absolutely, it can. Can it be a tool to help us be more productive and efficient? Absolutely. Do we need to rush to implement everything as fast as humanly possible? No. That's where the breath comes in. Take a breath. AI is very similar to undertaking a lot of implementation in general, piece by piece, one thing at a time. Think through what is a specific problem, bottleneck, challenge, frustration. That I have in my remodeling business, and how could AI help solve, alleviate, improve that? And just start with that. The other thing you can do is listen to this podcast, especially as Eric in the latter parts of this goes one by one through all sorts of practical ways that remodelers are actually using AI to their benefit. Enjoy today's episode. Enjoy Eric's energy that he brings to the table. And then pick one next right thing related to implementing AI into your wonderful, fabulous remodeling business. Enjoy. Kyle Hunt: We got the recording. It's the top of the hour. Eric Fortenberry is a man of timeliness. So am I. As my father in law says, to be early is to be on time. To be on time is to be late. And to be late is to be dead. The great Tom Emery says that. and we also just respect all of your afternoons. You are busy remodelers and contractors, and you are devoting an hour to listening to this, or you might be listening to the recording and you're listening. Although Eric and I both talk quickly, so you might have to just do regular speed. But we are glad that you're spending some time here on a topic that is is hot, on a topic that is important, on a topic that some of you are feeling kind of overwhelmed by it. Some of you are kind of feeling like, where do I start? Where do I go with this? You're in the right place. I've looked at Eric's slides, I have approved Eric's slides. I said, Eric. Change slide four and five, add this. No, no. They were great. And they're starting with some good practicality, some good teaching, and then getting into some actual tangible use cases. So using AI with your construction software. Eric Fortenberry, founder, CEO of Job Tread. Eric, I say you just jump right into it and let's start rocking and rolling. All right. Well, let's do it. I'm excited to be here. Appreciate you having me on, Kyle. maybe real quick, just just curious in the chat if we can We can get a quick show of hands. Who's currently using Job Tread? just just so I know our audience are are we talking to to a bunch of job tread people? Are we talking to people who are not using it? just just sort of curious here. I'm I'm gonna try to kind of keep this a little bit you know broad if if I can, but obviously it's kind of hard sometimes. you know, I'm I'm knee deep into job tread as well. So awesome. We got we got we got a bunch of yeses, we got a not yet. All right, a lot of yeses. Very good. Well, appreciate you guys coming and spending a little bit of time with us today. So, you know, today I I just want to quickly kind of again, what is AI? You know, I know a lot of people are are currently using it. Some people maybe still on the fence about it. you know, I did did a similar presentation the other day, and there's one guy that hadn't used it yet. So you know, if you're not using it yet, cool. We're hopefully we can we can get you excited about it. maybe also in the chat real quick, I'm curious, what is your go-to AI if you're currently using it, or or let us know if if you're not. just kind of curious if we got, you know, some some Claude, some chats. got got open claw. All right, Claude, Claude, chat. Got chat. All right. I think that's two and two. Chat, chat and claude. Chat heading towards Claude. Claude. Very good. Chat. Awesome. Awesome. Well look, so we're just gonna kinda talk talk quickly a little bit, you know, what it is. You know, I'm gonna share a little bit about kind of the the the job trip AI connector. and then we're gonna get in just a few best practices, and then I'll kind of share a bunch of practical use cases. And if if we have time, which something tells me we we we may not, but we will we will try to field questions along the way. so what is it? You know, it's it's interesting because like, you we get asked all the time, like, you know, hey, we're we're really interested in AI. We want some AI, and we're like, all cool. What do you want? They're like, well, I don't know. You know, a lot of people don't really know, you know, but they know they want it, you know, and and and I totally get it. It's really exciting. You know, I I I would describe AI as, you know, it's it's a tool in your toolkit. You know, and and and arguably it's it's one of your most powerful tools that you know you and your business have probably had access to. so it's it's something you definitely want to to learn about if you're not currently using it. You know, I like to tell people think about it like you know, it's it's it's an incredibly knowledgeable, you know, digital assistant that is always available, 24 by seven, you know, never gets tired and it's basically consumed everything, knows everything, and can help you solve any problem. So, you know, huge, huge opportunity here. You know, again, great, great, great resource. for for an extremely affordable price as well, usually twenty or a hundred bucks a month. this this will this will undoubtedly be your most productive you know employee that you could possibly ever have. a few of the benefits, so you know again people are like, well why why should I do it? Why should I dig in? What about all these risks and concerns? I mean, you know, I I think at the end of the day, like the benefits far outweigh you know any of the risk right now. You know, it's gonna help you to focus on what matters most. You know, it's gonna help you to save time. you know, on repetitive tasks or just things where you're you're you're not sure where to start, you don't know how to respond, you don't know what to do. Like that's that's where I encourage people, you know, instead of banging your head against the wall and trying to brute force, figure something out, just just ask it. Ask AI, you know, hey, here's the situation, you know, where where should I start? Where should I begin? What what ideas do you have? Like it is so great at helping you to get going. And that's gonna help you to move so much faster with so much more information, you know, that will ultimately hopefully improve you know your consistency, your communication. You know, and it and it and it's got this like really neat way to kind of turn data into actual information. So super powerful stuff, you know, when you really learn how to harness it and how to use it, you know, I I tell people I I believe that, you know, thanks to AI, it's it's it's made me superhuman. You know, I I am able to solve so many problems, you know, at at any level of of of challenge, you know, very, very quickly because I I I don't have to spend a bunch of time you know, researching and getting up to speed, like I can just immediately ask AI, hey, here's the situation. And and and and man, you can give it a lot of information. It just like instantly consumes it, reads it, and starts to give you ideas about, you know, where to go. And and I mean like it could be like some of the most elaborate, advanced things that like you would never even think that it had any clue about. And sure enough, it it can give you some really great ideas to help get your point in the right direction. Which which which AI have you been using the most and what's a what's a recent way you've used it? Claude is Claude is definitely my go-to. I started with chat. You know, I feel like chat is kind of gone by the wayside, sort of like MySpace. you know, maybe it'll come back. I know, I know Sam Altman's about to you know IPO chat. We'll we'll we'll see what happens there. But Claude, I feel like is the best, you know, really, especially for our industry because it's very, very technical. And and it doesn't have to be technical. You know, it can still kind of do the general content creation, be your therapist, things like that. But man, like when you have a very technical question. You know, may maybe it's about a specific tool you're trying to figure out how to use or, you know, a specific situation on the job side, or maybe it's, you know, how to use some software or whatever it is, like it has the ability to to to kind of go in depth, I think, a little bit better than than what I than what I saw with with Chat GPT. So that's it's definitely my go to. You know, recently I I did I did try to, you know, had a conversation about how can I get out of this jury duty summons that I've got. And you know, ul ultimately it it it it it told me that I I I pretty much don't have a justifiable excuse to to get excused and I needed to show up, but you know, gave me some ideas about you know letting a judge know that Kyle Hunt had me on a webinar later today, I needed to leave by twelve. So I was able to kind of navigate that situation ultimately, was able to get out of the I'm big I'm big with judges in Texas, so you I had some sort. Very very well known, Kyle for sure. Put on Richard's cowboy hat like I see in the video there and off we go. That tip of the hat. Nice. So you know, I I I want to again kind of you know sort of highlight there there's a few different ways that that you can be using AI. You know, the most common one again is is probably the the the claw, the chat, you know, being able to kind of create you know or subscribe to some sort of a cloud-based AI service, you know, and and I think this is this is probably where most people end up starting. You know, it is great for general questions, idea generation content. You know, it's it's this conversation that you're able to have to to hopefully kind of figure out, you know, answers or or kind of what what what you might want to do. Maybe you're creating, you know, some sort of a an SOP or creating some marketing content, whatever it is, like you know, the the the the the chats, the clouds, like those are really, really great places to start. They all have their own dedicated app that you can have on your phone, on your computer. You know, you could use the web browser if you want. but but I find those to be you know really great starting point. Now, another way that that you know a lot of people may, you know, already be using AI, maybe you don't even realize you're using AI. You know, I mean if you think about like you know Siri, right? Like that's like fully built into to to your phone. You know, well a lot of software has their own proprietary AI that they have incorporated into their application. You know, if you think about like with Job Tred, right? Like the ability to kind of do the the daily log summary or like the web clipper, you know, auto a AI. feature there. Like, I mean, there there there's there's there's ways that applications can essentially create very, very focused and specific solutions that will will will allow you to do whatever it is that, you know, kind of the the purpose of that that that software is. And and the neat thing about this, like, you know, unlike kind of the the general chat, you know, Claude, like where they have to sort of be this like all knowing, they have to be able to figure anything out. And a lot of times they're they're figuring it out on the fly, just sort of brute force, trial and error. And that's why usually these conversations can take a little bit longer than than than you might want sometimes. Well, when you have AI built specifically into software, you know, you're able to train it to perform that that that one, you know, or a few things very, very well. And so, you know, that's that's why, you know, again, a lot of software kind of is is able to set up their own sort of, you know, in in-house kind of in-app AI, which is is what we've been spending a lot of time working on and and doing as well. You know, and that's another way that you're able to. know to use AI. Now maybe it's branded something else, maybe you don't even know it's AI. You know, most software companies out there they they want to you know tout AI and they're all trying to be AI companies. this this this day and age we'll we'll see how long that that lasts. But you know again that's it's it's having it built in it can be a really really powerful tool. Now the third way is is when you can actually sort of take the best of both of these worlds and you can actually combine you know your whatever AI you know service you're using, Claude, chat you know, Gemini, you know, whatever, perplexity, all of them, right? Like, you know, you could combine them, you know, with a data source, with a software. And and the way that those are connected is is through what's called an MCP. And that, you know, stands for model, context, protocol, doesn't really matter. the thing that matters is that, you know, this is a really, really neat way. And and and this, you know, has has kind of evolved very quickly over the last few months. You know, where Anthropic, the company that that that owns and and operates Claude, you know, they came up with this this this new way for AI to connect to existing you know applications that have like an API. They have a way, you know, you know an open API where people or or where they're where their AI can communicate and share information back and forth. And so like this is like, you know, again, really, really powerful. And and instead of just asking your AI kind of just generic, you know, hey what what you know what what is the whole world you know doing what is the consensus on something it can actually leverage your real data to create real business insights and and have that connection so that it can operate on your behalf connected to those those business systems. And so like this bridge is is is extremely powerful. And when we saw this, you know, come out, you know, this this is when we knew that we had to kind of jump on that, you know, and I think we're one of the first construction, you know, management softwares out there to to actually release you know the ability for you to connect, you know, whatever your AI is to to to job tread through this mcp connection. And so again, I I I and and and I would encourage you, even if you know you're you're not really interested in kind of using it, you know, to to read or to create or do or do anything like just having the connection there, it is able to provide your AI just a ton of additional context about what it's connected to. You know, so in in our instance, you know, it's connected to JobTread here, like, you know, it has so much additional Intel and it can use all of that insight to answer really any of your questions. You know, if if you're trying to learn how to do something, you want to learn about a new feature, you want to, you know, figure something out in JobTread, like if you were to ask Claude when it's not connected, you know, to the MCP versus asking him when it is, you're going to get far better answers when it is connected because of that additional, you know, context that we can provide it when it knows that it's trying to figure something out about JobTread. You know, and and typically this this works with really kind of whatever you might connect to, but this is really, really powerful. And so I I encourage everyone to do that, even if you you know, you don't know exactly what you want to do with it yet, or let it do on your behalf. Now, when we when we when we talk about what can it actually do, you know, there there's really kind of you four. So once I pa pause the other thing back, if they haven't set up the MCP just going in and going into their job tread software, going to that section, making that connection. it's not a super onerous, not a super difficult thing to kind of get that connection set up, right? No, it's super easy. And and actually you don't you don't go into job trade, you go into your your AI. So you go into Claude or Chat, you know, Gemini, Grok, whatever it and like you you you need to go sort of find within that service, you know, where do you create, you know, these these connections. You know, Claude calls them calls them, you know, here's kind of your your connections or connectors. you know, you may need to look for something that says MCP, but like, you know, wherever that is, it's very easy. You just drop in. you know, the the URL for the the whatever apps MCP server you're trying to connect to. And then that that's that that's really, you know, the extent of it. it w it will kind of redirect you to Job Tread and say, hey, pick your permissions and then you go back and it's all connected. But it's a very, very simple process. Yep. There's a nice job tread video you guys did on step by step. Yep. So so so what what can what can that actually do though? And and and I encourage people to think about starting with, you know, just reading. You know, reading information, like being able to to to extract kind of data, you know, so so think about like, you know, you you have questions about, you know, hey, where, you know, where are we at with our jobs? You know, what what what's the most recent job or most recent customer created? Or, you know, do do we have an account for this for this person? Do we, you know, is the schedule there? Like what's been built, documents, kind of, you know, asking just general questions that, you know, again, you you could obviously go look it up, you know, but but maybe you want to generate some some report. You know, maybe you want to ask about all of the active jobs and where where they're at, like whatever it may be, like you know, letting it kind of go and just read data is by far the safest and best place to start. You know, get get comfortable, you know, with with that action. You know, and again, sometimes you might have to go back and forth and kind of you know, we tell it, no, no, I looking for this or go over here. You know, you need to be very specific. We'll we'll come back to that in a second. But like, you know, reading is is is is a great first place. Now. If want to kind of take it a step farther, this is where now you can start to like create content. You know, let's say you, you know, you're you're you just walked off the job site and and and you're about to get in the car, and obviously we we don't want to be on our phones while we're driving, you know, unless you got, you know, that full self-driving Tesla. you know, but no, just kidding. you should never be on your phone and driving. you know. Anyways, moving on. So, you know, let's say though, you know, again, you you got your nice little phone holder and you plug it in and you just open up Claw and you just hit the microphone, just start talking. Say, hey, can you, you know, create create a create a customer for for this for this new person I just visited with? Here's their address, you know, go build out a job. You know, here's all the things that we talked about. You know, maybe you wanted to go create the budget, you know, or you want to go, you know, build out a schedule or add some to-dos for you, like whatever it is, right? Like when you're creating new records, you know, that's where your AI can now do this on your behalf. You know, so so again, just kind of thinking about, you know, how powerful that is, you know, where you no longer have to wait until. You know, you you get to a stopping point or get to your computer or or can get on your phone, like you know, you can start doing this, you know, on the fly and letting the AI go and take those actions on your behalf. So really powerful. You know, now there's also updating, you know, and and and this might be, you know, you know, hey, we we we we just talked to the customer, we need to shift out the schedule, you know, go go update, you know, the the the dates or go, you know, update you know, some sort of, you know, message or or communication or maybe want to update the scope of work or the description here or there, like, you know, assigning things, like those would be like updating existing records. You know, so again, really powerful. And then lastly is the deleting. You know, this is where I, you know, I I I heavily encourage people to to to really wait till they're very, very comfortable with everything else before you sort of go down this path. You know, deleting would be like, hey, you know Go ahead and remove that to do from from my my my my list or or remove that task or you know remove something, delete something, delete a document, whatever it may be. Like I I encourage people to be very, very cautious and careful with having it delete something, because you might not always be able to get it back. You know, we're gonna talk about that here in a second. But you know, just so you know too, though, like even within updating, technically that could remove data. You know, if you say, hey, go into this job and I and I want you to to clear out the budget. You know, technically that's an update. You know, it was it was an existing job, it had stuff in there. You know, we we we we maybe just kind of removed it like so so there is this kind of overlap a little bit here. So I just I I share all this to be very, very careful and aware that some things could be destructive and and and you might not be able to get them back. And so you want to be be very careful. Gotcha. Eric, we we aim to please all of our people that attend, right? What's that? We aim to please everybody that attends our webinar. Well, in that case, Austin already put a question in there, so we're gonna we're gonna help him out by answering it right right now. Do you have to have your templates built out to have it create budgets, schedules, et cetera, correctly? No, no, you don't. you you you know, again, Claude and and you know, I again I I think Claude is by far the best AI here. So if if I refer to to Claude more more than than anything else, that's why. and it's also my go to, but like I mean, again, you you can work with Claude. To to develop an extremely robust, extremely elaborate, detailed, you know, set of cost items that you want to add to your budget. You know, 100%. Now, it it is it gonna, you know, give you the exact right answer on the first prompt, you know, the first iteration? Probably not. You know, is it gonna get you 50% of the way? Maybe. You know, but like this is it it it all depends on how good you are at prompting the the the the AI and and the amount of detail that you're gonna give it. And so. I'm I'm actually gonna use that as as a segue into a couple best practices here, Austin. I I think that this will this will hopefully kind of shore up some of that. So, you know, the the the first and foremost and and and often where I see people struggle the most is it's all about your prompting. And and when I say prompting, that's like when I'm when I'm communicating with the AI and trying to give it a set of instructions. You know, again, it's it's just like anything else in life, garbage in, garbage out. You know, if you are not very, very specific, then it It it it may make a bunch of assumptions and who knows. You know, I I don't know if any of you guys remember Amelia Bedelia, but you know that the the book is chock full of her, you know, kind of going and and and literally doing the things that that people told her to do, but it but it was often not what they were intending. You know, and so I think that's where like you have to learn to be very, very explicit and give as much detail as you possibly can. And and and again, this this isn't gonna be just a a a one-shot thing, like This is going to be a conversation that you're going to have with the AI to hopefully, you know, get to the point where you have instructed it and given it very, you know, detailed, kind of answering and clarifying questions, you know, so that it doesn't just go make a bunch of assumptions. You know, the problem is when you leave it up to AI to just sort of figure things out, well, it's going to take a crack at it no matter what, you know, but the problem is that it's it's it it can have a tendency to to hallucinate. You know, and in every one of these models out there, there is a hallucination rate that you know that that is tracked, it is known, you know, and so that that's where, you know, I think it's very, very important that you know you you give it as much possible detail as you can. And that will ultimately better, you know, set yourself up to have that, you know, high quality budget or schedule or you know, whatever it may be. yeah, very very, very important. Now, I would also say. You know, it to the extent that like you can spend some time training your AI, that is also going to help drastically improve, you know, what it delivers for you. You know, so so again, like having it connected to to our MCP and giving it access to your cost catalog, you know, pointing out you know previous jobs that you've run, have it go and review those, study those, you know, or or maybe you got you know proposals or or you know, documentation, maybe you got contract language, like. You know, even email communications, anything that you can give it and upload it and say, hey, you know, here is my style, here's my tone, here's how we like to organize, you know, our our you know, whatever, whatever it is that that that you're working on with them. Like, you know, again, it could could be anything from a daily log to a to a budget to a you know, a folder structure, like it doesn't matter. Like the the the important thing is that you know, you tell it what you want and how you want it to structure. And and and when you do that, that's gonna sort of again try to help bring a little bit more consistency to those future interactions that you have with it. And you can also tell it, like, hey, save this to memory, you know, remember this. You know, this is how I want you to to you know, kind of come across when when communicating with an upset customer, or is it is that the best practice on that you simply just kind of say, please remember this, please make this your primary way of approaching this? Is that as simple as it is? Yeah. I mean it's it's it now. I I think too the the other way that that you know I know a lot of people kind of would recommend and and we recommend is like actually create a project. You know, within Claude they're called projects. So you create a project and then you can you know go and create a bunch of different chats all within that project. And so that project contains additional insights and memory about you know what you're doing. So like I would go create a job tread project and then all of your chats and everything that that you want to ask would live in there. Now, you know, another little side thing though. it it's it's important that you create you know new chats every single time you know because once you fill up your context window it will just start to drop off things that that it that it you know might have been remembering you know within that within that chat and so like you know just starting fresh every time and and making sure that it has the information that it needs for that specific job not some job you know a week ago or you know whatever it is like you know you you want to have a freshly you know opened up kind of communication chat with with your AI. But giving it, you know, again, just insights and taking time for it to be able to go and learn and you pointing out what are your the best practices, like that is a great, great starting point to get your AI dialed in. Now, another thing that a lot of people didn't didn't realize, and I think again, this is where Claude does it really, really well. Ask your AI to interview you. You know, let it ask questions, gather details, like make sure that it understands the assignment. You know, this is going to drastically improve the accuracy and the completeness of the results. You know, tell it, do not make assumptions. Ask me anything that you don't understand or you don't know. You know, this, this again, it's really neat. It kind of pull puts up like a little multi-pick list. It's like, hey, you know, I'm trying to figure this out. Would you like, you know, to do A or would you like B or C something else? And you can like write in something else. Like, you know, again, answer those questions because that is so helpful for it to make sure that it understands, you know, your assignment. You know, and this is where again, like, you know, instead of just kind of letting it run with some vague prompt, it can get clarifications. Now, the other thing you can do here is you can actually ask it to summarize the instructions. You know, provide me a summary of what I just asked you to do, you know, so that I can verify before we proceed. You know, this is this is so important that that again, like it's better to catch any issues up front, you know, refine the instructions, give it clarifications, like you you want to have that opportunity to kind of fix things. you know, before it goes off and does a bunch of work on your behalf. So again, I highly encourage you to to have it do that before it starts, you know, going off and doing a bunch of things, you know, behind the scenes. Now, specifically with job tread, I would also encourage you to to have it draft up information, draft up documents, draft up messages like, you know, again, like you you want to make sure that this is this is kind of what you want. You know, if if you're gonna ask it to go build out a budget Well again, like as you can see here, like let it show you everything that it that it's come up with before it goes through the process of building it out in Job Trid. You know, say, hey, show me, you know, the the schedule and the outline. You know, show me, you know, kind of what what you're thinking about for this, you know, for this piece of content or for that, you know, daily log or whatever it is. Like that this again, it gives you that opportunity to review and to control the flow. You know, if if you just kind of say, Hey, go do this. You know, and and you don't sort of check it, then like you you could end up having to go and clean up a bunch of things, or maybe it's doing something on the wrong job, or it's you know, taking the wrong action. Like you you gotta keep control of the process here. And it's as simple as that. Even I see Jacob Thompson with home run on here, and he was he was showing in one of our peer groups kind of creating an estimate. This is a nice we we saw just go literally in a job trying to create the whole estimate just by asking, Hey, before you take it all the way in. If you can just show me here so I can review it. it's just a s that's a just a simple prompt and a simple best practice. Yep, absolutely. Now I would also say again, like before you have it go do some big overhaul of of a budget or your catalog or you know, rearrange everything, you know, to the extent that you can like save a backup, you know, again, especially when you're first learning this stuff, you know, save a backup of that dashboard, save a backup of that workflow. before you let it get in there and start making a bunch of changes. Cause I've seen more times than I'd like, you know, where Claude came in and just totally jacked it all up. And you know, if if you don't kind of save a backup, then it it's it's not able to be reverted. And so, you know, I I highly encourage you, you know, again, especially when you're getting sort of comfortable with this, you know, to to save, you know, whatever it may be, just export the budget, the schedule, the dashboard, like you can export all of this stuff, save that, and then start to work with the Claude so that in the event that it screws something up, you can revert right back to where you were before you know it kind of went went down that that path. And lastly, you know, again, I I I I I I I I'm continuing to reiterate similar things here, but like you have to review and verify everything. You know, my biggest fear, you know, with this, you know, continuing to go mainstream is that, you know, people are going to just see this easy button. They're going to just want to press that easy button and sit back and just let you know let the AI kind of do everything and think it's just going to take over. You know, like that that isn't that is not a good idea right now. You know, you should keep a human in the loop, you know, especially when when we're, you know, kind of making decisions or taking actions. Like, you know, you are the expert. You have tremendous experience. Your judgment, you know, the context, the the relationships that you have, you know, AI doesn't have all of that. You know, it it is just gonna kind of make the best, you know, choices that it can given the data that it has, but like. You have that real world experience and you can't forget that. Like AI is not here to replace you. It is here to be a tool for you to be able to be more productive and again take it to the next level. But again, it is your assistant. It is your tool. It is not your controller. It is not your owner. Like you need to use it. But remember that it's up to you. You are responsible for what your AI does. You know, at the end of the day, if you sell a fixed price project and and you relied on AI to to give you that full blown, you know, proposal and then push, come to shove, you find out that it forgot something. Well, that is on you. You're not gonna be able to go to a judge and say, well, you know, my AI forgot it. Like nobody cares. At the end of the day, the buck stops with you. You own this and this is your responsibility. So please don't see this as like the cop out, the easy button, like, you know, again, I'm I'm all about automations and you know, trying to streamline processes and be more efficient, but like You gotta still remember that like you own it. It is up to jury the jury the jury duty thing's making you think of all these law law law references and judge references. And to your point, like yes, AI is meant to help us be more efficient and productive. But just like when we hire a new employee and it takes a little bit of onboarding in order for you to actually realize some of that savings, I think AI is very similar. It's not gonna happen overnight, but if you continue to enhance it and get things in place and step by step. You're gonna look up three months later and go, ooh, this is saving us a lot of time. This is helping us be more efficient. and and even Richard said it, you know, it's not an easy button. Rely on the old adage trust but verify. and then sneak it. I think I think Roosevelt, I'm pretty sure it was Roosevelt that said it, but pretty sure that was Reagan. I would say I would say don't trust and verify. You know, like let's let's not just assume that whatever AI spits out is Is the final verdict, like it it it may be wrong. And you gotta keep that in mind and you gotta remember that. All right. So I wanna hop into and again kind of show you just some some examples, you know, kind of some some some some things here in action. you know, I again I've got these like little gifts that are gonna kind of show it to us here, but like here's an example of like just reading, right? You know, this this is like, hey, you know, that this person wanted to wanted to basically create this like, you know, project health report, you know, and and gave it a bunch of metrics. you know, KPI specific, you know, data points that it wanted it to go and extract and pull out and give, you know, give a visual, right? And so, you know, here just on the fly, you know, they kind of gave gave all the things that they're interested in and it was able to pull that data and give you some insight, you know, from your job tread. Super, super neat, super helpful. Nice little pretty, pretty chart, graphs there. so so that's that's one example. Now let's kind of take it, take it a step further. Like, hey, right now maybe we want to have it build us a schedule. You know, and so Again, you you know, however much detail you give it up front, you know, you're gonna get a much better output. You know, if you've already built the budget, then tell Claude, like, hey, go look at the budget. And I and I want you to draft up a schedule, you know, that that that we anticipate this project will take, you know, maybe, maybe four weeks or maybe it's, you know, three months or whatever it is. Like the more guidance you can give it and the more details that you can provide, the better job it's gonna do. Now, again, I encourage you to kind of take a look at the, you know, what it sort of drafted up before you're like, hey, go and Now go create that in Job Tread. You know, you can absolutely have it go create it in Job Tread, but you it's just a little bit easier to kind of have that back and forth conversation, you know, right in that chat window before you have it push it into Job Tred. That's good. One of one of my favorite parts of AI integrating more with JobTread is that in order to pull those reports, in order to do these types of things, it's going to force us in as companies to go, all right, we have to lock in with our job tread. Daily logs every day, solid. scheduling updates, making sure change orders, making sure our financials are dialed in. It's what I like is a lot of my remodeling clients are going, all right, we gotta really go all in on job tread because that's just going to make all of the AI aspects of it perform better and better results. Cause it is it's kind of if our job treads kind of junk in when we pull the data out, it's not going to be as great. So to everybody listening to this continue to encourage your team, continue to encourage yourself, more and more consistency in job tread. Absolutely. And and and you bring up daily logs. Well that was my next next example here. You know, again, may maybe you're maybe you're, you know, you're you're out there walking the job site and you literally just pull up your claw and just start talking to it. Just start telling it, hey, I want you to go and and and summarize all this information. Here's what I'm seeing. Here's here's what's happening on this job site. You know, may or maybe maybe you wait till you get back in the truck and and and again you start recording then but like The goal is like don't don't just leave this information in your head for you to have to go do the work later. Like do it in real time. Do it as quickly as possible so that you can get it out there, get it created. And again, just let it draft it up. You can then review it. And then if you want to share it with the client, you can, or maybe you want to use the AI summary tool that that we have built in to kind of give you that weekly, you know, recap of everything. You know, however you want to do it. But the the the the the key here is that you can quickly create very professional, very detailed, you know, daily logs. Hey, hang on, hang on, hang on. I'm a project manager on the field. I pull up my Claude on my phone. Claude, this is the most illustrious project manager in all of the land. Yes, yes, that's me. I'm on the Smith project. If you can I want to create a daily log. I just left here. We have the plumber that is 80% completed. He mentioned dot dot dot. We have a potential change order in dot dot dot. we have completed boom ba boom boop boom ba boom. And I just dictated in there. can you please create a daily log? And then it spits it out. Hey, update bullet point three. That should say four, not three. da da dot. Looks great. Please add that as a daily log right in job tread. Boom. Exactly. It's beautiful. Yeah, it is. And I mean, you know, I'm I we've been seeing a lot of people are starting to use plod, not claude, plod, you know, where it's like a recording device. Like it can like record like, you know, an hour long meeting and all sorts of like context, you know, that you can then again take that transcript, drop it in there. And say, hey, go and you know, again, update the update the description or build out a scope of work or you know, whatever you need to do. Like, you know, there there's there's not, you know, like gonna ever be, you know, too much detail. You know, that's the nice thing is that it can summarize it. I've got this version of Plaud. And then some people have kind of the little neck neck thing. So Bailey, put if you can put a link to Plaud in there, P L A U D. yeah, dictate that and bam, now we've got we've got the transcript. Yep. All right, now this this is a really neat one. I kind of threw it in there you know, just because I was we we we had steak steak took the whole team to steak dinner the other two days ago. I was sitting next to Hilario, who's one of our customer success managers, and he said he had a client who, you know, basically they they get these the these these work orders, you know, from from you know from from Lenar Holmes here, and and it gets emailed to him. It's the exact same format every single time. And what they wanted was they wanted the ability, you know, to essentially take that work order and and automatically go and do a bunch of things. And so what what what Hilario helped him do is basically, you know, he he connected Claude to their email account and then it it had a certain set of instructions that said, hey, anytime an email in this format comes in, you know, we want you to go and and and essentially review everything, you know, read the attachment, the description, kind of all of that detail, and then go look up the customer, go find the job location, and then create a new job. And then once you do that, we want you to go and take the actual details from the work order to build out the budget. And then we also want you to create a schedule. And he had it where it would go and it would look up the nearest jobs to that location and assign whoever the technician was on that job to this particular task. And so like, you know, again, Hilario kind of like whipped this thing out. It's like, man, what an awesome example there that to to share. So I I wanted to share that. But you know again that's it's a little bit more on the on the on the service side or a little bit more kind of for the trades. know but like just if if you think for a second about the power of that you know this is this is where you know let's say you wanted to create an inbound or or or like an inbox for all your your your your trades and your subs, you know your vendors to email bills into. You know, where you know again you you could have it where Claude is is essentially looking for that same you know email. You know I would I would recommend putting like the job number or the PO number, work order number in the subject. So it's always there and then it can go and it could find That work order, that purchase order, you know, convert it to a bill, attach the attachment, you know, and then leave it in draft for you to review it. I mean, like there are so many possibilities here. Now, again, I will say, I like to preface this. I don't personally connect my AI to my email. I I don't I don't feel super comfortable with that. you know, what I would encourage you to think about doing if you want to do that is to create a dedicated, you know, email account just for that specific use case. Or for or for anything, you know, maybe it's, you maybe it's clawed at your company.com or or job tread at your company.com, whatever. Like, you know, again, kind of sandbox it away from your own personal, you know, email that that you might need to use to reset passwords or get logged into certain things. Like, you know, I I think it's important to kind of just be mindful of that. But yeah, super, super powerful stuff there. really, really awesome to to see that example. All right, so hang on a second. Take a take a take a little sip of your water. You're doing great. And I mentioned with the recording we'll we'll link to the slides because I think some of you would just like to go one by one through some of those slides, which is awesome. we're doing great on time. We've got twenty three minutes or so. We're gonna share more kind of real use cases. I'm gonna I wanna squeeze in a couple quick hitter questions. Lloyd asks, What is the best source for learning Claude to incorporate what you're teaching us today? I I would say the best source is Claude. Go ask Claude. Claude, you know, help me get started using you know, using you, what where should I start? I'm a construction business owner, you know, and it'll say, well, like, you know, I ask it to interview you. You know, where where where, you know, where are your biggest pain points? Where do you think it could add the massive value? Like where are you spending a bunch of time, you know, doing, you know, tedious, you know, administrative, you know, manual work that that maybe this is an opportunity to, you know, to to see what it can do to to streamline that out. I would I would just ask it. Good. Ashley asked if you had an opinion on they use otter is plot better. you know, again, I I I don't I don't necessarily have an opinion on on either of those. I think at the end of the day, you know, what works for you, if you can get, you know, transcripts out of it, because that's that's gonna be the best way to to be able to drop it into whatever AI is, as long as it generates a transcript of the entire conversation, then then that's how it can it can it can process it as quickly as possible. Okay. Josh has got a question of what's the most efficient C P connector for Claude, Claude and Chrome browser extension or other? So so so it you you're not W when you go into your settings in Claude, it it it there's not like a bunch of options. It's it's connectors and you are going to need to put in the very specific URL, you know, that that will that will essentially be how it connects. So it it's it's not like you're using the the cowork or the or the the browser or any of that. Like it you you're going to just connect to the MCP server and then that will allow you to leverage it and and however, you know, however else you want to use Claude. But it's it's about creating that connection and And that's kind of really happening on the on the back end behind the scenes. Good. And Bailey put in step by step for Claude and Job Tride Connection. And then Ashley Ashley's Ashley's showing off a little bit in a wonderful way. Otter generates and I have Claude pull it and creates the scope of work for me and adds it as a pinned comment and daily log for me. Nice job, Ashley. Nice job, Ashley. Yeah. So, you know, again, great, great segue again. I these these are You know, some some real use cases actually. We we pulled all these just from Job Tread Pros, our our our Facebook group. you know, didn't have a chance to connect with each and every person, so I just sort of put their kind of put their first name and initial there. but I hate I hate to admit it, but your Facebook group's kind of gaining ground on my Facebook group. We're kind of neck and neck as far as value created. It's kinda ticking me off. man. Well, you we're I think we're about to hit ten thousand users in there. And you know, Kyle, we look up every single person that requests to join. to make sure that they're a job tread user. There there's a lot of effort that that goes into making sure that this is a very you know, great community. We you can't can't let all the riffraff in there that, you know, so many, so many large Facebook groups and and and yours yours really doesn't have this problem either. But I see so many of them where like you got those keyboard warriors who just it doesn't matter what's being discussed. They just come in and just a bunch of negativity and they're toxic and yeah, you know, we we we don't we don't let that go on in in in ours and and I know you don't either so Good. I'm gonna add one one other thing to what Ashley wrote. She goes, I've been geeking out on this stuff for the last couple of weeks. I'm super excited for the workshop in Seattle. so that's awesome. One one thing that I've been kind of saying and just want everybody to hear is there's only so much time you have to work on your business. A lot of your time is spent in your business. Arguably maybe ten percent of your time in a given week can be kind of on your business. So give yourselves a little bit of a break. This AI stuff is not going anywhere. You are not behind. You're frankly, you're already ahead of the curve if you're if you're even paying attention here. Just take little bite-sized chunks at a time. During the month of June, our goal is to get this part of AI figured out. Just give yourself a break because I see a lot of people maybe spending too much time on AI at the expense of just getting that estimate done or following up with that prospect or some of that core work that you need to be. So be careful not to get sucked in too much. and and screw up the rest of your work. Yeah. But I definitely I will I I will actually be going to to the Seattle one as well. So I will look forward to seeing you there. really enjoyed the Charlotte one. So I'm I'm trying to get out to as many of those those regional workshops as I can. and I saw you you noted that you got locked out of you know, or hit your limit in Claude. you you definitely you know, don't don't think twice about upgrading. You know, if you're on the twenty dollar plan, upgrade to the hundred. You know, if you're on the hundred and you're hitting that limit, the two hundred dollar, you know, again, like Let's put this into perspective. Like that is your cheapest, most productive employee that you could ever possibly hire. You know, a hundred bucks a month, even two hundred bucks a month, like that is a no-brainer for the productivity and the insight and the value that it's gonna add to to your life as well as your business. So again, don't don't think twice about that. All right. So again, want to just kind of quickly run through a few of these real world examples. You know, here Brandon was talking about how, you he thought he's gonna have to spend the whole weekend, you know, sort of drafting up this. this you know this this project and he basically just gave gave claude you know his his his his his his budget description he he had some render info some emission initial meeting notes that he had he had come up you know dropped it in there you know I think he said you it's like what the he nailed nail nailed the summary the template you know second command you know super helpful there you know we we talked a little bit about you know again estimating you know and so so here we had you know since since we you know Diego since we connected Claude to job trade it's working better than anticipated You know, we are now able to create estimates, proposals, all based on the plans, you know, and a few a few profit directives, you know, how much you know, profit to charge. you know, he said he also he took our latest meeting notes, fed them into Claude, it created all the to-dos for every specific job. Like, again, like this is tremendously valuable, right? Like this is helping to streamline getting all of this information curated into a very professional, very well organized, you know, job that you can then move forward with. Super helpful. we had Trey here. He he had a he he needed to do a whole home. you know drywall takeoff and said Claude did it in about three minutes and it even broke it out, you know, room by room, you know, separated out the ceilings, you know, gave him the total summary of everything. You know, he was able to go and plug that into his job tread, really helpful there. now one thing interesting too that Trey mentioned here is that you know Claude also pointed out that he needed to go double check, you know, a few of the things because it used the scale on the drawings where the dimensions were not listed. So again, I I encourage you to just always look for those those those Points that you need to go and spot check, double check, you know, make sure that everything is is accurate and correct. You know, don't just assume it's always right. But again, this can just like streamline your processes so much. Had Marcus here. He actually this is Marcus. so he was out at the Charlotte regional workshop we just did and and and he texted me after because we showed the the web clipper, you know, this one's built into JobTread and it's got the the AI button on it now, or it'll just like literally go grab all the data. grabs all the photos, the, you know, the the the specs, the the warranties, the install, everything. It grabs it all off that page and sticks it right into, you know, you can go straight into your catalog and do directly into a job or right onto a document, actually. and and and he said, man, this saved him so much time, you know, when he was working on this estimate and he's he's now excited rather than intimidated to build out his entire catalog. You know, super cool. I think later he told me it saved he he estimated it saved about three hours, you know, of manual you know, research and and and effort that like, you know, again, just like leveraging these AIs, like super, super helpful. you know, Joe, we we we've talked about this, you know, again, voice capturing, you know, what whatever it might be, you know, I I think just creating to dos, you know, having it go and update his to-dos and assign it to the job and the person, you know, putting those due dates, like really, really helpful. you know, I also found it a little bit interesting too. He talked about how he's now having Claude kind of working to create this this lead magnet, like this pricing calculator, he called it a cost to build build calculator for his website that will then directly you know create a new customer, new job, populate the budget based on all of the information and kind of that that questionnaire data that that he collects, you know, pulling from his his cost catalog. You know, super, super helpful there to be able to just have that all teed up for you. Now again, you know, it's just think about it like it's just drafting it, right? Like you still gotta review it. Another another super super awesome use case here, Mike, he was you know said he had Claude like researching subcontractors, suppliers And then just would have it go and add them directly into his job tread. You know, and this this this gathered the website info, the contact info. He said he had was it over a hundred, you know, vendors added to to his job tread just while driving around and dictating, you know, to it. And I was like, man, that's super cool. So the other day I was trying it out too. You know, I just started driving around every time I saw a contractor's truck or van that, you know, that was wrapped, just took a picture of it. It's like, Claude, go add it. You know, and if it couldn't find something, I was like, go find the website, go get some contact info, go You know, do whatever and like it just like literally builds out your your vendor you know bench there, like right? Like you if you see him out there, you know, maybe go do a little more research too. But super helpful to just very quickly if someone ever gives you a business card, like just snap a photo with Claude and let it go do all the work and get it in there. Super awesome. I know Kyle loved this one. Eric, just take a breath for a second. Getting me all riled up, man. I'm just that for the for the benefit of our peeps listening to the there's so right. I I what I like about the the whole webinar is one, we started with let's let's make sure we understand what we're doing. Number two, you really poured a little bit of cold water on some things of like now slow down, like it's not a be all end all. number three, you showed us like specifically just some some good use cases, and now you're showing some more. I'd be I'd be interested in just pausing here for a second. If every one of you, you're paying attention, you're here. if you can just think for a second, put in the chat box, what do you see as kind of your next step with using AI or your next step with integrating job tread and AI? Just take a minute and and type that in if you would. And then Eric's gonna continue with a few more of these ideas because you guys seeing these ideas really will generate some ones. baby step. I wanted to add add a new customer. It's good. Yeah, being able to write the estimate or at least start it before we even leave the client's house. Ashley, some people are kind of let's walk before let's crawl, let's walk, let's run. Ashley's starting to run a little bit with hers, which is great. Todd said, this is a question we'll go back to his in a second. Kelsey said I'm a salesperson. The initial project scope and summary. Eric, you want to riff on that? What do you see in there? Yeah, well what a what a great opportunity, right? Like, you know, Kelsey, I I'm sure you you you you deliver, you know, the best possible you know, proposals and and and and project scopes, but like, you know, at the same time, like, man, you know, I I could spend, you know, thirty minutes wordsmithing something, or I could just have Claude go, you know, take my raw, just, you know, just here here are my thoughts, get it organized, you know, make it sound extremely professional. You know, I would also think too, here's here's a little like advancing, like if you already know the type of customer that you're you're trying to work with here, like, you know, if if they're a super you know, kind of technical person, maybe they're a lawyer or an engineer or you know, software guy like me, you they they probably want to see more technical details. But if they're, you know, maybe like, you know, elderly person and and kind of they're they're they don't they don't need all that extra, you know, detail. They just kinda want to feel good and and have confidence that you're the right person. Like you can have Claude draft up, you know, the how how you how you talk about, you know, this job, the the not just the summary, but even the line items, the descriptions, like, hey, you know, kind of frame this for this type of customer. You know, and so again, it it can take you know, whatever you give it and kind of, you know, really, you know, hone hone in on how do I best position this to give me the best chance to to have it communicated clearly to that to that end user and and and give you the best chances to win that job. Good. everybody keep putting your next step in there. and then Eric go ahead and keep on keep on cruising through some of these examples. So so so so a couple other here, you know, again, Carl was you know he he was apparently really fed up on a on on a on a current job where you he he had some avoidable mistake. you know, that that that kind of you know bit him and he's man, I'm I'm developing this, you know, this this this skill that's gonna automatically review all the budgets, all the contracts, everything before it gets sent out, you know, scanning for potential pitfalls and holes so that hopefully, you know, he doesn't end up having those same mistakes and doesn't have, you know, slippage coming in here. Like, you know, again, I I think Claude is so great at at taking some existing, you know, data set and and and being able to critique it. and give you feedback about what you might have missed or what you could improve upon. Like, you know, that that that's I think that is a far easier use case to start with than like, hey, create it entirely from scratch. Just let it point out the holes. You know, is something not realistic? Have we underestimated the amount of time or the schedule or or whatever it may be? Like that is where, you know, I think Quad really shines and and you could even be like, hey, go look at these other three jobs. This job is very similar to that. And and look at like what resulted in change orders or what happened, where do we get off? Like, you know, again, take all of that insight that you just might not have have sort of processed. You know, I mean, it can go find trends, you know, that that you might not have ever even thought to think about and can give you some some really insightful information there. Awesome. another another reason to lock in on our financials and job costing in you're about to say it in job tread. We need to be able to see our expected costs, our actual costs. We need all of our time organized by our infield in all in in the field team members under different categories, different jobs, continue to fight for good data in there. Carry on. Absolutely absolutely. I mean, again, there's no longer an excuse to not do the job costing. You know, Caleb here, he he was just you know, he said he had this this this whole folder of like, you know, 40 you know receipts and invoices and things that he'd received. And so he just took it. dropped the whole thing into Claude and wanted to see how it do. He said it within, you know, in in less than 10 minutes it had created, you know, four it had entered 40 bills into the system. I mean, that that that is awesome right there. Again, like if if you find that you're getting, you know, buried down in this, in this, in this kind of tedious, you know, entering, doing the job cost and yada yada, like again, like set up, you know, your AI to help you get that information in there. Now again, I encourage you to to review it. You know, we also have the receipt scanner tool and it's got like a little AI scanning summary thing, like, you know, There's a lot of different ways you can do this. We talked about that other skill where maybe you have it read an inbox, like, you know, whatever it is, like you cannot, you know, use, you know, whatever excuse you want to not do the work. You gotta get it in there one way or another. So I'd encourage you to to think about how can AI help you out there. Eric, we have iPhone three, asking, what's the difference between a regular claude a work and skills? Care to Yeah, I mean so so so again like Claude is is is sort of the the all-encompassing service. I mean cowork is is is one way, you know, one kind of you know way that Claude can go and interact directly with you know with with your computer, you know, it can it can interact with your browser, you know, or it could just be kind of you know calling out and sort of reading information. and then a skill is like where you're creating a very kind of repeatable you know process where you have you know created a set of instructions on how you want it to do something. you know, every time you ask it to go do it. And so, you know, again, kind of there's there's there's a lot of different kind of ways that that you can use Claude. I I would encourage you to to again kind of you know study and and and sort of ask Claude, hey, when is the best use case, you know, or what is the best sort of mode, you know, for whatever particular task you're trying to do. You know, by and large, a lot of the time you can just kind of use the regular chat and and and if it needs to go do something else or use a different, you know, tool or or whatever, then it'll prompt you and say, hey, can can you allow me to go do this? Okay, cool. all right. So a couple more here. Aaron was was talking about how, you know, he he wanted to have AI kind of go through and and and and try to standardize all of his templates. Like over over time he had kind of built out a bunch of document templates, a bunch of budget templates, schedule templates, and like and this is where again, Claude is really, really great at being able to just consume a bunch of information, help you decide what is the best way, you know, to communicate things, the best organizational structure. Like You know, it can kind of study and then give you these these recommendations and actually directly implement it. I mean, like that is that is super powerful. Now, taking it, you know, kind of in in in in a similar fashion, you know, Rob here, he wanted to have Claude help him clean up his his entire catalog, you know, and so he had, you know, again, built this over the years, you know, but he had Claude go and analyze the entire catalog and he said within 30 seconds it found over 400 errors. And these were, you know, anything from just you know kind of punctuation errors. Grammatical errors, you know, typos, you know, missing units, you know, missing, you know, unit costs, like, you know, whatever it may be. Like, again, like the amount of data and how fast Claude and and AI can consume information and then turn around and give you feedback and then you know, in this case, literally just go implement it too. Like, I mean, it's just mind-blowing, you know, like to be able to like take sort of a hodgepodge of stuff and have it, you know, come together and become extremely. well written, well documented, well positioned, and then just get it implemented. Like, I mean, again, like that's a huge, huge boost. Like you could pay someone thousands of dollars to go spend weeks doing the same amount of work that Claude can do in in in in minutes. And lastly here, Mel Mel had a really cool cool cool cool idea I want to share. He he wanted to have this scorecard that would grade his project managers. And he and he and and again in this in this case he wanted to you know kind of take into account margin and Any change orders and then the customer reviews. And so, you know, he says he just tells Claude, hey, you know, go grade this PM, it'll pull all the latest data from from Job Tread where he's already kind of defined what he wants included, and then can also look online for the reviews or whatever. And like, you know, he now has you know the ability to kind of generate this grade that tells him the story about how his project managers are performing. You know, I thought that was super neat, super awesome idea. look, I I know I've thrown a lot at you guys. I you know, and and and my my goal here was to just spark ideas, right? Like I want to give you some ideas because I know when you get into AI, you know, it's it's kind of like you know, you you don't know what you don't know, and and some people kind of struggle to to figure out where to get started. And so, you know, if if everything I said sort of just went, you know, in one ear, out the other, like if if you walk away with any one thing, like ask yourself this question like what did you spend hours on last week that could have taken minutes if you would have been able to leverage AI? You know, just just just think about that. And and and and again, if if if if that doesn't give you some good ideas or help you kind of figure out where to get started, then then then then my advice is go create a Claude account if you don't already have one. And then number two, just ask AI to help you. Say, you know, here here's a prompt. Interview me to figure out how to begin using AI to improve my construction business. You know, and Claude immediately came back with, well, what is the biggest pain point that you'd like AI to tackle first? Is it your sales and lead response? Is it your estimating and takeoff? Is it your customer communications, project updates, you know, back office, accounting, schedule admin? Like, you know, again, like just ask it. You know, think of it as as your new best friend, your new assistant, your new whatever you wanna call it. You know, again, I I I I I I I would say Claude is is is definitely a good friend of mine now. You know, I I have a lot of conversations. I mean you you use you used the word therapist earlier. Well, I I picked that up from I I was in the I was in the the the the Tesla and I and I saw they had Grok fully integrated in it and it said, What mode would you like Grok to be in? Like, you know, is it your assistant? Is it you know, your your your storyteller? Would you like it to play therapist? You know, do you want it to do trivia and ask you a bunch of questions? Is it is it a kids' game type thing? I was I saw therapist, I thought that was hilarious. but you know what? my my wife would tell you she spent a lot of time you know talking to talking to chat you know how to How to handle situations, probably with me. you know, but you know, look, it it claw, you Claude or Chat knows knows me. She she doesn't want to switch from chat, she's really hooked on chat, you know, thinks it really knows her really well. Just so you know though, if you are on chat, you can actually export your entire history and import it over to Claude. so it is kind of neat how you can kind of export and import from one to the other, but you know, yeah, we w whichever one you like and you prefer. I I I do recommend Claude though, by by far. I think it is is currently the the the industry leader. you know, just the ability to connect to so many applications, and and just its its technical prowess, you know, especially related to construction. all of that is is is a huge boost. good. Give us give us a little feedback. what I learned in this webinar is type that in there in the chat if you would. What I learned in this webinar is Yeah, Job Tread loves Claude AI. You nailed it, Kelsey. Hey, but I I will say too, I mean, we we are we are very actively working on our own AI and and and being able to kind of you know integrate, you know, kind of sort of AI point solutions, if you will. you know, we're we're about to kind of sort of redo a lot of put put in like an AI like help help support widget to kind of help answer questions, give you guidance, help you learn things. You know, there there'll be one specifically on the budget, on scheduling, like so we're gonna kind of look at how we can continue, you know, to to to integrate. Cause obviously, you know, we We don't want you to have to go out and pay for, you know, another service, but at the same time, like I'm I'm telling you, like this this $20 or $100, it is the best $20, $100 you could spend, you know, from from a personal standpoint, like Claude is such a great resource. that that that that I you know again, I probably have like 20 or 30 conversations with it a day, you know, not even business or work related, just it it is a great resource. Ooh, we got some good stuff. Need to connect Claude. I'm way underutilizing, but Richard, don't be overwhelmed by that. That's okay. Austin said, I don't need to be as cautious implemented as I previously thought using the principles learned here. Awesome. Todd said I need to leverage AI before hiring more employees. Mm-hmm That's interesting. Free up my team. Job descriptions, like you know, I I like sometimes and I'm like interviewing a different position than usual. I'm like, hey, give me some really good questions, interview questions that I can ask this person. I might even drop in their resume there and like, boy, it is like so on point. It is it is awesome. I like what April said. It's okay to start small. Honestly, we shouldn't let it overwhelm us, or we will continue to ignore it. When things overwhelm us, absolutely. starting small is okay. There's a lot to learn. but it ain't it ain't going anywhere. So just take your time. what I learned is JobTread plus Claude is better than some of the other AI estimating tools that I've used, like handoff. Interesting. Ashley said, real quick, are you able touch on data X? Should we have that to connect Claude and JobTread as well? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, data Data X is, you I'm big big fan of those guys. you know, Peter Rainey super, super active, involved in here. Elliot, Dominic. I mean, you know, so so what they've done is is they've actually created their their own AI that's running that they've they've they've again been able to be be very intentional and very specific, helping it kind of have these these construction use cases with Job Tread. they've got some some neat tools where you can actually create agents that will that will be able to kind of like you know run and do a lot of a lot of these re you know repetitive tasks. kind of like creating like a skill. so so yeah, I'm I'm I'm definitely encourage you to to try them all. you know, I saw someone ask a similar question on our on our Job Tread Pros group and he's like, look, you know, there there's different use cases for all of these different situations. So I would encourage you to connect both, you know, the Job Tread MCP as well as the, you know, connect to through through DataX, you know, because there there's there's gonna be, you know, different scenarios where where where different ones will will will be, you know, better suited for the others. So, you know, again, it's it's it's a nominal expense to to just have so much power. And so much insight and and to just supercharge your AI. Yeah, I hadn't chat I hadn't chatted with you in a couple months, Eric, and I got my got my got my juices flowing. I got the I got the clo my Claud's already asking me and interviewing me more about my business. I've got I just the energy that you put out, sir, is wonderful. We all appreciate it. We appreciate the effort you and your team put into these slides and these ideas for spending the last hour with us. check out jobtread.com if you If you're not part of Job Tread, if you're part of Job Tread, come on, let's double down, let's triple down on it, let's really work on it. But don't be overwhelmed. Pick the next right thing, the next step to take. and that's that's all you need to worry about. And keep get keep that team learning how to use this as well. Eric, have a wonderful Thursday. I'd like you to take tomorrow off. Let's have a nice long four-day weekend. and everybody enjoy your your long weekend. Make sure you get a little R and R. Maybe a little AI research. That might be a good long weekend to do it. and keep working hard. You guys are doing great. I know you guys are getting beat up out there sometimes. pat yourself on the back. There's a lot of good things that are that are going on. The more you kind of focus on some of those positives, sometimes that's what you need to keep on keeping on. So thank you, Eric. Thank you, Job Tread. thank you, Remodelers on the Rise for hosting this. Check out Remodelers on the Rise dot com. and we will talk to y'all soon. Reach out anytime. Thanks, Eric. Yeah. Thanks, everyone. Kyle: You've probably heard a lot about AI lately. Everybody's talking about it. We've been doing some of our shows on it, but most of us are still wondering how does this actually help my remodeling business day to day? JobTread just rolled out something called an AI connector, and it's worth paying attention to. Basically, it lets you connect AI tools directly to your JobTread data. So instead of digging through old jobs and budgets or Client communications to find something, you can get answers faster. It can help you spot trends, summarize job info, and cut down on the repetitive stuff that eats up your time. For those of us who'd rather be out on a job site than buried in spreadsheets, this is a big deal. If you want to see what an AI ready construction management platform looks like, check out jobtread.com. Kyle Hunt: Thanks for tuning into the Remodelers on the Rise show. Whether you're listening or watching, I appreciate you being here. If this was helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next one. We're putting out new episodes every single week focused on helping you build a better remodeling business with real stories, practical ideas, and things you can actually take and use. If you're on YouTube, hit that like button and turn on notifications so you know when new episodes drop. If you're listening on a podcast app, a five-star review goes a long way and helps more remodelers find the show. We've got great links below or in the show notes where you can connect with us, check out our remodelers community and learn more about our coaching and resources. Appreciate you very much. See you on the next episode.