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My thoughts on A.I. (Part 2/3)

My thoughts on A.I. (Part 2/3)

Josh Crouch
November 12, 2024

Last week I wrote about what is working in A.I. for Contractors…

But today, I’m going to dive into what is just plain NOT WORKING.

(NOTE: What bothers you about A.I.? Reply with your answer! And read my last post here »)

Let’s start with A.I.’s actual outputs. While it’s amazing that A.I. can communicate using regular language like humans, it is still prone to making silly mistakes.

It gives information that is flat out inaccurate at times, and it doesn’t relate to human emotion. It may not be able to discern between service customers that have a true emergency situation and customers are just cranky.

It doesn’t know the context of a business or problem without a significant amount of training.

And it can’t actually DO anything! While it’s cool to see ChatGPT create content, it can’t actually publish that content, or log in to your CRM to complete basic tasks.

Now let’s look at A.I. search!

OpenAI recently released AI Search to compete with Google. Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine, too.

But, there are two big problems with where this technology is right now:

The search results are very difficult to “scan.” When you search for an HVAC company in Google, it’s easy to scan. You can see pictures, reviews, and contact info very quickly. But with AI Search, the results can’t be easily scanned - they require some “digging” and analysis on your part.
The source of the results is questionable. While Google is tough to work with, we know where Google gets its information: your website. On AI Search, the results can come from all over the place. I’ve seen AI pull in HVAC company reviews from TripAdvisor somehow. 🤷‍♂️

So while AI is cool, it still can’t DO stuff and its search results are very clunky to look through.

Homeowners who need to solve a problem fast don’t want to sift through confusing lists and paragraphs of data. They want to be able to scan and get answers fast.

Next time, I’ll share my predictions on the future of AI in the trades.

Talk soon,

Josh Crouch