Back in February I read an article about AI in the concrete industry. There was a line in it about a contractor who used to spend his Sunday nights going over job costs. And now he uses his time to coach his kids’ soccer team.
Great. So what did he do?
It never said. Most of these articles are the same. Big ideas, a feel good story, and not one word on what to use or how to set it up.
So I started figuring it out myself.
Some background. My company pours foundations. We’re a family business, and a couple of us in the office handle just about everything. I estimate every job and make sure everything we do gets invoiced so nothing gets missed. Before we ever break ground, I make sure all the precon is taken care of. Then there’s whatever else lands on my desk, which is a lot.
I’m not a tech person. I was just buried. Bid requests piling up in my inbox faster than I could open them, plans in five different places, and a quote spreadsheet I’d been adding rows to for years that only I really understood.
And I kept seeing AI everywhere. On the news, on YouTube, all over social media. I’d been playing with it a little at home. So I said, now’s the time to see what this actually does at work. How does this actually help me save my time?
So I started building. Badly at first. I’d ask it to do something, it would do half of it, and I’d spend an hour fixing what it broke. I almost quit more than once.
But it got better, mostly because I got better at telling it what I wanted. Now when a bid request hits my inbox, it gets logged, the plans get filed, and it checks if we’ve already quoted that address. When we win a job, the crew gets a scope sheet in Slack without me typing it out. Locates get handled. My old spreadsheet is retired. Everything lives in one place my whole team can see on their phone.
Now I’m building our own AI for the office. One place where anybody on the team can ask a question and get the answer from everything we have. But none of this happened overnight. It was months of trial and error, and a lot of pivots along the way. Some of it I rebuilt two or three times. It may not have been the proper way, but it was my way. My journey.
That’s why I’m writing this. To help you on yours. Especially the normal person, the one who isn’t a tech guy, trying to figure this stuff out. Not the hype. The how.
What to expect
A new post every Tuesday. Some weeks I’ll walk you through exactly how I set something up, step by step. Other weeks it’s a story about what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do different.
This isn’t about one tool. I’ll show you the thinking and the steps so you can do it with whatever AI you already use, whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot.
And if something’s eating your time right now, reply to this email and tell me. There’s a good chance it’s eating mine too, and it might be what I write about next.
If you’re in the trades, whether you run the business or work in the office, and you’ve wondered how AI could actually help, this is for you. And if you know someone like that, send this their way.
Next Tuesday: what I’d tell a contractor who’s never touched AI, and where to start.