AI has become impossible to ignore, and pool builders are right to wonder what it can do for them. The answer depends almost entirely on what you connect it to.
On its own, an AI assistant is similar to a brilliant new hire who has read almost everything but never set foot on a job site: It’s fast and capable, but it probably doesn’t know your operation or workflows.
“Think of it as a Harvard grad with no field experience,” says Eric Fortenberry, CEO of JobTread, a provider of project management software. “AI is really powerful, but it is not your business system.”
That’s the role of a construction management platform. It holds your estimates, budgets, proposals, selections, schedules, and communication in one place. Connect AI to that platform, and the assistant can finally work with your real business data. It can read your jobs and pull custom reports, create new estimates and purchase orders, and update records across your whole operation.
The time savings add up fast. Fortenberry describes a customer who used AI to read a homeowner’s quote request, then create the job, add budget line items, generate a purchase order, and schedule the work with the right project manager assigned. A task like that can save huge amounts of manual entry every time it runs.
AI also fits into the day-to-day life of a pool builder. Walking a job site or sitting in the truck afterward, you can simply talk to the assistant, telling it everything you want entered, and it writes up the daily log for you.
“AI isn’t replacing your software. It’s finally working with it.”
AN AI USE CASE
At Coastal Pools, production manager Mel Gowl wanted a fair, repeatable method of evaluating the company’s six project managers. The information was already inside Coastal’s construction management platform. He just needed a way to pull it together. Using an AI assistant connected to the platform, Gowl built a method to tabulate a single employee score for each project manager. It combines the PM’s margin performance against the company average, changeorder revenue against their target, and information relating to customer reviews. He has the ability to update the dashboard on demand.
“In this scenario, AI has really only helped me compile all the data into one place,” Gowl says. “We were very good at looking at a singular KPI but didn’t have a great way to compile all the KPIs and tell the full story of how that PM is doing.”
Gowl says he may use the scorecard to fuel the company’s bonus program next year.
