People in the same trade have started asking us whether they ought to bring AI in.
We are a contractor, but we build our own business app, anken.ai, ourselves, and we use AI inside it. We used it to write this article too. And even so, there are things we do not hand over to AI.
Over three articles we will set out how we go about choosing. This first one is about what comes before choosing.
Starting from “which AI is best” goes wrong
There is no shortage of comparison articles. But most of those comparisons are out of date within three months. Every time something new comes out, the order changes.
The bigger problem is that chasing the rankings makes you skip the work of fitting it to your own job. “Apparently it is the cleverest, so we got it” usually means nobody is using it two weeks later.
That is the wrong way round. What you decide first is what you want it to do.
What a contractor can hand over to AI
Having actually used it, these are the things that were worth it.
1. Reading something long and pulling out the points
Long emails from property managers. Specifications. Template contracts. The kind of thing that is not hard to read, but takes time.
You can ask it: “list only the items in this document that we are responsible for paying for”. But we check the answer against the original text ourselves. That part cannot be skipped.
2. Everything up to the point of writing
The notes attached to an estimate, the message that goes out when the schedule slips, a job advert, writing like this article.
Not having it write from nothing, but having it produce something rough that we then fix. That distance turned out to be the most useful. Starting from a blank page is what eats the most time, so that is the only part we hand over.
3. Correspondence in another language
Starting with our president, we can speak English and Tagalog, but writing is a different load. The more a piece of writing will be kept and referred back to — contracts, terms — the more care it takes. Here it genuinely helps.
4. Asking about terms we do not know
The standard for a new building material, the gist of a change in the law, a method we have not heard of. Ask as a way in, then go to the official source. Less a dictionary, more a tool for deciding which direction to look in.
5. Building software
This is a special case, but the reason we can build our own business app in-house is that we can use AI here. Even in a company with no full-time engineers, someone who knows the site can now do the work themselves. We wrote about that in another article.
What we do not hand over
We think this is the more important half.
1. Looking at the place
Obvious, but worth writing down. We may show it a photo and ask “does this need replacing?”, but we do not let it decide.
Damage to the substrate, damp, smell — none of that shows in a photo. Restoration is work where you cannot know until you open it up. Drop the assumption that there is a limit to what can be known through a screen, and the two sides will end up disagreeing later, every time.
2. The figure we give the client
We let it help with the wording of an estimate, but the figure itself is decided by a person.
The reason is simple: when it is wrong, we are the ones who carry it. “The AI said so” explains nothing to a client.
3. Putting client information straight in
Property names, addresses, client names, drawings. We have a rule: do not type them in as they are.
How they are handled depends on the type of plan you are on (the third article covers that), but we decided that settling the habit inside the company is more reliable than relying on the terms of the plan.
4. The final check
At the bottom of these OS Notes articles it says that the article was drafted by AI and checked by our staff. The checking is done by a person. If you are going to skip that, we think it is better not to publish at all.
Where to draw the line
We find this the easiest way to decide which side of the line something falls on.
When it is wrong, who loses, and how much.
- Only we lose, and we would spot the mistake straight away → fine to hand over (drafts, summaries, looking things up)
- The client loses, or the mistake is hard to spot → do not hand it over (figures, whether works are needed, decisions about contracts)
This is almost exactly how we think about handing work to someone new on site. There is nothing special about it being AI.
Is it still worth bringing in
We think so. As long as you expect the right thing from it.
What AI cuts is not time on the works. What it cuts is time spent reading, time spent frozen before you start writing, time spent working out how to look something up.
In our case, that time had been eating into evenings and days off. Getting it back is the change we have felt most.
This series
- Decide what not to hand over, before you pick one (this article)
- Using Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini for different jobs
- What happens to your information, and what it costs — what to check before you sign