Streamlining HVAC With AI | ACHR News

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the way a number of industries are doing business, and the HVAC sector is no exception.  

The industry has quickly caught on to the fact that AI can streamline HVAC business operations. Especially when facing such a shortage of labor, AI has become a necessity for many HVAC contractors to effectively manage things like communication, leads, training, and KPIs. 

As a result, today the industry is looking to streamline and incorporate AI in any way it fits — meaning, anyway that takes a load off a contractor, technician, or CSR’s plate. 

At this year’s AHR Expo, software companies like Podium, FieldEdge, ServiceTitan, Workiz, and Weidmuller showcased the ways they’re utilizing AI to lead their HVAC clients to an efficient business. 

“With software specifically, AI should help us lower complexity and help contractors focus on the important work of serving their customers’ HVAC needs,” said Jessie Barrack, senior vice president of business development at FieldEdge by Xplor. “If AI can help take the complexity out of using software and driving KPIs, then the contractor can focus on taking care of customers and growing their business.”  

 

AI for Faster Response Times 

As more companies release AI products into the market, contractors have begun to see even more how AI can be a game-changer for driving efficiencies into their HVAC businesses by giving their teams valuable time back to allow them to focus on the work they actually want to do.  

“AI can be given actual tasks and jobs that they can take over, allowing for consistent customer experiences, faster response times, and higher quality leads coming into the business,” said Jimmy Thompson, account executive sales manager at Podium.  

Podium offers an AI Employee that was built for the home services industry. The AI Employee, called Jerry, has many added features that help the product respond to Google Reviews or bulk message campaigns, transcribe call summaries, and automatically text missed calls.  

“Our AI Employee is available 24/7, never takes breaks, and never has a bad day,” Thompson said. “It can respond in several languages, help filter out unqualified leads, quickly get important customer information, and help dealers sell maintenance plans. Podium has over 5,000 AI Employees live with customers today, all supported by powerful integrations, interactive models, and a human engineering team.” 

On average, 78% of leads will work with the HVAC company that answers them first. That’s why utilizing AI to achieve optimal response time is so vital, because the quicker a company can respond, the more leads they are likely to grab.  

“What we call the power of ‘speed to lead’ is a huge way to beat your competition, engage your customers first and fast, in a channel that they prefer, such as texting,” Thompson said. “It’s critical to have coverage during the day, but it’s also critical to make sure that you have an after-hours strategy in place to make sure that you’re not missing out on any job opportunities. We see that about 40% of leads are coming in after-hours.” 

As a result of these trends, FieldEdge by Xplor is focusing on implementing an AI chatbot within its system that will provide that heightened level of support for its customers.  

“FieldEdge … is taking a thoughtful approach to using AI, and we are working closely with several partners in the industry to determine a path that makes sense for our customers,” said Jessie Barrack, senior vice president of business development at FieldEdge. “We are evaluating the tools and offerings in the industry and determining if we should build our own AI technology or if there is a partner pathway that makes more sense in the long term.” 

In the near future, FieldEdge will be using AI to not only leverage customer usage and interaction data “to provide answers to problems, but also suggestions or help articles on new ways to interact or use the software to manage their business,” Barrack said. “Longer term, the opportunities are endless, with AI applications across the FE platform from marketing, scheduling, training, and reporting and KPIs. Ultimately, we will start to weave in AI technology where it makes the most sense for our users and to enhance the current software.” 

The chatbot was designed to give customers the ability to quickly and simply get answers to their questions.  

“Because the chatbot, behind the scenes, has access to all of our history, all of the support databases — it’s a little extra layer of faster support,” said Barrack. “It doesn’t really replace the human support that we have, and it doesn’t change any of the way we work with our customers. But it does give them quicker, faster answers, because the AI tool can access all that information so quickly.” 

 

AI For Customer Communication  

The inception of many, if not all, AI products available in the HVAC industry today came from the need to streamline operations — the need to save time.  

So, as companies like Workiz look for more ways for AI to reduce daily tasks for employees, they focus on how they can grow their current automation.  

“At Workiz, our vision is to automate anything that does not involve holding a wrench,” said Strickland Tudor, vice president of revenue at Workiz. “The benefits of machine learning and, more recently, generative AI, have influenced both our product roadmap and client experience for years at this point.” 

More recently, it’s led to the development of Genius Phones, which was featured on this year’s show floor. Genius Phones is an AI-enabled call insights feature that can look into any call.  

“So, a CSR, a dispatcher, or anyone talking to a homeowner — we’re recording that call, and it’s available forever and always in the cloud, but we’re extracting data out of that call,” Tudor said. “We’re extracting sentiment in terms of: Was it pleasant? Did the CSR do a great job? Is there a coaching opportunity?” 

Genius Phones also provide the ability to immediately extract data that’s relevant to the job, and create an estimate through the click of a button, without having to type anything.  

“It’s all transcribed,” Tudor said. “AI is pulling through the details of that call and reducing the manual action required to really turn that initial interaction, which could just be an inbound phone lead, into revenue.” 

 

AI for Coaching  

Recent innovations in AI have started to leverage AI technology for employee training, and it’s come in handy as many business owners struggle with finding the time needed to effectively train technicians.  

“HVAC businesses leveraging AI to provide personal training for employees elevate the standard of service these businesses offer their clients,” said Angie Snow, principal industry advisor at ServiceTitan.  

Utilizing AI solutions for training has also proven beneficial for those contractors looking to monitor whether or not their technicians have retained what they’ve been trained.  

“You may have taught your technicians this process, and ingrained it in them, but how do you know they’re really following the process?” said Snow. “Each of them has different levels of average tickets or different conversion rates … so something we’re really excited about with Sales Pro is getting that real-time feedback on how [employees] are performing. What are their conversations like? Are they taking time to educate? Are they following the processes taught to them?” 

Those in the HVAC industry might be used to that real-time coaching happening during something like a ride-along, and there’s a lot of value in that medium. But the industry just doesn’t have the bandwidth anymore for ride-alongs day after day.  

“So, to have an AI solution that provides our employees with immediate coaching is a game-changer — they want feedback to be able to perform better,” Snow said.  

 

AI for KPI Monitoring 

At one point, it may have seemed that AI provided the most benefits to the HVAC industry in terms of predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. But as the technology has grown, so have the manufacturers of its products and its consumers — they’ve now begun to realize the other ways the data collected by AI can positively impact their business. One example is key performance indicators (KPIs).  

“We’re seeing the market lean more towards measuring KPIs and monitoring production to maximize their production output,” said Anthony Davis, applied solutions engineer at Weidmuller. “AI can actually help our customers identify the critical and meaningful KPIs and metrics they need to focus on. … With that in mind, there’s just so much more data available in that realm than there would be with only predictive maintenance.” 

According to Davis, meaningful KPIs often mean that the volume of data goes from Gbytes to Mbytes, which is less costly to transfer on a remote network and easier to handle locally via a PLC or controller.  

“We see that it is necessary to provide tools to help a customer identify the data that is necessary and throttle back the data that just cost them [money] to collect,” Davis said. “We do this with powerful tools that allow them to define rule-based conditions that would then qualify the data as important.” 

And finding the right AI software for each specific business’s needs is only half the battle. The other half is gathering all the data in place, packaging it, and sending it where it needs to go.  

This led to the development of one of Weidmuller’s tools showcased at this year’s expo: the Weidmuller Edge Agent (WEA), designed to bridge the gap between hardware and software.  

KPI: The Weidmuller Edge Agent is currently in Beta release through Weidmuller’s Beta Testers Program.  (Courtesy of Weidmuller)

 “The Weidmuller Edge Agent combines secure VPN, industrial data orchestration, notifications, alerting, alarming, reporting, visualization dashboard, cellular gateway functionality, and edge computing into a cloud-connected ecosystem,” Davis said.