How HVAC Businesses Use AI to Increase Efficiency & Revenue

A lot has been written about how artificial intelligence (AI) is used in HVAC systems. For example, AI algorithms and machine learning are now being used in heating and air conditioning systems to:

• Increase comfort levels based on building inhabitant preferences

• Improve energy efficiency and system performance

• Reduce energy consumption and energy costs (particularly in commercial buildings)

• Provide predictive maintenance, fault detection, and diagnostics to limit downtime and expand the lifespan of heating and cooling systems

These advancements provide significant benefits in terms of energy savings, sustainability/ emissions reductions, and cost savings for businesses and homeowners. They also help HVAC service providers improve customer experiences through better preventive maintenance.

AI technology's role in optimizing and driving revenue growth for HVAC businesses has been less discussed. This article focuses on that.

Below we walk through some examples of the AI tools we now offer through Titan Intelligence (TI) — ServiceTitan’s AI built for the trades. First, we cover features built to increase operational efficiency. Then, we cover features that are helping our users grow revenue.

Quick Background on Titan Intelligence (ServiceTitan’s AI for the Trades)

Since the founding of ServiceTitan in 2012, our team has been dedicated to providing innovative solutions to help HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and select other trades to run their businesses more efficiently and profitably. 

There was never a question of whether  AI would eventually play a role in the tools we offer our customers. It was only a matter of when. And in recent years, we’ve been able to leverage advancements in AI to begin making this a reality.

At the 2023 Pantheon conference, we announced 14 new AI-driven features across our Pro Products and Accounting suite (some of which are detailed below). In 2024 we’ll announce several new features that build further on what we’re already providing for plumbing service businesses.

The key difference between ServiceTitan and other solutions when it comes to AI development for the trades is twofold:

1. Access to trade-specific data: AI takes an enormous amount of data inputs to develop effectively, and ServiceTitan benefits from trade-specific data across thousands of customers and locations giving us a significant advantage compared to other providers.

2. Dedicated AI division: ServiceTitan has an entire division — Data, Titan Intelligence, and AI — that is dedicated to developing these advanced technologies for our customers. We’re developing an AI platform for the trades — not simply a series of chatbots within our software.

With that context in mind, let’s look at some of the AI features we currently offer HVAC shops.

AI Features for Improving Operational Efficiency

Invoice Summary Generator

Titan Intelligence can now generate invoice summaries in seconds based on prompts and your original invoice and job summaries. In settings, you can define a prompt such as: 

Write this invoice description in a clean, professional format adding urgency and justification for the charges and include bullet points as needed. Break into three sections: Invoice Description, Justification for Charges, and Points of Urgency.

Instead of a staff member spending five or 10 minutes cross-referencing the estimate or job summary and writing this invoice summary manually, they can generate this automatically with the click of a button. They have the option to make edits if needed, and their invoice is ready to send.

If you need to summarize 20 invoices per day, for example, that’s conservatively saving staff 1.5–3 hours of work per day on this single yet important job function. 

Invoice Email Generator

Once an invoice is finalized and ready to send to the customer, Titan Intelligence can also generate personalized and engaging invoice emails for you with a single click. 

Just like with invoice summaries, you can define a simple prompt in your settings that gets applied to your invoice emails, such as:

Generate a professional and polite invoice email. Thank them for choosing our services and provide contact information like business unit email and phone number at the end.

Then, from the invoice screen, you can have your email generated and sent with a few clicks. One click to initiate the email, one to generate the email text with TI, and one click to send. If you need to make any additions or customizations to the email, you can easily do so before hitting send.

TI Chat Assistant

A base subscription with ServiceTitan offers plenty of optimizations for efficiently scheduling HVAC jobs. However, our upgrade product Scheduling Pro now offers TI Chat Assistant.

With TI Chat Assistant, virtual agents trained on your own call recordings can handle most of the common use cases your call center handles today—from understanding your customer's intent and collecting contact information to booking jobs and answering customers’ questions. Your agents can easily monitor all the interactions and step in when flagged or they determine necessary.

GPS Enabled Timesheets

We’ve written previously about the ways ServiceTitan solves common challenges with HVAC technician time tracking and timesheets such as technicians forgetting to fill out their time cards, filling them out inaccurately, or office staff needing to hound techs to fill them out and submit them for payroll.  

With Fleet Pro, HVAC shops can streamline this process even more with GPS-enabled timesheets powered by TI. Fleet Pro’s proprietary Automated GPS Timesheets Integration intelligently updates technician timesheets according to GPS data in real time, saving you time and protecting you from excess wages or wage theft claims.

Learn more about our all-in-one HVAC fleet tracking and management system.

Reputation Review Response Generator

Our Marketing Pro product, which allows you to manage various key marketing functions right from within ServiceTitan, now offers an online review response generator powered by TI.

Not only does your staff get to track and respond to your online reviews across a variety of platforms from a single place, but TI will suggest tailored responses to reviews in just one click — addressing the customer’s feedback while matching the voice and tone of your brand — helping you keep your online reputation strong in a fraction of the time it takes to craft a unique response for every review.  

AI Features for Increasing Revenue

Ads Optimizer

Optimizing your Google Ads is essential, but it’s a technical, time-consuming process. Our TI-powered Ads Optimizer tool takes work out of this process, helping lower your cost per lead while increasing the quantity and quality of those leads.

Specifically, Ads Optimizer leverages audience and revenue data in ServiceTitan and automatically feeds it into Google Ads and other connected ad platforms. By enriching data used by these ad platforms, Ads Optimizer trains Google to target based on revenue, not just calls or form fills. 

Optimizer also looks at a company’s capacity and notifies the person managing that Google Ads account when the job board gets too full or isn’t full enough. Users can set thresholds so they don’t waste money on jobs they can’t fulfill or, if you don’t have enough jobs on the board, you will know when to increase ad spend.

Second Chance Leads 

Second Chance Leads — offered through Phones Pro — automatically reviews a significant portion of your calls classified as unbooked, “not a lead,” and excused, and flags only the ones we believe have a high likelihood of being saved with a quick follow-up call back to your customer. After a CSR ends a phone call, this feature uses Titan Intelligence to review the call recording and creates a Second Chance Lead for you to review and act on.

Our goal is to ensure that all the Second Chance Leads we send you are actual leads and have a strong possibility of being saved. At present, our data suggests that users are recapturing 37% of unconverted calls and turning them into booked jobs.

Technician Assignment Automation with Job Value Predictor

A base subscription with ServiceTitan offers significant advantages for HVAC dispatchers and CSRs including an easy-to-use dispatch board with drag-and-drop functionality, and the ability to reschedule jobs, alter routes, add notes to individual jobs, and reassign techs without missing a beat. 

Our AI-powered upgrade product, Dispatch Pro, optimizes your board setup to maximize profit by automatically taking into account job value predictions and recent technician performance (sales performance, lead generation probability, skills, etc.) when assigning technicians to jobs.

Without your dispatchers even needing to think about it, Dispatch Pro will help identify and assign the best-fit technician for a given lead who is most likely to close that job and produce revenue. 

In addition to helping maximize profits, this feature also provides significant efficiency gains for dispatchers. We’ve seen a 2x increase in capacity per dispatcher with Dispatch Pro. 

Learn More About ServiceTitan AI for the Trades

The features we’ve discussed throughout this post are just a sample of the first round of AI tools we’ve rolled out for the HVAC industry and other core trades. These tools are already making a significant impact for our customers and their businesses. 

In addition to what we’ve covered here, we offer Risky Driver Detection with Fleet Pro, Price Insights and Configurable Services in Estimates with Pricebook Pro, a Quarterly Benchmark Report that compares your business’s key metrics to similar businesses, providing data-driven insights for improvement, and more.