How tradies can use AI without the hype

Every week there's a new AI tool promising to run your business for you. Most tradies have tried one, got an answer that sounded confident and was wrong, and gone back to doing it themselves. That's a reasonable reaction, but it throws out the useful part with the hype. Used for the right jobs, AI saves a trade business real hours on the work nobody gets paid for: reading, sorting and writing. This guide is about telling those jobs apart from the ones you should keep for yourself.

What AI is good at

The AI tools most people mean today are language models. They are very good with words and much less reliable with facts. Play to that:

• Sorting enquiries. Reading an email and working out whether it's a new job, a supplier invoice, a newsletter or spam, and pulling out the address, the problem and how urgent it sounds.
• Turning rough notes into clear words. A few lines typed in the ute become a tidy job description, a scope of works or a polite reply.
• Summarising. A long email chain with a builder becomes a few lines you can read before you call back.
• First drafts. A reply to a new enquiry, a follow-up on a quote, or the wording of a variation, ready for you to check and send.
• Answering questions about your own records. "Which quotes are still waiting on an answer?" is easier to ask than to find in a list.

What to keep for yourself

• Prices. A model doesn't know your costs, your margin or how hard the site is to get to. Price the job yourself; our guide to pricing a job properly shows how.
• Promises. Arrival times, completion dates and anything a customer could hold you to.
• Technical and safety calls. Whether a switchboard needs replacing or a wall is load-bearing is your licence on the line, not the software's.
• Legal and tax questions. A chatbot will happily give you a GST answer that sounds right. Check it against the source, such as the ATO, or ask your accountant.

Look after your customers' details

Pasting a customer's name, address and phone number into a free public chatbot sends them to a company you have no agreement with, and some free tools use what you type to train their models. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's guidance on using AI products recommends that businesses avoid putting personal information into publicly available AI tools. Not every small business is covered by the Privacy Act, but your customers expect the same care either way. Prefer tools built into the software that already holds the information, and ask any vendor whether their AI provider trains on your data.

Start with one job

Don't try to "use AI" in general. Pick the one task that eats the most of your evenings, whether that's the inbox, writing up jobs or chasing quotes, and try a tool on that alone for a month. If you aren't getting the time back, stop. If you are, move to the next one. For most trade businesses the best place to start is the inbox: see winning more work by answering enquiries faster.

Check its work, especially at first

AI is fast and usually right, which is exactly why mistakes slip through. For the first few weeks read everything it produces. You'll quickly learn where it's reliable and where it isn't, and a good tool shows you what it based its answer on, so checking takes seconds.

How BizzMate uses AI

• Enquiries become jobs. Emails to your Gmail, Outlook or other mailbox, and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp messages, are read by AI and turned into job cards, with the urgent ones flagged. Newsletters, receipts and spam are filed away rather than put on the board.
• A first reply, drafted. On Crew plans and up, the AI receptionist drafts a reply to each new enquiry for you to check and send. If you switch on automatic acknowledgements, it can thank the customer and ask for missing details when nobody has answered in time. It never quotes a price, promises a time or books anything, and it says it was sent automatically.
• Your voice, on the job. On Crew plans and up you can tell BizzMate to create a job, move it, assign it or add a note, and find jobs, quotes and invoices, by speaking. Sending anything waits for you to confirm.
• Questions about your business. The AI business coach answers from your own jobs, quotes and invoices, and lists what it checked under every answer.

The AI runs on Google's paid Gemini service, which doesn't use your data to train its models. Try BizzMate free for 14 days.

This guide is general information, not legal or financial advice. Check privacy and tax questions with the regulator or your adviser.