Disclosure
TradeVulcan develops software for trade contractors and competes for some contractor technology budgets with ServiceTitan. Survey figures are attributed to ServiceTitan and Thrive Analytics.
What changed — Sept. 24, 2026
ServiceTitan released its 2026 Commercial State of the Trades research today, based on an online survey of 1,020 U.S. commercial owners, executives and general managers conducted by Thrive Analytics from July 10 through July 28. The sample was primarily mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractors working on commercial buildings. Sixty-two percent said their firms have piloted or deployed AI, and 33% said they are actively using it or have embedded it across the business. Among contractors using AI, 59% report a positive impact, but only 15% report a significant positive impact with clear ROI.
The adoption story is real. The proof story is still catching up.
Commercial contractors are not waiting for artificial intelligence to become a settled category. Nearly two-thirds of ServiceTitan’s survey sample has moved into a pilot or deployment. But the most important number may be 15%: the share of AI users who say the impact is both significant and tied to clear ROI. At the same time, much older business problems are getting louder. Forty percent now rank improving cash flow among their top three goals, 96% wait at least 15 days for payment, and 73% say tariffs materially affected the business over the past year. The contractor question is no longer whether AI is interesting enough to try. It is whether a specific deployment measurably improves a company already carrying labor, material and working-capital pressure.
Contractors should measure AI deployments against real operating metrics before expanding them.
AI adoption has outrun the accounting for AI
There is a meaningful difference between trying AI, using AI and proving AI. A pilot can be useful before it pays back, and some benefits are hard to isolate from staffing or seasonality. But the label AI is too broad to function as a business case. A voice agent should be measured differently from a dispatch optimizer, and a proposal assistant differently from predictive maintenance. The practical dividing line is whether the company can name a before-and-after metric that justified putting the workflow into production.
The report also points to an operating reality beyond AI: commercial service performance depends on clean customer, asset and agreement information reaching the field at the right time.
The bigger near-term pressure may be cash conversion
ServiceTitan’s report shows how quickly a profitable-looking commercial backlog can turn into a working-capital problem. Eighty-two percent of respondents say they send invoices within three days of completing work, yet 96% wait at least 15 days to receive payment and 30% wait more than 30 days. At the same time, 40% now rank improving cash flow among their top three business goals, up from 28% in 2025, while 42% rank increasing net profit margins first and 29% name acquiring new customers. The implication is not that growth no longer matters. It is that contractors are paying closer attention to the timing and quality of that growth. Purchase-order accuracy, invoice completeness, approval workflow and receivables follow-up can matter almost as much as the speed of billing.
Tariff and labor pressure make measurement more urgent
Seventy-three percent of surveyed contractors said tariffs materially affected their business over the prior year. Roofing Contractor’s same-day review of the report adds that 75% expect material and equipment prices to rise over the next 12 months, 70% are very or extremely concerned about the effect of higher material costs on profitability, and 43% placed tariff-related cost increases among their top three business risks. Skilled-labor shortages ranked first at 57%, followed by rising labor or overhead costs at 45%. That backdrop makes the AI-ROI question more than a technology debate: every software investment is competing for attention and budget while contractors are also trying to protect labor efficiency, job margin and material-cost accuracy.
Recurring agreements are becoming a larger part of the operating base
Forty-six percent of respondents now say more than half of their commercial customers are on service or maintenance agreements, up from 42% in 2025. That movement fits the broader resilience theme. Recurring relationships can create more predictable inspection and planned-maintenance work, better equipment histories and earlier visibility into replacement opportunities. They also give automation better context because the contractor has structured customer, asset and service-history data instead of a one-time transaction. But agreement count alone is not a performance metric; renewal, margin, truck-roll frequency and follow-on work still determine whether the book is economically healthy.
The least flashy finding may be the most actionable
ServiceTitan says 69% of respondents identified access to warranty coverage and agreement details as a top obstacle for field technicians, with correct spare parts and equipment service histories also flagged. That is an important counterweight to the AI headline. A sophisticated model cannot compensate for missing entitlement data, incomplete asset histories or contract terms nobody can find. For many commercial operators, cleaning up the underlying records may be a prerequisite to getting reliable results from any automation layered on top.
Where contractors expect AI to matter — and what proof should look like
| Workflow | Survey signal | Useful proof metric |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling and dispatch | 37% expect the greatest AI impact | Drive time, schedule utilization, overtime, jobs per technician-day |
| Predictive maintenance | 31% expect the greatest AI impact | Emergency-call reduction, planned-work conversion, false-positive rate |
| Estimating and proposals | Named as an additional opportunity | Turnaround time, close rate, margin variance, revision frequency |
| Remote diagnostics | Named as an additional opportunity | Truck rolls avoided, diagnostic time, first-time fix, escalation rate |
| Customer inquiries | Named as an additional opportunity | Response time, booked work, abandonment, human-escalation rate |
What a contractor can measure over the next 30 days
- List every AI-enabled workflow currently in use and label it experiment, production or retired.
- Give each production workflow one primary business metric and capture a baseline before expanding it.
- Include implementation, training, review time, rework and integration when calculating the cost of the workflow.
- Review receivables aging and identify the recurring reasons invoices stall after they are sent.
- Check how often material and equipment costs are refreshed in estimating and price-book workflows.
- Rank service agreements by renewal, margin, unplanned truck rolls and follow-on work rather than contract count alone.
- Test whether field technicians can actually access warranty, agreement and equipment-history data at the moment they need it.
- At the end of the period, expand, change or retire experiments based on measured operating results.
The Dispatch view
The trades are moving past the stage where AI adoption itself is surprising. The harder phase is proving that adoption changes the economics or execution of the business. ServiceTitan’s survey is useful precisely because it shows both sides at once: experimentation is widespread, while the share of AI users reporting significant positive impact with clear ROI is much smaller. That forces a better question. Not, ‘Do we use AI?’ but, ‘Which workflow improved, by how much, and can we prove it?’ Contractors that build the fastest proof loop — test, measure, keep what works, remove what does not — will get more value from the technology than companies that simply accumulate tools.
Methodology
Dispatch reviewed ServiceTitan’s Sept. 24, 2026 distributed release, its stated survey methodology, the 2025 commercial-service report for direct year-over-year comparisons, and same-day independent trade coverage. Thrive Analytics fielded the 2026 online survey July 10–28 among 1,020 commercial owners, executives and general managers, primarily in mechanical, electrical and plumbing. Survey results are self-reported and are not an audited industry census. The 15% clear-ROI figure applies to contractors using AI, not all respondents. Additional tariff, material-cost and labor-risk figures are attributed to Roofing Contractor’s same-day review of the report. The hero is a real licensed Pexels photograph used only as illustrative commercial-HVAC context.