AI is Your New Power Tool

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, remains a hot topic as businesses begin to adopt AI-powered tools and technologies. According to results from Glass Magazine’s annual Top 50 Glaziers survey, installers are slowly exploring how AI can aid their processes and bottom line. “Physical Security is embracing AI thoughtfully and strategically, with a phased approach focused on the areas where it can deliver the most immediate impact,” says a rep from Top 50 Glazier Physical Security. 

Adopting AI for installers was also a topic of discussion at BEC Conference during the session “AI is Your New Power Tool,” moderated by Ethan Turner, vice president of sales and marketing, Binswanger Glass with panelists Tyler Clark, preconstruction manager/software developer, Barringer Construction; A.J. Hubert, senior project manager, Dynamic Group LLC; and Johnny Maghzal, head of revenue for Togal.AI. The conversation focused on what AI can and can’t do, and how companies can integrate AI technologies while avoiding pitfalls. 

AI will augment processes, not replace jobs

“Let’s acknowledge things up front, some people are excited about AI others are skeptical, and others are just wondering if it’s going to come for their job,” said Turner at the beginning of the session. Panelists reassured the audience that AI will replace tasks, not jobs, and will likely amplify the value of human judgment.  

Maghzal underscored that AI is trained on historic data and is therefore not good at creating new ideas. “Humans will still come up with ideas and make decisions,” he said, and human judgment will still be crucial.   

Barringer’s Clark emphasized that AI tools are designed to streamline many tasks. “Being able to make yourself more efficient is really the goal here, your craft is not going away, but faster processes and workflows will allow humans to do higher yield human activities.” AI tools can replace repetitive tasks like manual accounting, repetitive document search, data reentry and basic quantity extraction, and can augment scope evaluation, risk interpretation, strategic planning, and pricing management, according to panelists. 

By moving these repetitive and iterative tasks to AI, employees can be freed to do “high-yield” activities, according to panelists, including customer engagement. “We want to put the focus back on the people, free up people to build relationships so they’re not at a computer doing data entry, but instead getting more face time,” says Clark. Turner emphasized that as AI becomes even more common in marketing and sales, the role of sales staff and in-person relationships will have an even greater value. “AI will likely make sales more important—you’re going to have to get in front of your customers.” 

Panelists also reminded the audience of the initial resistance among field workers to mobile technology like iPads and software like Procore and AutoCAD, technologies that have now become industry standards.  

While AI will not replace employees, it may change the type of employees that companies hire, according to panelists. “I’m now looking for resourceful individuals. Not for the guy that knows the most about the glass industry – if you can be resourceful with this power tool, it ups the game,” says Hubert. AI will also be instrumental in ensuring that institutional knowledge gets catalogued so that it can be used for the next generation of glaziers, says Turner. “We all have someone in the office who’s an encyclopedia. When you use these tools, you can move that tribal knowledge into standard operating procedures.” 

Strategies and opportunities for installers

When companies and leaders are ready to start using AI, they should start small, panelists said. Using AI to summarize emails or meeting minutes, and just getting used to interacting with AI, can be a good first step, says Hubert. 

If or when the company is ready to expand their AI strategy, it’s important to start slowly and create a plan, panelists agreed, and recommended using a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach. 

Crawl 

Before even implementing an AI tool for business processes, panelists encouraged leaders to take stock of company processes and identify pain points. “Don’t start with the software company, instead start by figuring out what process you want to apply the software to,” says Maghzal. Business leaders should establish an end goal for the AI rollout in order to measure success, panelists said. 

Implementation will also require an internal champion; an employee that can own the process and focus on the project. Another part of trying AI tools can be side-by-side testing; comparing how AI performs a process compared to non-AI methods, and analyzing the difference. 

Walk 

After piloting tools, companies can move to broader integration. Key performance indicators should be established to measure performance and to track completion towards the end goal of the project. 

Maghzal emphasizes how important training is to get broader buy-in from employees and encourages business leaders to have empathy for workers using these tools for the first time. “Employees are already busy, so building training materials is very important. Show employees why the tool will help them,” he said.  

Whether using a bespoke AI tool or third-party tools, cleaning company data for use can be very important, panelists say. Many companies have data spread across different platforms and databases, which will need to be catalogued so that it can feed into new AI processes.  

Run 

When companies have established broader integration, they can consider scaled adoption across the company as needed, panelists say. Clark says that his company developed their own internal tools to extract data most efficiently.  

At this point in the process, Clark says, the data extracted can be used for predictive analysis. Barringer’s internally built tool analyzed relevant historic data to produce likely estimates for bids. “This process gives an ROI boost from the standpoint of business development leads; building developers want estimates immediately, and we’re not seeing more time to estimating and bid jobs.”