Tim Johnson was training a new manager when the question came up. How big was one account manager's book of business?

Johnson, president of Tim Johnson Landscaping in Statesville, N.C., and a pilot customer for Aspire's new Command Center, said the old answer meant building a list, filtering it down and sorting through the results. 

This time, "it was one query in Atlas, and then we had the number within 30 seconds," he said, during a video interview shown at Ignite, ServiceTitan’s user conference for Aspire and FieldRoutes customers.

The introduction of ServiceTitan’s AI-powered Command Center, with spots opened on Thursday for 100 Ignite attendees in Orlando, highlighted the Aspire keynote address at Ignite, held at Disney’s Swan & Dolphin Resort. A broader release of Command Center is coming soon.

A harness for Aspire data

ServiceTitan Co-Founder and President Vahe Kuzoyan compared the implementation of AI in the trades to the taming of the horse. Kuzoyan pointed out that with AI, like the horse, a harness "allows you to connect the power … to a specific purpose in order to do real work."

What does that look like in the landscaping industry? Aspire VP of Engineering Kiran Palan described the problem Command Center addresses across a landscaping business. 

"The answers are already in Aspire, but they are spread across reports, screens and people," Palan said.

An owner who wants to know how the business is really doing often has to ask someone, or wait for a report. Palan called Command Center "the biggest thing we are adding to help run the business."

Built into Aspire and accessed via Atlas, its conversational AI, Command Center answers plain-English questions about the business. Or, as Kuzoyan said, provides a harness for the horse to unleash the power. 

The alert does the watching

Aspire General Manager Eli Zevin put a number on the problem during the Smart Estimating segment. "The average landscaper runs 12% over their estimated labor hours and usually doesn't know until the job closes," he said.

Nobody has time to check every number every day, Kuzoyan told the audience, so "Command Center watches for you." When a job runs past its estimated hours in the middle of the week, he said, the tool emails the owner "while there's still time to do something about it." Email alerts are available today, and SMS is coming.

In the demo, Kuzoyan opens an alert email on the way to his truck, pulls up Atlas on his phone and asks how September revenue compares with the year before. The answer: down 22%, about a million dollars. Atlas tied the drop to a warning already on its radar. Design and build was running almost 13% over on labor, with one branch driving most of the overrun.

Ask the question, get the why

Kuzoyan demonstrated what the result looks like in real life. A real-language question about September labor efficiency came back with an answer in two seconds, with crews 6.5% under budgeted hours. But Atlas pointed out that the rosy number didn’t present the whole picture. 

In one division, actual hours were double the estimate. Pulling the tickets behind the overrun showed one property on 13 of them.

"So the crew is fine," Kuzoyan said. "The estimate is the problem." 

The sequence took four questions and maybe a minute, he said, and moved him "from a nice-looking month to the exact estimate I need to fix."

Dashboards work the same way. 

Kuzoyan asked Atlas for a dashboard for branch managers tracking crew productivity and job profitability in the maintenance division, and the AI Builder returned nine widgets, without anyone having to write a single line of code. 

The one thing to focus on today

Kuzoyan closed the keynote where he opened it, with the mathematician Paul Erdős and the problems that sat unsolved for decades before they began to fall. Then he turned to the people in the room.

“Margin, labor, knowing which clients are slipping away—these are problems this industry has fought with forever, and they’re starting to move,” he said.

GM Zevin had described the aim earlier in the keynote. One of Aspire’s largest multi-branch customers told the company his top priority for AI is raising what every person on his team can handle.

That means more book per account manager, more selling per estimator, and a lot less time on administration, Zevin said.

Johnson has seen that already at Tim Johnson Landscaping. 

He said the data now coming out of Command Center has his team asking a different kind of question: What is the one thing we can focus on to move the needle on profitability today?

What comes next, in his telling, is a change in timing. 

Command Center, Johnson said, “is going to give our account managers the data in a proactive manner rather than a reactive manner to lead our teams forward.”

In other words, the ability to harness the data, in real time.