Case study — Roberts Glass & Service
Roberts Glass & Service put an automated voice system in front of fourteen lead glaziers. No app, no tablet, no new login — it calls them, and they answer. What comes out is something most specialty contractors don't have: a dated, attributed record of every job, every day.
What it does
Across the specialty trades, what happens on a job site lives in phone calls and in people's heads. A project manager who needs to know something rings the crew and asks. That isn't negligence — it's the shape of the work. Lead glaziers are on lifts and in trucks, not at desks.
Which is why the usual fixes don't hold. Paper forms come back at the end of the week, or don't come back. Tablets live in the truck. Apps get installed once and opened twice. Every one of them asks a tradesman to spend ten minutes a day being an office worker, and ten minutes a day is exactly what he doesn't have.
Rather than asking the field to file information, Roberts Glass & Service built something that comes and asks for it.
An automated voice system calls each of the fourteen lead glaziers on schedule. It asks what a project manager would have asked, and takes the answer by voice or by text — whichever works from where they're standing. Nothing to install, nothing to log into, no new habit to form. Answering a phone call is already the job. A lead glazier can give it thirty seconds or three minutes.
The design constraint came first, and it came from Jeff Hamilton, the company's president, rather than from us: whatever got built had to require nothing new from the field. That decision is the reason the system is still running. Most field-data projects fail on adoption rather than on technology, and Roberts declined to start one that depended on fourteen people changing how they work.
A frictionless experience.
Every answer becomes a dated, attributed entry against the right job. Reports are consolidated and distributed without anyone assembling them, and results are filed into the job record in the ERP, so the documentation isn't a separate task waiting on somebody's desk.
Three things follow from having that record:
We have a dated record of every job now, every day. The useful part isn't that we have it. It's that everybody's working from the same one.
This is the part Roberts values most. A safety issue raised on a job site reaches the safety team immediately, with a written record attached — not at the end of the week, and not after it has been relayed secondhand three times.
In commercial construction, how quickly a subcontractor hears about a safety issue, and what they can show afterwards, are not small matters. They affect people first and everything else second.
A year of daily entries is a different asset from a day of them. Roberts can now see delivery performance by supplier — invisible when nothing is written down. Estimating is beginning to draw on what actually happened on past jobs rather than on recollection.
Very few specialty contractors of any size have a working AI system in front of their field crews. Most construction AI is a pilot, a dashboard, or a chatbot nobody opens twice. Roberts has one that fourteen tradesmen use every working day, precisely because it asks nothing of them.
Roberts Glass & Service is a glazing contractor, but nothing about this is specific to glass.
The shape of it is this: your people in the field know things, nobody captures them, and the knowledge goes home with them at the end of the day. It's invisible while it's happening, because there's no broken process to point at — just an absence where a record could be. That turns up in nearly every business with people working somewhere other than the office.
The businesses that fix it first tend not to be the biggest ones. They're the ones that decided the information was worth having.
Bring the process that's costing you the most time. We'll tell you straight whether it's worth automating — and if it isn't, we'll say so.
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