Last week we had a booth at The Fence Show in Las Vegas, walking contractors through the platform we built for the trades. I went in ready to talk about what the AI does, how the agents work together, and what’s happening under the hood. The conversations went somewhere else.

They wanted the phone answered, estimates scheduled, and jobs booked without somebody in the office chasing every step. How we made that happen was our problem, not theirs.

It’s easy to talk about the part you built instead of the problem someone is paying you to solve. That booth was a good reminder.

FROM THE FIELD

A booked job is more than an answered call

A salesman we spoke with put it plainly. His frustration wasn’t just with one piece of software. It was having to use that software alongside other tools just to get through the day.

That’s the part an impressive demo can skip. Answering a call is useful, but it isn’t the same as winning the work. There can still be an estimate to schedule, a proposal to send, a customer to follow up with, and a crew to notify once the job is approved. Put those steps in different systems and somebody still has to keep everything moving.

An AI product might handle one of those steps well. That doesn’t tell you what happens to the rest of the process, or how much work your team still has to do around it.

BEFORE YOU BUY

Three questions I’d ask before buying

It’s easy to leave a demo impressed without knowing what would actually change on Monday morning. These are the questions I’d want answered before making a decision.

What business result are we measuring? If the promise is more booked work, the number of calls answered isn’t enough to prove it. Ask how you’ll track inquiries that become scheduled estimates or approved jobs. If the promise is less office work, measure the time your team actually gets back. Establish a starting point before you test it.

What happens when it gets something wrong? Ask what happens if the system gives a customer the wrong information or books an appointment incorrectly. How would your team find out, and who would correct it? Then ask to see how it handles a request it can’t finish. You need to see the handoff, not just hear that a human can take over.

What does my team stop doing? Ask the vendor to walk through the same customer inquiry before and after their system is added. Which steps does nobody have to touch anymore? What still needs a person? If the promise is less work, the vendor should be able to show you what comes off your team’s plate, not just what gets added to it. If your people end up opening one more tool on top of everything else, you didn’t buy help, you bought another login.

Ask to see this with a realistic example from your own business, with customer details removed. And if the plan starts with replacing the systems you already use, ask why that needs to happen before they can show you a result. Those are fair questions for any vendor, including us.

TRY THIS

Run the three questions on your last demo

Think about the last software demo you sat through, AI or not. Without looking anything up, try to answer those three questions about it.

What result was it supposed to improve, and how would you have measured it? What happens when it gets something wrong? What would your team have stopped doing?

Anything you can’t answer is worth clarifying before you buy. Write it down, check your notes or the proposal, and bring the remaining questions to the follow up call. If the vendor can’t answer them either, that matters more than how impressive the demo was.

Before your next demo, send the three questions ahead of time and ask the vendor to build the walkthrough around them. If you get a list of features instead of an answer, ask again.

ONE ASK

Bring me your demo

If you’re looking at an AI tool right now, bring a demo summary or proposal to a conversation with me, with customer details and anything confidential removed. We’ll go through these three questions together. I’ll tell you what looks solid, what’s unclear, and what I’d still want to see before signing.

Until next time,

Shawn Kercher

CEO, HummingAgent AI

P.S. If you know an owner getting pitched AI right now, forward this to them.