Is Your Anti-AI Bias Holding You Back?

More than any other technical home service business innovation of the 21^st Century, the developments within the world of artificial intelligence (AI) are sparking the greatest customer-relations changes within HVACR, plumbing, electrical and other residential contracting businesses.

HVACR companies that have been entrenched in older website conventions are missing out on the transformational power of AI and its ability to rocket their businesses to greater heights.

During an August webinar sponsored by Heating, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI), Jennifer Bagley, founder and CEO of the CI Web Group, Houston, Texas, provided insight into how distributors and HVACR contracting firms must change their website constructions to be fully integrated into more AI friendly, consumer-aware marketing tools. And that includes changing the very nature of the content they’ve been posting over the past 10-20 years. In short, Bagley said, it’s time for HVACR to “get agentic.”

“Agentic” is the term used to describe one of the major benefits of artificial intelligence, which is using AI as an “agent” to help them find information in ways that go far beyond Google’s current capacity, or to communicate with other AI agents or real people (customers, distributors or manufacturers).

Service business owners who are resisting AI adoption due to a technology bias or conspiracy theory-based fears of “Big Brother” must put those aside and look to the future of their business’s development and its ultimate survival. That future, Bagley said, is now.

One result of the AI revolution is that the days of “Googling” for information as it’s currently done will disappear, although Google will offer it’s own alternative in response to AI’s overwhelming abilities and most specifically, to ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. Since that release, ChatGPT has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.

Artificial intelligence is a Large Language Model (LLM) that has been “trained” on a huge collection of data, and it is, Bagley said, “smarter than any Ph.D. professor.”

During the HARDI webinar, Bagley shared that, in April of 2025, the number of people enlisting help from ChapGPT had grown such that Google lost 1% of its market share. In May, Google lost 2% of its market share, and 10% in June, Bagley said. And the siphoning of Google users will only increase. Overall, ChatGPT has captured about 80% of the entire artificial intelligence market, and it’s still only used by a small fraction of the population.

“You’re looking at exponential adoption of AI before AI has technically rolled out as a standard tool on all of the devices and hardware that everyone has in their pocket, car, handbag, and home,” Bagley said.

ChatGPT is a UIUX (User Interface/User Experience) platform that allows users to have conversations with the large language model. Open AI sits behind the scenes to provide a level of efficiency within the system. 

Your AI platform should provide you with either the option to utilize the platform as a free user, a paid user or as a workspace within a company or a business. You should also establish your AI profile as a “paid” account, so that any content or information you are placing inside a chat bot is not being used to train the large language model, unless you decide to allow it to become searchable, and allow your thoughts and ideas to become others'.

“Google has started to crawl and present content that has been generated directly out of some of the large language models, which is a very interesting role reversal,” Bagley said.

How to USE AI
AI can be used to perform financial modeling, create organizational charts, research competitor websites, review documents or videos, create excel spreadsheets, and conduct market analysis and competitor analysis.

As Bagley described it with some humor: “If I am a typical entrepreneur with 90 different thoughts in my head at any particular time and 90 different things I want to get done at any particular time, with AI I now have the ability to execute all of those tasks without having five computer windows open, with 100 tabs per window open at the same time and me bouncing around within each tab, because I can send my “agents” out to do everything, from planning my grocery list to building a marketing plan to creating a social media plan to analyze our budget to evaluate our P&L year to date, to creating a marketing budget for next year, and so forth. When you get into ‘agent’ mode, every agent could be performing 10 different tasks at the same time. One can be researching websites, one is researching documents, one is watching videos, another is creating an Excel spreadsheet, another is analyzing your target market, and one can be analyzing competitor promotions.”

During the presentation, Bagley spoke of the great variety of AI tools, such as:

• Poe is a platform that allows users to interact with AI chatbots within a single interface. It works as an aggregator for different AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude Opus 4 and Llama. This makes it easy to compare their responses and capabilities. With Poe, users are empowered create their own custom chatbots.
• Claude Opus 4 specializes in coding, advanced reasoning and AI agents. It can work on complex, long-running tasks, agentic workflows and tasks that require precise content management.
• Runway allows users to generate videos from a static image, other videos or a text prompt.
• Deep-Seek R1 is optimized for reasoning, math, and code tasks using reinforcement learning and cold-start data. 
• ElevenLabs is a realistic sounding voice AI platform that can be used to generate natural-sounding dialogue between multiple “people.”

And those are but a small sample of an approximate number of 2,400 generative tools that exist across many categories and now used by millions of people around the world.

To Share Information or Not
Bagley emphasized that each AI platform a user chooses to employ should provide the option to utilize the platform as a free user, a paid user, or in a workspace (for a company or a business).

“It is very, very important if you are utilizing a conversational AI chat bot and providing any proprietary information,” she cautioned.

“We want to make sure that we have some kind of a notice that says that the content or information that you're placing inside that chat bot is not being used to train the large language model unless you decide to do so through sharing and allow it to become searchable.” Because, basically, it’s your information and observations, and if not protected, it can be scraped and used without your knowledge or consent. According to Bagley, Google is using content that has been generated directly out of some of the large language models.

Bagley explained that the business model for someone using a large language model is to purchase monthly subscriptions for every user within the business and for those that are utilizing the LLM to perform functions or build applications. they're paying for API calls (messages sent from one software application -- the client-- to another software application or server-- the API endpoint-- to request a specific service or information for pennies on the dollar.

Bagley’s company paid a mere $600 for about nine million API calls in one week. 

Among AI technology’s greatest advantages is its efficiency, and the efficiency it can help bring to a service business, and of course, its capacity for performing multiple tasks.

AI also eschews what Bagley described as “bloated high code, WordPress websites.” And, if a contracting business has a website, the majority of their marketing systems and marketing strategies are not technically designed for the consumer who's utilizing an AI agent, whose numbers are growing.

“And, their conversion tools are also not set up for agent-to-agent communications. And the industry is still talking about, ‘should I use AI in my call center?’ Why would I want to answer phones when consumers are now adopting AI agents to to perform the task for them?

AI promotes efficiency, because it can allow you to get a tremendous amount of things done very, very, very fast. The majority of corporations are likely figuring this out, Bagley shared, and they have built a community within their organizations that is helping their organizations become more and more AI enabled. Those humans, those people, those homeowners are now utilizing AI personally and professionally. And you're going to start hearing from a lot of them,” but only if you’re up-to-speed on incorporating AI, Bagley said.