Most roofers do not know how to "Buy" AI. Think of a home owner, every 3-5 hours there is a post on Reddit on the r/roofing subreddit where a home owner posts some garbage hacky work photo asking "is this going to leak?"
Of course, as you can imagine. The group is filled with proud roofers who provide a response ranging from RELATABLE HELP to RATIONAL to RIDICULE. (of the home owner and/or the roofer)
Well, that isn't the only sub-reddit where buyers go to Get feedback on a particular purchase. This also exists in every other home services business and also dog groomers, graphic design, website design, basically anything where someone does something for someone else.
As the image kind of suggests right now, simply adding two little letters to anything gets the board and the venture capitalists off the CEO's back in terms of having an AI strategy. It makes the price go up, it makes the stock go up, and it certainly makes the hype and excitement go up.
However, artificial intelligence is just that - it's synthetic, it's intelligence that's replicating human intelligence, and yes, it is way better and way smarter than a human. However, it still needs to be trained just like any human. If you give a human bad data and bad training, you get a bad outcome. If you give a human a bad system, you will get unpredictable outcomes. If you give a human a process with a lot of gaps, you will have hallucinations and unpredictable outcomes.
A mistake would be to write off poor implementation as a determination of the capability and quality of the promise inherent in artificial intelligence. No different than if someone went on Reddit, saw that there's a complaint about a roofer every 3-5 hours, and assumed that all roofers are hacky scam artists. The fact is, the news only shows up to document the planes that crash. They don't show up to document the news about planes landing safely. By and large, most roofing jobs go off without a hitch. Unfortunately, in the case of artificial intelligence, there isn't as much quality information about how to buy and implement and integrate artificial intelligence into your business.
However, due to the hype, there's an enormous amount of pundits who are touting it as something more than what it is, which is a synthetic replacement to human intelligence that you can employ on an outcome basis as opposed to a per hour or per year salary basis. It still is bound by the same laws of gravity that intelligence needs guidance, support, guardrails, and training.