This spring, we hit the road. Five cities. Five rooms full of field service leaders who showed up ready to talk honestly about what’s working, what isn’t, and what they actually need from AI. What we heard was candid, consistent, and exactly the kind of feedback that makes our product better.
Here’s a full recap of what happened, the most impactful stories we heard, and how users are shaping the roadmap for Service Pro AI in real time.
The Roadshow at a Glance
The 2026 Service Pro AI Roadshow made five stops between April and May:
- Fond du Lac, WI
- Charlotte, NC
- Tampa, FL
- Denver, CO
- Houston, TX
Each event brought together different varieties of service professionals including service managers, operations directors, dispatchers, and executives, for open, unfiltered conversation. Our goal? Invite healthy skepticism, welcome candor, and bring people together to learn about the future impact of AI built for field service.
Two Service Pro AI power users joined us live on the road to share their experiences firsthand. Chuck Del Cielo, a Service Manager at a large nationwide power systems organization, joined us in Charlotte, Tampa, and Denver. Shawn Tackett, Director of Houston Field Services at Relevant Solutions, joined us in Fond du Lac and Houston. Their live tellings of their Service Pro AI experiences anchored every room they walked into, and we’ll get into both of them in detail below.
The Themes That Kept Coming Up
Across five cities, five very different rooms, and even in conversations external to the Roadshow, the same problems keep surfacing. Different industries. Different company sizes. Different regions of the country. All are plagued by similar challenges and field inefficiencies.
Here’s what we’re hearing:
Techs are showing up without context. A universal truth: no one wants an unprepared technician working on their expensive equipment. Across every stop, the same scenario kept coming up: a technician rolls up to a job site with no idea what was tried last time, what parts have already been swapped, or what the service history looks like. They have no choice but to start from zero. The customer who spent 20 minutes on the phone before the appointment describing the problem now has to describe it all over again. That’s wasted time, a frustrated customer, and a five-star review that just dropped to four.
Here’s what that looks like in the field:
- Dispatchers sending techs out to equipment that’s already down and waiting on parts, with no flag in the system to catch it before the truck rolls.
- Techs showing up without knowing who was on site before or what’s already been tried
- No easy way to surface service history, last tech’s notes, or open issues before the job without digging through a system or calling the dispatcher.
The ask was consistent across every room: give techs a brief they can read before they even leave the shop. In more than one city, that idea got described as a “dream come true”.
The documentation and invoicing gap is costing everyone money. Every company in every room wanted the same thing: technicians completing the loop in the field, notes captured, summary ready, without someone in the back office having to chase it down afterward. One field service leader shared that his average time to invoice is 17 days. Others described cases stretching over a month. At that scale, shaving even a week off that average is a meaningful cash flow improvement.
But the documentation problem runs deeper than invoicing: technicians spend an average of 7 hours per week on manual data entry and wrap-ups, with poor documentation costing up to $2,000 per technician per month in revenue leakage from rejected invoices, missing parts charges, and warranty disputes. Service Report Automation is built to close that gap.
Inspection data is the real AI foundation. Getting technicians to consistently capture the right information at the right time remains one of the hardest problems in field service. With 60-plus question inspection forms and gloves on, techs find ways to skip them. The room in Tampa was especially direct about this: voice-activated inspection completion is what actually gets inspections done. Let techs talk through it, support with pictures, and have AI assist.
Every shop has a version of “ask Jimmy.” All the leaders describe the same person: the senior tech who everyone calls when they’re stuck. That person carries decades of institutional knowledge in their head. They know the equipment, they know the quirks, they know what to check first. And when they retire, that knowledge walks out the door with them.
Service Pro AI captures that knowledge automatically as your team works. Every appointment summary generated, every note captured in the field, every inspection completed feeds back into a living knowledge base built from your actual service history, your equipment, and your best people’s expertise. Not generic information from the internet. It’s your knowledge, now organized and accessible.
Data privacy was the first question in almost every room. Before anything else, people wanted to know: where does our data go? Who can see it? Is our proprietary knowledge going to end up training a model that our competitors can access? Service Pro AI is a closed system grounded in your data, not the open internet. What you upload stays yours, and the answers Service Pro AI gives you are directly attributable from your own documentation.
The work-order-to-warranty-invoice gap is shared pain. Regardless of industry, the time between a completed job and a clean invoice or warranty claim going out is too long. Service leaders point to a specific and frustrating problem: warranty claims require serial numbers, and techs keep leaving the job site without them. A return trip to get a photo costs $200 to $250 in wages, fuel, and lost billing hours. Prompting techs to capture that information before they leave the site is an immediate fix with immediate ROI.
Chuck Del Cielo: Proof Over Promise
Chuck is a Service Manager at a large nationwide power systems organization, one of Service Pro AI’s earliest adopters, and someone who didn’t take anyone’s word for anything. He tested it himself.
Chuck joined us live in Charlotte, Tampa, and Denver, and every room he walked into got the unfiltered version of his experience.
ChatGPT vs Service Pro AI: the test. Chuck was asked to serve as the marine generator technical support contact for dealers and installers calling in with equipment questions, so he started using Service Pro AI to field those calls, testing it against ChatGPT at the same time.
One call stood out. A technician on site was reporting an injector fault. Working through the issue with Service Pro AI, Chuck traced the real problem to a fuel pump on the same circuit. A low-voltage issue was triggering the fault code. He then ran the same scenario through ChatGPT. The result? Replace the injectors. That would have been the wrong fix, a wasted truck roll, and an unhappy customer.
This is the difference between generic AI tools and AI built for the field. Which would you trust?
“We’re getting information from the data we upload,” Chuck told the room. “If we control the content, then we don’t have to worry about bad information getting back.”
What he wants built next. Chuck’s vision for voice-driven inspection completion got strong reactions in both Tampa and Denver. His description of a technician walking through a generator inspection with noise-cancelling headphones, talking to the AI as they go, taking pictures when prompted, and ending up with a completed inspection report emailed to the customer before they ever leave resonated with every room, and the Service Pro AI mission. No gloves off. No phone screen typing. No skipped fields. Just built-for-the-field efficiency.
Read the full fireside chat recap here to see what else Chuck discovered.
Shawn Tackett: Protect the Knowledge, Scale the Team
Shawn Tackett is the Director of Houston Field Services at Relevant Solutions, a nationwide distribution and service company focused on the industrial compressed air market. Over the last five years, Relevant Solutions has grown over 800%, and looking for ways to support that level of growth into the future brought Shawn to Service Pro AI. Read his full customer spotlight here.
Shawn joined us in Fond du Lac and Houston and brought his firsthand experience to both rooms.
The data privacy question, answered from experience. Shawn didn’t need to theorize about it. His team had lived it. Before committing to Service Pro AI, Relevant Solutions had already been exploring AI at a corporate level, including tools like Microsoft Copilot. Two concerns kept surfacing: data security and practical value.
“We don’t want our information out there for public consumption,” Shawn told the room. “We wanted to ensure we’re not educating our competitors, but utilizing our own knowledge.”
That distinction, between a closed enterprise system grounded in your own data and a general-purpose tool pulling from the open internet, was a key deciding factor for his team to join the free trial of Service Pro AI and try it for themselves.
What they’re using it for today. Relevant Solutions is currently using Service Pro AI to generate professional appointment summaries. Not every technician is great with words, and Shawn put it plainly: voice-to-text can produce some colorful results when techs aren’t paying close attention. Service Pro AI takes what the technician captured during the job and turns it into a clean, professional summary automatically.
One of Shawn’s technicians, Tony Dulin, described his first experience with it this way: “As soon as I made the first summary with Service Pro AI and saw how it formatted and how professional it looked, I really liked it. I was very impressed with that.”
Building AI like you’re building a team member. One of the most valuable things Shawn shared across both stops was his framing for what good AI adoption actually looks like. “We’re essentially trying to train up an agent like building a new technician or developing a new employee as a subject matter expert.” That framing shaped how Relevant Solutions approached the rollout internally. The team understood they were building something, not just turning something on, and it was designed to aid them, not replace them. The feedback loop, from a customer’s mouth. When asked what made the difference in getting his technicians to buy in, his answer wasn’t the features. It was the team behind them. The MSI Data team shows up, listens, and ships what they hear. That’s what earned trust with his technicians. “The work we’re putting in now is going to benefit us later,” he told the room. For a company that’s grown 800% in five years, building something that scales with them isn’t just a strategy, it’s a necessity.
Why the Source of the Answer Is Everything
In every city, someone asked the same question: how is this different from [insert generic AI tool here]?
We love this question, and the answer means everything.
General-purpose AI tools like Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or other large language models (LLMs) built for general use pull from the open internet. When they don’t have reliable data, they don’t say “I don’t know.” They generate a confident-sounding answer anyway, or pull from false information. In field service, where a wrong answer can mean a wasted truck roll, an incorrect part order, or equipment that stays down, that’s a huge risk.
Chuck demonstrated this directly. In the same troubleshooting scenario, Service Pro AI traced the fault to the real root cause pulled from verified manuals of the equipment they serve. ChatGPT told him to replace the wrong part entirely.
Service Pro AI is a closed system. It only pulls from data you control: your equipment manuals, your service history, your SOPs, your knowledge articles. Not the open internet. Not a guess. Trusted information built from content you’ve verified and uploaded with the help of your Forward Deployed Engineer.
For Shawn’s team at Relevant Solutions, this wasn’t just a privacy preference. It was a competitive requirement. Their proprietary service knowledge is part of what makes them good at what they do. Keeping it inside a closed system means they’re building their own advantage, not sharing it with anyone else.
The difference isn’t just accuracy. It’s grounding. And in the field, grounding is everything.
Read more about generic AI vs. Service Pro AI and why AI built for the field always wins here.
What’s Coming Next: Job Prep Brief
One of the things we heard consistently across all five stops is that the problems people are dealing with aren’t new. What’s new is having tools that can actually solve them. And of everything we shared and discussed across the entire roadshow, one upcoming feature generated more excitement than anything else: the Job Prep Brief.
The Job Prep Brief. Before a tech rolls, they should know what’s waiting for them. Service history, last tech’s notes, open issues, previous inspection results, all surfaced automatically before they even leave the shop. No digging through a system. No call to the dispatcher. Just the context they need to walk in ready. This came up in every city and got the strongest reaction of any upcoming feature across the entire roadshow, and we are excited to launch this very soon.
Start Your Free Trial of Service Pro AI
If you’re ready to see what Service Pro AI can do for your operations, the best next step is to get hands-on with it yourself.
Our trial is different than most. We stay with you the whole time to make sure you get value out of Service Pro AI. Our Forward Deployed Engineers work directly alongside your team throughout the process to make sure your technicians are adopting the tool and seeing real value, not just logging in once and walking away. Setup takes minutes, not months. And features like Service Report Automation are ready to use on day one.
Start Your Free Trial of Service Pro AI
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Service Pro AI?
Service Pro AI is a closed, enterprise AI system built specifically for field service organizations. It’s grounded in your own data, including your equipment manuals, service history, SOPs, and knowledge articles, not the open internet. That means your technicians get accurate, trusted answers based on your operations, not a guess from somewhere online.
How is Service Pro AI different from ChatGPT?
General-purpose tools pull from the open internet and can confidently return wrong answers when they don’t have the right data. Service Pro AI is a closed, enterprise system grounded in what you’ve uploaded and configured, so the answers are accurate and specific to your equipment and workflows.
What does the trial involve?
The trial is a high-touch engagement, not a standard software rollout. MSI Data’s Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with your team to get Service Pro AI set up, drive technician adoption, and make sure you’re seeing real value. There’s no cap on support, and the team doesn’t step away until your technicians are genuinely using it and benefiting from it.
How quickly can we get started?
Fast. Features like appointment summary generation are ready to use on day one without a fully built knowledge base. You don’t need everything uploaded before you start seeing value. Our Forward Deployed Engineers guide your team through the process and help you build from there.
What happens to our data?
Your data stays yours. Service Pro AI is a closed system. What you upload isn’t shared publicly, isn’t used to train models for other companies, and isn’t accessible outside your organization. For companies where proprietary knowledge is a competitive advantage, this isn’t a detail. It’s the whole point.
Will AI make it too easy for techs to skip the thinking?
Service Pro AI isn’t designed to replace thinking. It’s designed to capture institutional knowledge and make it available to every tech on your team, especially the ones still building their expertise. The goal isn’t to remove the thinking. It’s to make sure the thinking doesn’t disappear when your best people do.
Is Service Pro AI only for existing Service Pro customers?
Service Pro AI is built to work seamlessly with the Service Pro platform, and existing customers have an immediate advantage because their work history and service data are already there. If you’re not yet a Service Pro customer, reach out and we can walk you through what getting started looks like for your organization.