How Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Your Fabrication Business

By Tim Saddoris, president of Grand Onyx

Many surface fabricators think it’s too complex or they don’t have the technical chops to harness artificial intelligence, but that’s not true. In a lot of ways, AI is easier than using Google — and even replacing Google in many cases. So, let’s dig into AI and why it’s essential to understand what it can do in our industry.

The Four Levels of AI for Business

So, let’s look at the four levels of AI and how you can put it to work for your business.

Level 1: Ask a question. ChatGPT works by responding to user-generated prompts. Prompts are questions that you ask to get answers. Here are some examples of how this plays out.

Writing Friendly Past Due Notices: Let’s say you have a customer that is 90 days past due. Ask ChatGPT to write a five-sentence email with empathy, mentioning that you are a surface fabricator business and that they are one of your top customers. It drafts the email in seconds.

Creating Photos for Your Website or Sales Brochure: AI can generate photos. I had a customer who wanted to do in-home consultations for retail sales but didn’t have any photos for their website. So, we had AI generate them for us.

Level 2: Provide Data. AI can also help you sort data and find the key insights you need to make better decisions.

Product Comparison: Maybe you are trying to decide between two different machines. You’re not an automation expert, and they look very similar. So, ask AI.

In seconds, you get the information to compare more easily. The paid version of ChatGPT can go out to websites, pull information, and put together a chart.

While this may not be enough information to decide on a significant investment like this, it can give you a quick overview. If you had a PDF of detailed specs, you could upload it and ask AI to go into greater detail. It’s an independent business consultant that can provide basic advice.

You might also ask about the key things you should consider in making such a purchase and get a list of things you should think about. While the list might not be all-inclusive, it can help make sure you’re not missing something important.

Contract Review: Contracts are often laden with lots of legalese. Want a quick overview? Upload the contract and type in your prompt. ChatGPT will quickly scan all pages and provide you with a list to review, in order of importance.

While it’s not going to replace your careful consideration or your legal adviser, we’re only in version 4 of ChatGPT. Future iterations will only get better. For now, think of it as a tool to help you focus on the big things.

Other ways you can use AI to help guide your business decisions include balance sheet analysis, customer sales trends, dent analysis, and material and inventory trends. Like the contract example, you can upload the data and ask questions to pull out insights or trends you might spend a lot of time parsing yourself or overlook entirely.

Level 3: Create an Avatar. Using AI, you can create an avatar that acts a certain way. For example, almost nobody in the fabrication business has a human resources manager. However, you still have to deal with human resources obligations.

Job Descriptions: Let’s say you need to write a job description. You can train ChatGPT with a sentence like, “You are an HR manager for a surface fabricator.” Provide your website address, and it will learn about your business. Then, you can guide the AI engine in creating your job description.

You can refine the output to get as detailed as you want. Perhaps you want it to be more specific to your company and how you do business. You’re competing with every other business looking to hire skilled labor, so you need to do a little more selling of what you have to offer to grab someone’s attention.

Ask ChatGPT what information it needs to improve the quality of its output. In response, you’ll get questions you can answer to help hone the job description. Answering these questions will create a more customized output that fits your business and gets people excited about joining up.

Sales Training Sessions: Maybe you want to hold sales training for your team. By defining your avatar as vice president of sales, you can ask ChatGPT for a training itinerary. One of our clients did so and created a structured sales training strategy for a Saturday session. With prompting, It then helped break down the sessions, such as classifying customers when they walk in your door, upselling, closing techniques and more.

Level 4: Process Automation. This is where you bring everything together. For example, I use an AI notetaker in all my meetings. It records the meeting.

At the top of the screen on the left, it even suggested next steps, ideas and open questions that need answering. About 10 minutes after the meeting concluded, it was delivered to my mailbox, letting me search and find key points quickly. Another example is shop floor efficiency. In this image, cameras are monitoring baristas in a coffee shop. On the right side (blue), it’s tracking how many cups each barista produces. On the left (green), it tracks how long each customer has been in the shop.

Think about how this could apply to your fabrication business. Maybe it analyzes fabricator and forklift routes on the shop floor or tracks the amount of manual labor a job takes to ensure you get the margins you need.

Putting AI Into Practice

How often have you overheard a conversation like this? A customer calls with a question like, “What time do you close?” The salesperson answering the phone says, “We close at 5,” and ends the call. That is not what you want to happen. They missed an opportunity to engage with a customer, get an idea of their project and set an appointment.

We can record and take the transcriptions of all the phone calls and ask AI to analyze all calls. By uploading the data (Level 2), AI can provide the data on what’s being discussed and whether your reps are following up with questions and setting appointments.

We then apply Level 3, which is creating an avatar. In this case, we might find a well-known sales expert you trust and ask ChatGPT to analyze the data in their style. You can get a scorecard along with recommendations. Bringing it all together in Level 4, you can create a way to improve performance. For every incoming call, you can score calls based on the key questions your AI avatar expert says you need to ask.

Now, let’s score a new call based on these questions. Here’s a typical conversation between a potential customer and Greg, your sales rep:

Agent: Good morning. This is Greg. How can I help you?

Caller: Yes, I was wondering what your price ranges are for granite countertops.

Agent: I would say they probably start at about $100 per square foot, templated and installed, and certainly go up from there.

Caller: Got it. And do you offer financing?

Agent: We do not.

Caller: OK, thank you. Bye.

In this quick conversation — based on the things you want your salesperson to do here — you can score performance on each question and see that they clearly failed.

By doing this on each call, you can help Greg develop the right habits, providing concrete feedback about whether they are following your sales process and drawing customers into the sales funnel.

AI isn’t going to replace Greg. You need that authenticity and human connection, but AI can work as a teaching agent to help improve your sales process.

Other AI Opportunities on the Horizon

But wait! There’s more! In this constantly evolving landscape, new developments are unfolding. Here are some AI opportunities that we think can have a big impact on this business:

• Improving your closing rates: analyzing thousands of calls to find top performers and uncover what they do to generate sales.

• Saw scheduling: pulling data out of your system and helping automate scheduling.

• Inventory predictions: better demand forecasting and inventory reorder points.

• Shortening installs: how you manage client scheduling and reminders.

• Shop floor and efficiencies: optimizing your workflow and improving your margins.

The bottom line: You cannot afford to be left behind when it comes to AI. Many of you in the fabrication business were around before computers or smartphones with cameras, and now those are cornerstones to everyone’s success. AI is the next tool that can help you in ways you never imagined.

Tim Saddoris is the president of Grand Onyx. a firm dedicated to helping stone fabricators increase their revenue by 30% to 300% using proven techniques and a World Class Blueprint System to help you build a more profitable, scalable business. They help companies refine their sales process, uncover insights about better ways to sell, and coach sales teams for greater success. Learn how Grand Onyx can help your business grow at www.grandonyx.pro.