Hello ClarenceGuide
AI for tradies: where to actually start (not the hype)
Most AI advice for tradies is written by people who have never quoted a job from the back of a ute. Here is the version that assumes you have 15 minutes, not a quarter.
Start with the job you do after knock-off
The AI wins in a trade business are almost never on the tools. They are in the admin you do at 7pm when you would rather be eating dinner: writing up quotes, chasing invoices, replying to the enquiry that came in while you were under a house.
Pick one of those. Not three. The tradies who get value out of this stuff are the ones who fix one annoying job, prove it works, then move to the next.
The two jobs worth doing first
Both of these use a prompt you write once and reuse. You are not building software. You are writing yourself a note that happens to be addressed to ChatGPT or Claude.
- Quoting from a customer text. Paste the message, get back a structured quote you edit and send. Saves the 20 minutes of staring at a blank screen.
- Enquiry triage. At the end of the day, sort the messages into book-it, quote-it, defer-it and walk-away, with a draft reply for each.
What AI is genuinely bad at here
Anything that needs your eye for a job. It cannot tell you whether the switchboard is dodgy or whether the client is going to be a nightmare. It does not know your rates, your travel radius, or the suburb where you always lose money.
So you never send a quote straight through. The prompt drafts, you decide. If a tool tells you it can price a job without you, it is selling you a subscription you do not need.
What it costs to try
The free version of ChatGPT or Claude will do everything in this guide. You do not need to pay for anything to test whether this works for your business.
If you want the prompt written for you, our tradie playbooks are free in the library. Grab the quoting one, run it on your next enquiry, and see if it saves you a lap of the block.