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Home services operators are walking into 2026 more confident than they've been in years — and more uneasy. They expect to grow. They expect better margins. And when we asked what was most on their minds, the answer that rose above everything else was artificial intelligence.
So we went looking for who, exactly, is winning with it. The answer surprised us. In our State of Home Services 2026 survey, the largest companies use AI the least broadly — and they're posting the strongest margins in the field. The operators racing to deploy AI across the front office are the smaller shops, and they're pointing it most eagerly at the inbound phone line — the one place customers punish it hardest.
The operators pulling ahead in 2026 aren't the ones adopting AI fastest. They're the ones adopting it most deliberately.
This post covers the greatest hits. Download the full report here or read on.
We surveyed 32 home services operators in May 2026 — owners, executives, directors, and managers at companies ranging from owner-operated shops to private-equity-backed platforms doing more than $100M in revenue, across eight trades including roofing, HVAC, plumbing, and pest control.
Two honest caveats before the findings. First, 32 respondents is a small sample: a finding that splits 50/50 carries a margin of error of roughly ±17 points, so where a slice of the data gets too small to defend, we describe the direction ("most," "more than half") rather than cite a precise percentage. Second, this group skews larger, more digitally engaged, and more PE-aware than the industry as a whole. Read it as the view from the front of the adoption curve, not the median home services business. Where a figure comes from outside research, it's cited.
At first glance, adoption looks settled: 91% of operators told us they use AI. The picture changes when you ask how. For more than half of AI users (55%), "using AI" means a general-purpose chatbot — ChatGPT or Gemini open in a browser tab. The typical operator applies AI to just two tasks, and the single most common answer was one. Only 17% of AI users apply it to quoting, and only 31% to scheduling.
In other words: nearly everyone has bought a smarter assistant, but almost no one has rebuilt their operation around it.
Everyone assumes the biggest, best-capitalized operators — the platforms with innovation budgets and dedicated technology teams — are furthest ahead on AI. It's a reasonable guess. It's also wrong.
When you split AI use by company size, the pattern runs opposite to expectations. Owner-operators average about 3.6 AI use cases and $10–25M shops about 3.8. The largest operators average roughly 2.1, and PE-backed operators just 1.8. The companies with the most resources to deploy AI are deploying it in the fewest places.
Now compare that with the margin data. Margins are mostly improving across the field — 59% of operators say theirs got better last year — but the gains aren't evenly spread. The largest operators, the ones using AI the least broadly, improved margins more than any other group: 71% of $100M+ operators reported better margins. The pain concentrates one tier down, in the $25–100M middle, where half of operators saw margins decline.
Two caveats, because the report is honest about them. These are small sub-groups — 14 operators in the $100M+ band, eight in the middle — so the contrast is directional rather than statistically firm. And narrow AI use at large companies might reflect discipline, or it might just be organizational drag: more departments, more approval layers, slower rollouts. The data shows that restraint is tracking with better margins, not that it causes them. Even so, the pairing is the most important — and least intuitive — thing this survey found.
Where are the eager adopters pointing all that AI? At the inbound phone. The instinct makes sense, because the phone is where revenue visibly leaks: the average home services company books just 42% of its inbound call leads, and providers miss or mishandle an estimated 15–25% of calls (ServiceTitan, 2026). In our survey, 78% of operators said they're not "very confident" they capture and convert inbound calls. So 41% of AI users have aimed AI at call answering, hoping to plug the hole.
Here's the problem with that bet. The inbound call is the single highest-stakes moment a home services customer has — a flooded basement, no heat, a roof opened to the weather — and it's exactly the moment customers are least willing to deal with an AI. A Hire Bloom analysis of more than 10,000 home services reviews found that among reviews mentioning AI, sentiment ran 69% negative, with the worst reactions clustered on automated phone systems standing between a panicked customer and a human during an emergency. The national mood backs it up: Morning Consult's 2026 AI Trust Report found 63% of US adults trust AI only a little or not at all — with distrust highest among the older and rural homeowners most likely to call a contractor.
The easiest AI to deploy — a bot answering the phone — is the AI customers punish hardest. That mismatch is the central finding of the report.
Best Choice Roofing is a useful example of the deliberate model precisely because it's large — a top-five US residential roofer operating in two dozen states. Rather than racing to automate its estimating team, the company tested AI on the workflow first, found that a custom agent alone couldn't close the gap, and added human capacity alongside the AI instead of betting on automation to replace people. The result: 80% of contingency contracts now go out with an estimate attached, up from under 25% — roughly triple the throughput. CEO Bryce Barnett frames every AI decision as a question: can AI replace this job, or can it make a person more efficient? His answer, repeatedly, is "and," not "or."
The same lesson shows up in where confident operators are putting their money. Asked about back-office investment plans for 2026, operators named two priorities tied at the top: training and SOPs (53%) and AI tools (53%). The winners aren't choosing between people and AI. They're funding both.
All of this plays out against a contradictory mood. Operators are optimistic about their own businesses: 78% expect higher revenue in 2026, a quarter expect growth above 20%, and 59% say margins are improving — in line with Jobber's 2026 Home Service Trends Report, which found 75% expecting growth. But ask what's actually on their minds and the answer isn't revenue or hiring. It's AI, named by 44% of respondents, with industry consolidation close behind at 41%.
The consolidation anxiety isn't abstract. More than half of operators (53%) were approached by a private equity firm or consolidator in the past 12 months, and 28% were approached three or more times. The capital behind those calls is substantial: 27 active HVAC-led roll-up platforms are competing for deals, and Blackstone acquired Champions Group in February 2026 for roughly $2.5 billion. One telling detail: among operators approached three or more times, AI has overtaken consolidation as their top concern. Once the acquisition pitch becomes routine, the question stops being whether you'll be bought and becomes what your operation needs to look like either way — and increasingly, that's a question about AI.
Underneath the AI question is the reason it's urgent: there aren't enough people. 88% of operators are at least somewhat concerned about technician turnover. Industry estimates put the HVAC technician deficit around 110,000 and the plumbing trade on track for a shortage of roughly 550,000.
The same tight labor market shows up as two different problems depending on company size. Under $25M, half of operators name hiring technicians as their top people challenge — they're still fighting to fill the truck. At $25M and above, hiring is largely solved, and 45% name developing managers as their biggest challenge instead. That's where the labor story and the AI story meet: AI doesn't run itself. Someone has to implement it, document it, and supervise it — exactly the management depth the largest operators say they're missing. The deliberate operators understand that the AI problem and the people problem are, in the end, the same problem.
Four takeaways from the data:
"As we continue exploring AI and automation initiatives, Hire Bloom provides the flexibility to scale human support where it adds the most value, allowing us to thoughtfully balance technology and the human experience." — Alta Pest Control
None of this is a forecast. It's a field reading from today's operators — confident where the data is strong, careful where the sample is thin, and honest about both. The numbers will move. The direction — toward operators who treat AI as an operating decision, not a quick purchase — looks durable.
Get the full report. The complete PDF includes every figure, the consolidation and labor deep-dives, the Best Choice Roofing case study, and the full sources and methodology.
Download the State of Home Services 2026 report →
Sources: Hire Bloom 2026 Home Services Survey (N=32, May 2026); CFOx, Home Services 2026 M&A Outlook; Jobber, 2026 Home Service Trends Report; Morning Consult, The AI Trust Report (May 2026); ServiceTitan inbound call and booking-rate metrics; CT Acquisitions, Private Equity in HVAC 2026; Hire Bloom, What 10,000 Customer Reviews Say About AI in Home Services (2026).
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