Top 100 Event Coverage: AI as a Transformative Tool in Pest Control

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – An important reason companies on the PCT Top 100 list are succeeding is a willingness to embrace technology. This holds true when it comes to ChatGPT and other AI (artificial intelligence) tools, which many company leaders have embraced and others are open-minded about using.

At PCT’s Top 100 Awards Ceremony & Executive Summit, held this week in Nashville and sponsored by Syngenta, keynote speaker Matthew Bertram, senior consultant, Future Point of View, said pest control owners are not unlike other business professionals he consults for when it comes to AI.

Bertram said, “It might be that they are thinking, ‘I've been running a successful business for 20 years, I've got a good thing going. I’m not opposed to ChatGPT and different AI tools, but I just don’t know how to integrate them into my business.”

HOW IT WORKS? Bertram provided a “business-oriented” explanation of how generative AI works. He said ChatGPT uses an enormous amount of data, ranging from billions or even trillions of pieces of information. “This is a bit of a hyperbole, put it’s as if the entire Internet was sucked into ChatGPT.”

Humans play a crucial role, Bertram said, by providing prompts that define the style, intention, outcomes, constraints, and specific requirements for what they want the AI to generate. The quality of this input significantly impacts the quality of the AI's output. Bertram said, “What is it you are trying to create, an email, a document, a strategy, a blog post, a picture? What is it that you're trying to do? What outcomes do you want? What kind of constraints do you have? What do you not want? What is it that is not going to work for you?”

So, by combining mega-data and human prompts, Bertram said AI doesn’t just retrieve existing information (like a Google search), but rather invents and produces content that hasn't existed before.

WHERE IT CAN HELP. In setting the stage for why AI tools are useful, Bertram asked audience members to raise their hands if they are doing less now than they were one year ago. As expected 99 percent of the audience kept their hands down. “We’re all doing more, we're trying to keep everything held together. Why then are we so concerned about offloading tasks to AI?”

Bertram shared several areas in which generative AI, particularly ChatGPT, can be useful to pest control businesses.

Developing Business Strategies. Most pest control companies have strategized using exercises like Porter's Five Forces and SWOT analysis. A challenge many companies have is going from notes/ideas to written plans – this is a task made for ChatGPT, Bertram said.

Solving the ‘Blank Canvas’ Problem. For non-writers, sitting in front of a screen or blank email causes anxiety (e.g., How do I most effectively write up a proposal or an email?) ChatGPT can aid in content creation, making it easier to start writing and reducing stress associated with creative tasks.

Customized Knowledge. Bertram said AI enables the creation of highly personalized insights and information tailored to specific business needs that traditional methods may not provide.

REPLACE TASKS, NOT JOBS. Bertram said a common misconception is that AI will replace jobs. Not true, Bertram said, noting that what AI will do is replace tasks within jobs. “AI may handle anywhere from 10 percent to 60 percent of tasks, but it is exceedingly rare for AI to completely replace a human worker (100 percent of tasks).”

"Task replacement" poses both opportunities and challenges. “That person in customer service, might get 20 percent of their time back, so now the question is how do I refocus them? How do I retrain them? How do I upskill them so that they can do something else?” Bertram said.

On the service side, Bertram said he sees potential in the pest control industry when it comes to 24-hour hotlines and “Dot AIs.” Bertram used the example of a service professional he called John and his AI counterpart John.AI. Because there is so much available information on the Internet, AI could create John.AI that uses the same language and mannerisms as its human counterpart. 

“The advantage is that at 1 a.m. in the morning, rather than me having to talk to [human] John, I'm going to have a nice conversation with John.AI,” said Bertram, who added that the scope of that conversation is limited to things that can be done on his behalf (e.g., the scope of autonomy). For example, Bertram said a customer can ask John.AI if he can stop out tomorrow morning to take care of a pest control problem and John.AI can respond, “I have an appointment already at eight. I can be there at 8:45. Is that good for you?”

In this example, that appointment goes into human John’s calendar. “And that's the way that it's going to work – it does things on your behalf. John.AI doesn't get sick, doesn't get hungry, doesn't go on vacation. But human John does.”

‘BAKE IT’ INTO YOUR CULTURE. Bertram challenged Top 100 attendees to lead by example and “bake” the use of Chat GPT into their company culture. He shared the story of a client, a  vice president of sales, who used ChatGPT to help brainstorm ideas and develop strategy more efficiently.

“Within an hour, they wrote out a complete marketing strategy that had sample emails, that had a Facebook post, that had follow up, had drip campaigns. They did a couple of days worth of work in an hour, and the director came out saying, ‘Wow, this thing is really cool. Here's that ‘evangelism effect.’”

Bertram left Top 100 attendees with a final thought when it comes to AI: they are going to pay for it in one of two ways. “You're either going to proactively make the investment, and you're going to reap the benefits of spending the time and effort to integrate it into your company, or you're going to pay for with lost opportunity costs, with inefficiency, with lost revenue. My hope and my vision for you is that it is the former – that you would make the proactive investment.”

In addition to Bertram's presentation, the PCT Top 100 Awards Ceremony & Executive Summit included presentations on team-building and panel discussions on leadership; door-to-door sales; and the "good, the bad and the ugly" of running a pest control business. The event was capped off by celebrating Top 100 companies’ accomplishments with a reception, dinner and plaque presentation. PCT will be providing additional coverage of this event in the days and weeks ahead.