Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage ServiceTitan Co-Founder and CEO, Ara Mahdessian.
If you will remember, we went through one major technology transition a decade ago together. Cloud changed how modern businesses operated. Most other industries jumped on the innovation, but the trades were initially a bit behind the curve. Many of you partnered with us to build ServiceTitan. You grew, we grew. As with all major tech transformations, those that adapted won, and those that did not fell behind. Now, the AI race is upon us, but this time, two things are different.
First, you are a different leader. AI is still early, but you are already leading from the front. You are using voice agents, AI dispatch, AI coaching, ServiceTitan solutions, third-party solutions. Last time, we had to convince the industry to catch up. This time, the trades are in a much better position to win. The second thing that is different is the scale is much bigger. The big tech companies invested $1 trillion over 10 years to build out cloud infrastructure. They are investing $1 trillion this year alone for the AI build-out. It is projected to be more than $10 trillion over the coming decade. That is 10 times bigger than cloud.
Why? What do they see, and how do we prepare for it? The AI maturity model gives us a sneak peek into the future. Before AI, in the old world, humans did everything in a business. They analyzed the data, they came up with the insights, they decided what to do, they did the work. Now, the new world. Level one was ask AI. It is Siri on your iPhone, it is Atlas in ServiceTitan. Humans ask, AI answers. How much did we sell last month? Why did conversion rates drop? Level two allowed us to automate individual workflows. A voice agent that answers calls and books appointments, a dispatch agent that sends the right text to the right jobs. Powerful stuff.
Indeed, many of you are already here at level two, whether you are using our pro products or AI third-party solutions, or a combination of the two. Is this what $10 trillion of AI build-out is all about? Is the end state a better chatbot? Is the Holy Grail a voice agent for every business? No. Do not get me wrong, these solutions are certainly very valuable, just not $10 trillion valuable on their own. They are the beginning of the transition. They are not the destination. The magnitude of this investment only makes sense if AI can completely revolutionize how we operate a business. A business that runs itself, and a business that gets better every day. That is what this is all about. Of course, to get there are a couple more levels we have to cross.
Level three, where we have far more automated workflows in the business. Level four, where those automations become coordinated. Finally, level five, where the system learns and improves itself after every decision. Do not let the sequential numbers fool you. The levels might go one, two, three, four , five but the value jumps exponentially at each step. A business that runs itself and gets better each day is far more valuable than one with just a few automated workflows. So what does this mean for a contracting business? What does it actually look like to be a level five contracting business? The mechanics, of course, will be different for residential versus commercial, for service versus construction. Here, I am going to use residential service as the example.
For my commercial and construction friends, you will see your journey in the commercial keynote and in Vahe's' keynote later today. For exteriors and property care, yours are in your trade-specific breakouts. I encourage you to watch for the patterns. The workflows might be different, but the problems and lessons underneath them are not. That's what the next 20 minutes are all about. At a high level, this is what a residential service business looks like. You generate demand, book the appointment, sell the work, do the work, manage inventory and payroll, and then you analyze and optimize to repeat the loop again.
This isn't just your workflow, it's also your business model. How many leads you generate, what percentage of them you turn into booked appointments, your average ticket, these three things determine your revenue. Marketing spend, office labor, field labor, and so on, they determine your cost. How well you optimize this loop determines your profit. This might seem very simple on paper, but under the hood, there is a lot going on. Just think about all the things you need to do in order to generate lots of leads. You have to be great at the highly competitive world of paid ads. You have to be great at email marketing to your existing customers. You have to immediately respond to leads that come in through the lead marketplaces. You have to be great at having an active social presence.
You have to build and maintain a stellar reputation of reviews, and soon you're going to have to figure out how to compete in the new world of ChatGPT ads. To have high booking rates, think about all the things you need to do there. Your CSRs have to handle each call perfectly. You have to figure out a solution for off-hours and overflow. You have to convert customers who prefer to text or those who prefer to book on your website or through Google. You have to prioritize capacity for high-value opportunities, and you have to nurture these appointments so customers don't cancel. Then in the field to have great average tickets, you have to constantly reshuffle your dispatch board to get the right tech to the right job.
Your techs have to be great at presenting those good, better, best options. They have to offer financing on everything. You have to follow up on every unsold estimate, and you have to coach technicians to improve performance every day. That's 18 things you have to be great at every day. For two decades, we have been talking about generating leads, optimizing booking rates, and increasing average tickets. We're still talking about generating leads, optimizing booking rates, and increasing average tickets. Your teams know these things matter. We have simply been fighting two unbeatable forces, time and speed.
How can a marketer optimize your ad spend when capacity changes hourly? How can a CSR respond to texts while on the phone with a customer? How can you review every recording to coach CSRs and to coach technicians every day? There simply isn't enough time. In an increasingly digital world, human speed is simply not fast enough. The only way to be great at everything is to automate it. This has always been our vision. Owners and leaders focused on outcomes, technicians focused on serving customers, ServiceTitan increasingly automating the complexity in between.
AI is making possible what would have otherwise taken us another two decades to build. Last Pantheon, we partnered with 50 pioneering customers to build the self-running, self-optimizing business in the trades. I want to share with you this journey, I want to share the lessons we learned going through it. First, achieving level three required that we automate more workflows in the business. So we built an agent for each of the workflows I just talked about. We started where missed opportunities were most evident. That was appointment booking, particularly calls arriving off hours, calls arriving when CSRs were already tied up.
We built a voice agent to handle those calls, one you could set up in minutes instead of weeks. It was okay at first, then it got really good over the ensuing months. We wanted it to book as well as a good CSR. We couldn't rely on the booking rates inside ServiceTitan because as you all know, those are very easy to game. So we built a voice intelligence agent that'll review every call to determine if it was a bookable lead. Today, our voice agent books as well as a good CSR. Good enough that when a CSR leaves, many customers choose to let the voice agent handle the overflow instead of scrambling to find the replacement.
Some even let the voice agent handle 100% of their phone calls, with CSR standing by to handle escalations that need a human touch. Customers asked us if we could extend this technology to help CSRs improve their own booking rates, so we expanded voice intelligence to grade how well CSRs followed your call process and coach them to increase those booking rates. Next, customers saw an uptick in text messages. They asked us to automate this channel because response times were often long, customers would end up calling competitors. So we built a text agent that immediately responds and more naturally and professionally than any human has time to type out.
Online volume increased, too, so we upgraded Scheduling Pro to improve its conversion rates, we built a web chat agent for customers who wanted to book through chat. Interestingly, we initially thought these web chats would cannibalize Scheduling Pro bookings. It turns out they captured net new appointments that contractors were previously missing. Now, with booking covered, we turned our attention to demand. For paid ads, Marketing Pro's Ads Optimizer already helped Google improve targeting to increase ROAS. We made it even better. We built support for multi-touch attribution. We built support for Meta Ads, then we built an agent that experiments with new ads as well.
For email, we had Marketing Pro's email, but customers were underutilizing it because it required manual work. So we built an agent to automate many of the campaigns you'd typically run, cross-selling services, seasonal campaigns, weather events, so on and so forth. We then built a speed-to-lead agent to immediately respond to those leads you get from Yelp, from Angi, from Thumbtack, from Facebook. Then we created a social publishing agent that automatically posts content to the major networks for you. With demand solved, our next focus was average ticket.
With more jobs on the board, it became even more important to assign the right tech to the right job because you ultimately have a finite number of technicians. We first upgraded Dispatch Pro to consider every data point about the job, the ad that generated the lead, what was said on the call, everything we know about the homeowner, the home, the equipment. Dispatch Pro started making more intelligent decisions. Next, we built an agent that automates those good better options, good better best options for the technicians and the comfort advisors with integrated financing in each proposal.
We create an agent to automate estimate follow-ups, and then we rebuilt our sales coaching agent to be native inside of ServiceTitan. No more switching apps, no more forgotten recordings, and greater engagement from technicians. We reached level three, 30 agents covering the most important workflows in a residential service business. Not just okay agents. In my opinion, best-of-breed agents, each focused on its specific job. Now, what happens when they all do their jobs at the same time?
I will share a few real-world examples. Example one, the schedule is already fully booked, but the ads agent, it keeps on spending. The email agent, it keeps on sending. Both want to maximize their individual metric, and the business ends up paying, whether in marketing dollars or customer attention, for leads you can't serve. Example two, a customer tells the voice agent her car is stuck in the garage and she needs to drop off the kids tomorrow before heading to work. The voice agent knows this is a high-value opportunity, so it books it for this afternoon, b ut the dispatch agent doesn't have that context, so it assigns a low-level tech and revenue is left on the table.
Example three, the speed-to-lead agent knows that the lead it's working on is more valuable than three other jobs on the board, but it has no way to ask dispatch to move one of them to make room, so it offers the customer a slot for tomorrow, and of course, the customer calls a competitor instead. Example four, the board is light. Ads wants the spend to fill it. Memberships wants to fill it with tune-ups. Dispatch wants to pull forward tomorrow's appointments. Who should act? This is what happens when agents are independent. They optimize for their own goals. Paid leads, email leads, demand appointments, tune-ups, estimates, financing, so on and so forth.
Each agent was right about its own job, and yet the company still made the wrong decision, not because the agents are broken, but because they are independent. In a world of finite resources, technician capacity, marketing dollars, customer attention, every decision has an opportunity cost, but no single agent can see it or weigh the trade-offs. With independent agents, there were two consequences. First, the effectiveness tax. Decisions that leave money on the table or waste company resources a nd second, the overhead tax. The team had to work even harder to catch and resolve all these conflicts.
Thirty independent agents don't make an organization. We had digitized the employees. We still needed to digitize how they work together. To do that, we needed a coordination system for them to work together, so we built one. Now, each agent focused on the same goal, durable profit that recurs because customers are happy. You cannot just tell 30 agents that their goal is durable profit and somehow magically have them optimize for it. They need five things that we built into the coordination system in order for them to do so. First, shared context. What the voice agent hears, the dispatch agent will know. That car stuck in the garage gets the senior tech, and he knows why he is there.
Second, shared judgment. Each agent works from the same formulas. We built best-in-class lead scoring that predicts how much any appointment might be worth based on all the signals, what was said on the call, the customer's tone, all the details about the home, the homeowner, the equipment, and so on. We built something similar for demand forecasting. Based on all the signals about weather, recent demand, historical demand, and so on, it predicts what your board will look like later this afternoon, tomorrow, and the rest of the week, and how many more appointments you need to drive to fill your capacity.
Now, when the schedule is full, the demand agents stand down, and they wait for Thursday, when the board is predicted to be light. Third, coordinated action. One agent can ask another to act. A plan no longer stops at the agent boundaries. If speed-to-lead needs a slot for that high-value appointment, dispatch moves the tune-up to tomorrow, of course, with the customer's consent. Fourth, arbitration. When several agents can act, the system decides which one should based on the highest expected value for the lowest expected cost.
When that board is light, it is the coordination system that decides how many appointments dispatch should pull forward, how many memberships should book, and whether ads should increase spend. And last, centralized supervision: 30 agents, 30 configurations, 30 dashboards. The office has only so many hours in the day to supervise these agents and handle all the exceptions. Techs have only so much patience for one more app. When the software does not operate as one system, it is the people that become the coordination system. So we built one way for your team to supervise all the agents, to configure them, to monitor their performance a nd now the coordination system allows the 30 agents to behave like one team.
You eliminate the effectiveness tax, you eliminate the overhead tax. Better outcomes, less work. Does any of this ring a bell? Remember how you originally refused to buy ServiceTitan when all we did was dispatch? You also wanted us to do marketing and sales and inventory and payroll and so on and so forth before you would even buy the product. You did not want your people paying that overhead tax and stitching data and workflows together. You did not want your business incurring that effectiveness tax.
In a world of agents, it is no longer just data and workflows. It is also judgment and actions, very consequential ones, thousands of times per day. These problems do not disappear. They multiply. The coordination system got us to level four, leaving one final chapter, one final challenge. How does the system get better from every experience? Everything at level four runs on judgments. Every judgment is facts plus assumptions. Lead scoring might assume a trapped car adds $750 to the job's value.
Demand forecasting might assume a fourth consecutive day of 90-degree weather means six more calls by 3:00 P.M. Those assumptions are not precise on day one. They might also change on day 20, and again on 50, and again on 312, because the environment changes all the time. A veteran dispatcher's gut is a decade of outcomes correcting her assumptions and improving her judgment. We needed that for every agent, from every job, every day. We closed the loop. Every outcome is tied back to the decisions that produced it. Which ad generated the lead, what the customer said, which tech ran the appointment, what we predicted the job would produce, what the job actually produced.
Outcomes improve assumptions improve judgments improve the next decision. Level five, a system that gets better over time. Not just a business that runs, a business that compounds. A year since last Pantheon, this dream is becoming a reality. Hundreds of engineers sprinting for months to make this vision possible. This is Max, the self-running, self-improving version of your business. One company brain, many specialized agents. It automates 18 key drivers in your business, intelligently maximizing durable profit. It automates Google and Meta Ads, email campaigns, social presence, speed-to-lead, reputation and reviews.
It automates booking on the phone, text, web, Google, and more, and it automatically assigns the right tech to the right job, creates those good, better, best options, integrates financing, follows up on every unsold estimate, and coaches technicians. More revenue without having to proportionally scale cost as the business scales. Of course, you can enjoy more profit. The new command center gives you a live view into all of them. You can customize each agent with a few clicks. You can dive into their performance metrics and review what actions they're taking. You can see the insights they are surfacing for your awareness or asking you to take action.
Most of the time, these agents are doing their job, coordinating, learning, improving. So when demand forecasting sees that you are going to be light on HVAC demand appointments in the shoulder season, well, shoulder season happens to be allergy season. Demand orchestration asks ads to drive leads, and ads experiments with new ads for indoor air quality. The customer texts in, the text agent responds, lead scoring evaluates all the signals, the ad, the conversation, the customer's home, and it predicts this is going to be a $2,500 opportunity b ut there's no capacity.
So dispatch identifies the lowest value opportunity on the board. It communicates with the customer to move it to tomorrow, of course, with consent, of course, with the $25 credit, and so that high-value opportunity is booked for today. The right technician is selected for this situation. The technician is prepared. He diagnoses. The estimate agent builds the right, good, better, best options for him, financing integrated. The job turns into a $24,000 replacement, of course, with those UV lights, the air cleaner, all that jazz. As more jobs close the same way, lead scoring improves its predictions. The system prioritizes capacity for this type of job, and it allocates more marketing budget to this ad.
More of these jobs come in. As we worked with Max customers over the past year, we noticed two things. Small improvements across each metric compound into large revenue gains, and the additional revenue is often very high margin, and therefore that disproportionately increases profit. I want to walk you through an example. As an illustration, if you generate 10,000 leads, you convert 60% into booked appointments, you have an $800 average ticket, you multiply those three numbers, you generate $4.8 million of revenue. At an assumed 10% profit margin, that would mean $480,000 of profit.
Now, let's assume you improve each of those metrics by just 10%. You generate 11,000 leads, you are now booking at 66%, and your average ticket is now $880. Your revenue jumps to $6.4 million. But the best part is costs don't have to increase proportionally. More leads from the same marketing budget, more appointments from leads coming in, more revenue from the same truck rolls. A good chunk of that additional revenue can drop straight to the bottom line. So assume those profit margins increase to 15%. That would now mean $960,000 worth of profit.
Revenue only increased 33%, but profit doubled. That is how disproportionate this effect is on profit versus revenue. If we can shrink the connection between revenue growth and cost growth, for the next two decades, we don't have to talk about profit margins anymore. We can celebrate them instead. Recall what we discussed at last Pantheon. Whenever a technological disruption happens, the companies that leverage the innovation thrive, and those that don't suffer a different fate. As we speak, every industry is chasing level five, but for once, this industry has the advantage.
Just look at everything we have to solve for agents to coordinate and learn together. When most of your business already runs through one platform, ServiceTitan. Imagine the uphill battle other industries are going to face when they have CRM here, and marketing there, and inventory here, and payroll there, and scheduling here. It is going to be much harder for them. For the first time, the trades don't have to catch up. We have the foundation to lead. For those that want to adopt this future piece by piece, you can. We've rebuilt the engine under ServiceTitan's hood to be an agentic operating system with the tools that agents need to take action. So you can adopt our agents, you can adopt third-party agents, you can even build your own agents.
Now, for those that want to take your business straight to level five, self-running, self-optimizing with that proverbial click of a button, there's Max. All 30 agents, all Pro products, and a dedicated Max specialist to set it all up for you. For those on Pro products, which is nearly this entire room, we want you to experience a taste of what's possible. If you have Marketing Pro, you get these agents. If you have Contact Center Pro, you get these agents. And if you have other Pro products, you get these agents.
Max, of course, will give you access to all the agents and all the Pro products and make each agent more capable because of the coordination system. For those in residential service, this journey started with 50 pioneering contractors willing to partner with us on this journey. Now, even new customers to ServiceTitan are jumping straight to Max. We expect 700 locations on Max by fiscal year-end. It is clear to us this is the future of ServiceTitan, and this is the future of the trades, and it is getting better each day with more agents on the way, particularly for the back office.
For those in commercial, in construction, in roofing, and property care, the same journey we just showed is in flight for you, and you will see Max for your business in your specific Pantheon sessions. The world has spent the past year asking, what will AI replace? You are at the bottom of that list. There is something uniquely fitting about that because the AI build-out depends on the trades. Every data center, every megawatt of power, every cooling system, every pipe, the trades are literally building the physical foundation of this AI revolution. For 250 years, America has been built by people with tools in their hands, and it still is.
I saw something last week that really put the scale of this into perspective. It was Elon Musk's plans for Terafab, the largest building in the world, 100 million sq ft, three times the size of Central Park. So he can make 100 billion chips per year just for his companies, not to sell them. Because he thinks that if you take all existing chip factories on Earth today, they produce only 2% of the chips he will need just for his companies. If Elon is even half right about what is coming, I feel immense responsibility to make sure that this industry, the people in this room, the folks that helped build ServiceTitan into what it is today, are ready for it. Not just ready. Winning. Last time, you caught up. This time, you will lead. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage your MC, Alene Aroustamian.
Now the party has really started, has it not? Good morning, Titans, and welcome to Pantheon 2026. I do not know if you noticed, but we have been doing this for a long time. I decided to dress like Ara today. White shirt, black bottom. I am even wearing patent leather. I thought about unbuttoning one button, but it is fine. We are back in Orlando, where magic is everywhere, the humidity has a personal vendetta against me, and every conference room is about 40 degrees colder than it is outside. For those I have not met yet, I am Alene Aroustamian, Director of Executive Operations here at ServiceTitan. This is my ninth Pantheon.
Whoo. You might want to clap for the fact that this is my 10th year at ServiceTitan. I am still alive and smiling, so we can clap for that. Thank you. At this point, ServiceTitan is less like a job and a little bit more like family. Let me explain what I mean by that. Ambitious, demanding, deeply meaningful, and occasionally, nay, most always texting me after midnight. Ara thinks in decades, Vahe thinks in possibilities, and I think in 30-minute calendar blocks. Somehow, we call that little thing alignment. I have spent the last decade working alongside the two of them, which is equal parts family group chat, master class, and high-intensity cardio.
I have watched ambitious ideas become everyday realities, and I have learned that when either of them begin a sentence with, "What if" it is never hypothetical. If Ara asks it, strategy is forming. If Vahe asks it, clear your afternoon. The most important thing that I have learned is that ServiceTitan's story was never simply about software. It was about respect. The boys saw firsthand the sacrifices that their fathers made every single day as contractors. The early mornings, the long days, and the responsibility of supporting everyone that depended on them. Their commitment to this industry is personal because they know that your businesses are not simply numbers on a dashboard.
They represent livelihoods, families, and years of hard work most people never fully see. Which brings us to today. October 6th has a history of rewarding people willing to take the leap, even when they did not have every single answer. Let us go back in time. So on this day in 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened in Paris. Even though the building was not fully ready and still under construction, they had a vision, opened the doors, and improved from there. I imagine that there is a few business owners here in the room that can relate to that. Sometimes leadership means having a plan, and then sometimes it means, "Hey, you know what? We are just going to open on Monday and then see what happens." Then you know what? Your teams figure it out.
Then on October 6th in 2007, Jason Lewis completed the first circumnavigation of Earth powered entirely by human effort. No engine, no sail, no shortcut. He traveled more than 46,000 mi, walking, swimming, running, kayaking, all the things that I clearly do not do, for 13 years. 13 years. And of course, if Ara had managed the expedition, he would have expected it to have been completed in 10. Take that one in. On this day in 2010, a simple photo-sharing app called Instagram launched. It began by solving one human need and eventually changed how the world connects. It also gave us filters, influencers, and the belief that no vacation or meal that we eat actually happened without photographic evidence to share with the world.
Three very different stories, but one shared lesson. Progress rarely begins with everything perfectly in place. Neither do great businesses. They are built in the unglamorous hours, the difficult decisions that no one else knew you had to make, the promises kept when no one was watching. Your customers might only see the completed job, but not the hundreds of decisions and risks and sacrifices behind it. And when your work is done, and when it is done well, most barely notice because the water runs, the lights stay on, the air is comfortable. Life just continues. That quiet reliability is one of the most powerful forms of service that there is. As a result, we salute each and every one of you. Thank you.
Yes. Now, before I send you off to go and conquer Pantheon, let's cover a few survival essentials, shall we? First up, the Pantheon mobile app. It is your command center for the week. The agenda is packed, the property is large, and confidently walking in one direction or the other does not necessarily make it the correct direction. I know. I did it yesterday and was escorted by security back to the normal location. The app has your schedule, session details, maps, announcements, and everything else you could possibly need to navigate this week. Most importantly, please pre-register for those sessions, the breakout ones I'm referring to add them to your personal agenda. Reserve your seat.
Think of it as the Pantheon way of calling shotgun. It saves it for you, and you definitely want to do that, and you've got to claim it early, okay? If a session is sold out, however, join the wait list 15 minutes before, and you might actually end up getting inside. We'll fill it up as it goes if people don't show up. There's still hope, but I ask you, please, this is not the week to operate in Armenian Standard Time. If you know what that means, you know what that means. If you don't, that means you're always on time. Congratulations. This year's most flexible agenda lets you build a Pantheon experience around your business and your goals. Think of it as your own choose your own adventure in Orlando, just with fewer roller coasters and far more ROI.
You'll find peer-driven roundtables, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities like brain dates that connect you with people who share your interests and your challenges. There's no single right way to experience Pantheon. Build the agenda that meets your business where it is today and helps move it toward where you want to be tomorrow. With more sessions than anyone could possibly attend in person themselves without cloning themselves, here are a few you should definitely keep on your radar.
For my residential contractors businesses, join us for Run Your Business Not Your Software at 11:30 this morning right here on this stage. If your systems occasionally create more work instead of making it easier, and I do see some of you nodding your heads in the audience, this session is for you. For our commercial businesses, don't miss Same Work, New World: The Next Era of Commercial Contracting. Very serious title indeed. At 3:30 this afternoon on the Titan stage, you'll explore what changing technology expectations and opportunities mean for your business. Of course, we will all meet right back here at two o'clock for Vahe's keynote.
Please make sure you lock that one into your agenda. I promise you will not want to miss that. Over the next couple of days, don't measure the value of Pantheon by how many sessions you attend. I ask you that. Instead, I ask you to measure it in the conversations that stand out to you, that stay with you. The introductions to new friendships and partnerships. The idea that you take home and put into action immediately for your teams. Please, go make the most of this week. If you see me, stop by, say hello. I would love to meet you. See you around campus.