Stop Wasteful Software Spending With These AI Adoption Secrets

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ℹ ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Every contractor has a software graveyard: tools bought with good intentions that nobody uses. 

Wade shares his journey implementing AI at his CPA firm, revealing why even the best software fails and how to get real adoption. 

Learn practical strategies for introducing new tools, building team buy-in, and turning software investments into actual productivity gains for your construction business.

⌚️ Key moments in this episode:

• 00:00 The Software Cemetery
• 01:11 Why Tools Fail Adoption
• 03:20 Wade AI Rollout Story
• 05:14 Early AI Experiments
• 07:03 Why Teams Resist AI
• 08:02 Simplify the Message
• 09:37 Big Wins Use Cases
• 12:35 Contract Review Example
• 14:16 Why Wins Stick
• 16:03 Workflow Integration Attempts
• 19:51 Burning the Boats
• 21:13 Recap and Takeaways
• 23:27 Final Wrap Up

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Head to profitfirstconstruction.com/blueprint to download your free copy. 

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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Transcript

Wade Carpenter: [00:00:00] Every business owner has a little software cemetery somewhere, full of tools they bought, loved, introduced to the team, and then watched quietly die behind the login screen.

Today, we're talking about why that happens, especially with AI, and how to keep your next big software rollout from becoming another expensive tombstone.

This is the Contractor Success Forum. I'm Wade Carpenter with Carpenter & Company CPAs, alongside Stephen Brown with McDaniel-Whitley Bonding & Insurance, and today I'm gonna discuss my journey with my team into adopting AI.

I recently had an experience where the whole organization that I was working with was having the exact same problem. It's not an isolated problem, and whether it's AI or software or whatever, I just thought this was a topic that a lot of people really needed to hear.

Stephen, what do you think? Kick this off. 

Stephen Brown: I need to hear it too. I've been using AI for a couple years, but not all the time. But man, when I need it, I really need it, and it's [00:01:00] fantastic. Also I find using AI in my car with Google searches, asking simple, quick information. These days of being curious, you don't have to be curious about anything for long before you can find out the answer to it.

Wade, I remember the days, you do too, where we just had boxes and boxes of software, and we were afraid to throw all those disks away, remember? A lot of our listeners will have no idea what I'm talking about.

 You buy software, you implement it, you subscribe to it, and immediately you're overwhelmed with how to use it and how to get the most out of it. It's wonderful.

And remember, software's easy to sell, because you find out someone who needs a problem, and you show them how your software will solve that problem, and it's an easy sell, right?

A lot of times, you charge so much and you say "Well, I'm charging so much for the software because of all the support you're gonna have, to implement this and use it." Software is only as good as much support you have. That never really seems to work out the way the [00:02:00] customer thinks it's gonna happen.

So in construction, all of our listeners are just slammed, Wade. And with AI, as any software, you've gotta lead by example, don't you?

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, absolutely. We talk about it all the time. You go to a trade show and you buy a new accounting software or estimating software and project man- whatever it is, and we don't get adoption. And I just wanted to today walk through some of my journey of this, because just having access to something like AI does not equal adoption.

You can have the best tools in the world. You can spend thousands and thousands of dollars on software or AI or whatever, but the best tools out there are gonna fail if they're not, number one, understood by your team, trusted by the team, easy to use, and where I feel like it is, it needs to be built in their daily workflow.

Otherwise, why should they change? They don't understand why they should change. Does that make sense? 

Stephen Brown: Absolutely. Our [00:03:00] listeners, if you've been listening a while, you know all the dashboard tools that Wade has created to help you manage your numbers. I can't imagine what you've created from the bookkeeping and tax side of things for the people that you work with.

Like what's an example of something you developed that they would not embrace but now they're using regularly and are grateful for it? How did you do it?

Wade Carpenter: That's where I wanted to walk through my journey with this, because I don't think I'm alone in this. The conference I went to last week told me that I was definitely not alone in this. Everybody was struggling with some of the same problems, whether they understood AI or whatever, but...

Let me just start off by, you know, I think ChatGPT came out somewhere around November of '22, and within three months, I went ahead and bought-- I saw so much potential in AI and I bought everybody of the team access to it like every single one of them. And I paid for a year upfront. And I did that for two years and I'm not seeing [00:04:00] adoption of it.

And finally when we're about to renew year three earlier this year, I sat down and said, "Who is using this?" Almost nobody was really using it, but they were using it like Google. And, you know, okay, this is what this particular expense is for. You could almost do the same thing with just Google Search.

Even when they were using it, a lot of them were just using like the free version of ChatGPT. I'm like, why did I pay for this? And to me, this is like the first opening part where I saw this leverage and production where we can help make my team not only more efficient, them doing better work and less tedious work.

The team saw it as basically this unfamiliar tool that they didn't know how to use or couldn't see the use cases for.

So I may have related that before, but anyway, I don't know if you've seen the same thing in your business or if any other people not adopting it like Daniel Whitley, but that was like my first [00:05:00] attempt at it

Stephen Brown: Somebody uses it or someone else in the office uses it, and you say, "This is fantastic. How did you do this?" And then they confess that they used AI, and you go, "Wow." And that's when you first kind of glimpse, this is a really good thing.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. Some of my earlier attempts, I'm not gonna go through all of these things, but I built out those custom GPTs that was like the first iteration. We can have a repeatable process that has instructions that two or three years later, they've come so far from that, but even some of those repeatable processes, I would put that in place and again, nobody used it.

As far as AI and helping their automations and stuff like that with Zapier and Make and n8n and those kind of tools, I spent a lot of time building that kind of stuff, and they weren't using it either. Maybe some of the marketing stuff like that.

But when I did build some of that, they didn't know how to use it or how to get to it.

Stephen Brown: And after you [00:06:00] explained it, to them, were they afraid when they couldn't figure it out again?

Wade Carpenter: I think part of it. I'll get to this, but it's like it wasn't their normal workflow. But we had all these things like Excel transformation, stuff like that, that saved a lot of time, and I'll talk some of the use cases.

We do a lot of things with PDFs, with tax returns and stuff like that, and people's taking pictures on their phone and it's like, okay we can't work with it. PDF converters that save time.

I built software import tools. I built chatbots for things like answering questions about this is where it goes in our tax software. And to me it was like, okay, I'm making it stupid simple for you to... you know, in theory it's like all you have to do is paste in you know, your data. Or click a button and get a result. And it still wasn't getting adoption and it was limited. And when they saw-- 

Stephen Brown: Is that when fired everybody replaced them with AI? 

Wade Carpenter: No, I haven't done that, and I'm very proud of [00:07:00] the fact that I've still got a great team. I know I've got a great team that's been with me, and I think that goes a long way.

But, for me to disrupt the way they normally do things. They, number one, did not always understand the use cases out there. They didn't know how to apply it to do that particular contractor they're working on.

These tools were not in their normal way they did the things, their normal workflow. Sometimes they forgot the tools were out there. They were working with old habits that they were just baked into the way they do things.

And to be honest, sometimes the AI concepts or whether it's software adoption or AI or whatever, they felt like it was too advanced or unfamiliar. To them it seemed like more work, not less.

So this is again, frustration between, you know, I see what they can do and they just say, "Okay, this is just something else to learn." And I'm still trying to do all the work I do and don't see the [00:08:00] value. Does that make sense?

Stephen Brown: So what turned out to be the main problem?

Wade Carpenter: I think I'm in the process of getting better and better, but as I mentioned last week, I was at a conference in Salt Lake City, and a good friend of mine threw this out.

I was showing them some of the stuff we had built, and she's like, "Well, you're at PhD level, and I'm on the second-grade level." And another guy was like "Well, I'm in kindergarten level."

I guess, to me, some of this stuff, after a few years of learning it, it becomes second nature.

I think there's a lesson in that because the owner may be out there doing like me, he's like, "We want to be as productive as possible." They understand the vision, but sometimes the team may need a simpler explanation of things.

That's where some of the realization for me is, I need to put it in terms that they can see. Having analogy like, I won't get into specifics, but like an MCP server is like a connector or something. I don't [00:09:00] know.

When we can have visuals and where they can see it, like, okay, this is how these things fit together. When you can give them specific examples, this is how it fits and this is what we can do with it.

And then, just plain English use cases, I would say. This is what it does without a lot of technical jargon.

I think that was a start for me, and still something that I guess part of where I'm going with this, I mean, getting adoption, I don't have it all figured out, but I think I've made a lot of progress that some people may not have. That's where I started trying to prop up all the wins that actually worked.

I may have told the story of the payroll import with this contractor that's got 40 to 50 people, and they are time tracking, but they got the weirdest Excel time report you've ever seen.

One of my ladies was spending over three hours a week keying in time for this. And I took it and I was like, okay, [00:10:00] I got an importer set up to where it will map all this stuff to QuickBooks, from three hours to about 15 to 20 seconds to have it imported. That kind of thing, it's like, hey, yeah, this is well worth it. But the other ones that are not working on payroll, well, I don't get that.

Stephen Brown: I take it she has not gone back to using the old-fashioned way of doing it. Once you created that and showed her how much time that saved, it's changed forever for her, right? 

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, three hours a week. I've got some other ones, we had one where a contractor wanted some very specific job reports, and pulling his purchase orders. Going through QuickBooks and pulling those out one by one because it's not built to report like that.

So I had another one that was actually three-plus hours a week, that she was going through and manually pulling all these different purchase orders to fill out these spreadsheets.

Just the looking up time alone and, actually this was Josh on my team that built this one, [00:11:00] but, same thing, got an import where she can just copy and paste the stuff in. That was a major time savings. For her, it was a practical, you know, pain that she was solving.

Another one, there's a couple of people on the team that work on the corporate tax returns. And years ago I had built a process to import the data into the trial balance software and then ultimately into the corporate returns.

It was clunky, but it was still faster than hand keying it. There's been a few iterations of that, but it was still taking 10 minutes on one side and 10 minutes on the other, which would've taken maybe an hour on each side before.

Even that 10 minutes saved a lot of time, but now I've got it where it's virtually instant within, 25 seconds we've got that import and it's done.

And so those two people had specific things that they could point to and say, "Hey, this is saving me time and this is pretty cool."

This is exactly what we can map [00:12:00] it to. And obviously for a contractor listening to this, it's gonna be different workflows, but the main idea is giving them specific use cases where it can save time and they can see the wins.

I feel like I'm just running off here, but any questions about that? I have some theories about why these wins work. 

Stephen Brown: I wanna get into that before we finish the podcast. And also point out that, maybe some of our listeners' whole perception, because they're not at the PhD level like you are, Wade, they're at the kindergarten level... No I, I'm probably in first grade, okay, or second grade. I'm not in kindergarten level.

But for example, a lot of times when you're managing risk, a lot of risk is tied into the contracts you sign. So by setting certain parameters of what you want AI to look for in every contract, and scanning that contract and having it read it and do it for you, it's a game changer.

So you say, "Okay well, I'm glad you do that, Stephen. How am I gonna do that in my [00:13:00] construction company?" This is just something that you can verify that AI has been set up to check your contracts for certain parameters before anyone's allowed to sign it.

And that you, before you negotiate a job as estimator with a new client, that you're gonna review the contract they wanna see, or they will review your contract that you use.

It's real simple and it creates a procedure that is constantly there looking after you with no stress. Where the stress gets involved when you don't see something that's written in a contract in a size two font, and it's 100 pages, you know?

Specifically, tell me how this situation, how you fixed it, or how you're fixing it now at Carpenter & Company 

Wade Carpenter: W just since you mentioned that, this is definitely not a replacement for a good construction lawyer, but you're right. AI is a perfect use case to you know, at least point out some of the things that you're looking [00:14:00] for.

Claude just this week released a plugin that has 70 different legal skills out there to go through things like that.

And again, it's not a replacement for your construction attorney, but it probably is a great way to go through some things like that, and that's just a great use case.

My thought is like, why some of these wins worked.

Number one, it solved a real pain point. It fit into an existing process. Especially these big ones, we obviously saved, when you say three hours a week, if it reduced manual entry, if it's doing things like producing reliable results versus a human... I wouldn't have said this a couple years ago. Some of the processing for AI, I would still double-check your numbers, but it is producing reliable results now, especially if you do it with code.

The last one helping that person do the actual work that they needed to do. And that's why some of these wins worked I felt. [00:15:00] Because there's still more iterations that I've gone through with this and that's where I wanna talk through some of those other things.

Any other comments about or thoughts on what I could have done different?

Stephen Brown: There's a pain threshold, and as the managing director of Carpenter & Company CPAs, you have to lead by example. Some people that aren't embracing technology, you have to make them do that, and then they appreciate it.

Isn't that the same way always when you're raising your kids? It's the same thing. A pain threshold that you have to go through before you adopt change.

So that's a simple way to think about it is you were talking earlier about the pain threshold. That pain threshold is, you have a pain and you're not aware of that pain or what it's doing to you until you see the solution.

And even then, when you see the solution, you have to learn how easy it is to implement that solution. And then it still takes a number of times before you totally buy in, and then it's done, [00:16:00] right?

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, you just unpacked a whole lot of things. If it's okay, I'd like to progress to that point, because that's a great point.

I can show some of these wins and so like how do I get it in their workflow? And I was doing things like, one of my favorite programs is called SmartSuite, which is like Airtable if you know what that is, like a database.

In that they have dashboards. And I built all these dashboards and buttons and forms, and all they had to do was go in there, click a button, fill out a form and we could have the PDFs run or adjusted or spit out an Excel import template, those kind of things.

Some of the adoption improved, but not really enough. This is lessons for me is like even these useful tools fail if they're not directly in the path of the way they do work.

Some other things that I had done earlier this year, that OpenClaw came out. And I know there was a lot of security risks and stuff like that, but I built some specific agents to [00:17:00] do certain manual tasks like PDF converters and some of these Word or Excel tools to adjust, or the QuickBooks importers that I felt were safe.

And I actually got them built directly in Slack, which Slack is our chat communication, and they used it all day long. It was just like another person there, and they could message them. I showed them a few times, but still, I think I saw two people actually use it.

It was so frustrating to me. Now I got these tools that's nearby, and thinking this is directly in something they're working with, but it also created this unfamiliar pattern that they just, you know, it was still blocking my adoption.

That's why this has been a really frustrating and enlightening process for me.

Last few weeks I put out some of those where we were talking about rebuilding the internal infrastructure. We talked about some of the subscriptions, and it's not really about the [00:18:00] subscription, but it was also about, number one, getting the tools together so they played well together, but instead of going to five different programs to do their job, the idea for me was like, hey, I gotta put this directly in their path the way they work otherwise, they're not gonna use it.

That's where I was replacing these disconnected tools and all these tools and agents and workflows right there where they could do the work.

Again, more challenges there. The team was seeing very big disruption and I'm sitting there thinking, I'm gonna gain all this long-term efficiency.

I think this is coming to where you were talking about, like having the kids and saying, "This is what you gotta do." 

Me as the owner, I'm saying like, "Hey, this is the destination. Your life's gonna be so much easier." And that destination for the team is okay, you got a big old climb that I don't know how to do, and it's like I don't know if I've got the energy to do it. 

Stephen Brown: I can't imagine the frustration. Maybe if you're an old-fashioned business model [00:19:00] where you're charging by the hour, you'd rather someone spend three hours manually putting in data. But you need to do business with someone that's getting it done faster, more efficiently.

I have customers call all the time and they need an answer to a question immediately. They can't wait. They're talking to someone about a job, they're getting ready to have a meeting, they know a certain question's gonna come up, and they need me and they call, and they need a quick answer.

I would think in your line of work, the faster you can turn information over once you receive it from the client and give them advice on it, because your job is to give advice, not to crunch data all day long for someone.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, and I think that's a perfect thought here, because number one, like our back office clients, we're fixed price. Whatever it takes to get it done.

So in my mind, I'm just making your life easier. I'm cutting out things you have to do and spending time on. I actually did this the week of April [00:20:00] 15th, I think it was April 13th, we have a team meeting every Monday.

And I was like, "Okay, we got a little over a month to replace this particular software that was dead center into what they were doing." So just like Cortez, I said, "I'm burning the boats. You got one month to turn, do this." And obviously there was a ton of pushback and frustration.

There was bugs, yes, unfinished items and that created stress, but it was like, okay you're gonna make us learn something. And I was trying to make it like what they were using, but they still like, "Okay, I, I don't have time to move off of this." And so it's just more and more frustration. So to your point, acting like the parent, I had to force the transition.

But for the people out there listening, if you're doing something like this rollout, I have to remember, you gotta keep the empathy and support for them.

I did get pushback, and understandably so because I'm disrupting [00:21:00] their world. But for the long-term health of my business, that's where I had to burn the boats. I keep using that term.

So I hope I'm not belaboring this way too long, but personally, I just wanted to recap some of the things. 

Stephen Brown: Yeah, recap the key points and we can wrap it up.

Wade Carpenter: Okay. Again, you know, if you're a business owner out there and you're trying to move some of these forward, explain the concepts as simply as you can, address some of the pain points. We're spending three hours doing this... address some of the pains, not just say talking about possibilities.

This is what we did before and after examples. You say, you have to build around the existing workflows. Talk about the time savings in plain language so that they can relate to it.

I also think having internal champions that's not necessarily the boss. Sometimes there's gonna be pushback because you are the boss, but if somebody else can see on the team that, "hey, yeah, this is making sense".

There's gonna be challenges and things [00:22:00] like that. You gotta make the feedback to yourself very easy. You gotta communicate the fixes and improvements and as we make changes, we fixed it quickly.

And this is for me too. I'll be honest, all this resistance I was taking personally, and you can't do that. Because it's like they're not resisting you, it's just... it's hard not to take it that way when you're seeing like, okay, I've put a lot of time and effort into this and I see so much on the other side of this.

Stephen Brown: Those are all great points. I especially liked the internal champion. Someone besides you or a number of people besides you, that get it. And can just tell them when someone's complaining about something, "I don't know why you're doing it that way, we've been doing it this way for the last three months." You know, "Suit yourself." And all of a sudden, they're like, "No, no, no, no. Show me. No, I, I wanna know now." So yeah, these are all great points, Wade.

Wade Carpenter: Like I said, sort of drawing this to a close, whether it's an AI or [00:23:00] just project management software, estimating tools, job costing systems, your time tracking, whatever it is. I think there's some lessons here.

Just because it's useful does not mean it's going to be adopted. People support what they understand.

So I think the workflow fit matters more than the tool power sometimes. Addressing those pain points builds momentum in doing this. And as you said, the champions, feedback loops, those kind of things I've already said.

I hope this has been thought-provoking, if nothing else. Any wrap-up thoughts from you? Anything I could have done differently? Because I was racking my brain like, "What am I doing wrong?" 

Stephen Brown: No, in your mind you've solved a solution to a problem and everyone ought to adopt it. But again, people don't adopt change until they realize that they can't live without it, and they're not gonna live without it.

There's so many examples out there of technological change that all of us use now without [00:24:00] even thinking about it, that there was some pain involved, there was a learning curve.

And AI is just one of those. So I think you made some great points, Wade, I think our listeners that are struggling with the same situation, getting that going in their office or implementing some other type of software situation will take these points in stride and give it some thought because it worked for you and it ought to work for others.

Wade Carpenter: I appreciate you letting me explore this a little bit today. And if our listeners are out there, I hope you may take some thoughts from this, my struggles, and maybe you're dealing with some of the same things.

If you got any feedback on this, we'd love to hear it in the comments below. If you haven't already, always share, subscribe. It always helps us out a ton. We do this every single week, and we will see you on the next show.