In the field, almost everyone operates at the same speed. A solid crew will build the same size patio in the same amount of time, regardless of the company they work for.
“The real separation between struggling and thriving happens back at the office, in how well the work gets managed and how well knowledge moves,” says Mike Lysecki, the CEO of LeanScaper. “The old way to get better at that was to hire more overhead, the most margin-punishing place to add cost. AI breaks that trade.”
Balancing Efficiency and Human Relationships with AI
A common concern with the utilization of AI is diminished human interactions, but Lysecki argues that when AI is used for the right tasks, it frees your team to invest in people.
“Think about where relationship time actually goes in this business,” Lysecki says. “It doesn’t get lost to too much face-to-face connection – it gets lost to the back-office grind. Building the spreadsheet, emailing the report, sitting in a meeting that existed only to move information from one head to another, spending an hour crunching numbers just to understand what already happened. None of that is relationship-building, and all of it is time you’d rather spend with a customer, a key vendor, or your own crew.”
When AI is automating reports and answering routine questions, it gives time back to team members to focus on what really matters.
“Used poorly, AI becomes one more automated wall nobody asked for,” Lysecki says. “Used well, it’s the opposite – it clears away the wall the paperwork already built and puts you back in the room with the people your business actually depends on.”
What AI Tools To Invest In?
Rather than wondering what type of AI tool to buy, Lysecki challenges owners to first ask where their business is stuck.
“Find the place where work piles up and waits – the estimates that sit for three days, the questions that always route back to you, the report that eats every Sunday – and point AI at that,” Lysecki says. “Let the constraint pick the tool, not the other way around.”
Take time to experiment with a purpose in mind. While it may seem a little indulgent, it can end up unlocking time savings that compound for you and your team.
“Over a season those small unlocks stack into a real edge that competitors who never sat down to tinker simply don’t have,” Lysecki says. “Start cheap; most of the best tools have free or low-cost tiers, so you can prove value before you commit real budget.”
Also, don’t hesitate to ask what your peers have found works as well as what they’ve tried and abandoned, as this can save you just as much time.
Lastly, always judge AI tools against the question: “Is this actually giving my people back time and making the work better?” If you can’t identify the hours an AI tool is saving within a few weeks, move on.
Is Your Company Ready for AI Agents?
The next step beyond using AI tools is AI agents, which can autonomously perform tasks that involve decision-making, problem-solving or performing actions in external environments.
Whether your company is prepared to take advantage of AI agents depends on which end of the spectrum you’re considering. On one end, an AI agent can be an autonomous mower, which takes a repetitive task off your crew’s plate.
“A lot of companies are ready for that right now,” Lysecki says. “If your properties fit and your service level fits, there’s little reason to wait. That readiness is about the physical realities of your accounts, not brand maturity.”
On the other end of the spectrum is an autonomous, customer-facing AI agent that responds to your clients the way a person would.
“Before you turn anything like that loose, your house needs to be in order: brand standards, voice and tone, service guidelines, all defined,” Lysecki says. “The reason is simple – an agent represents your brand at scale, in your name, without a human on every interaction. If you haven’t defined what your brand sounds like and how it behaves, you’re not automating your standards, you’re automating the absence of them.”
Lysecki says while the spectrum is vast, nearly every company should be ready to put agents to work in some capacity by now.
“If you can’t find a single place where an agent fits today, that’s usually not a sign you’re not ready – it’s a sign it’s worth looking harder,” Lysecki says. “And the companies telling themselves they’ll get to it later are the ones starting to fall behind.”
Advice for Others
If you’ve been hesitant to fully invest in AI, Lysecki stresses the importance of getting started now, as time is the asset you can’t buy back.
“AI works a little like a person – it builds up a body of knowledge about your company and then puts that knowledge to work,” Lysecki says. “So a company that starts feeding it today has, three years from now, three years of accumulated company knowledge built into it – running its systems, carrying its standards, answering its questions. The company that waits and starts in three years starts from zero, knowing nothing about the business.”
He also notes that those who are fearful of AI taking jobs and removing the human aspect of relationships should view it instead as a chance to take monotonous tasks off plates and enable teams to focus on quality, creativity and relationships.
“The gas-powered mower is the perfect parallel,” Lysecki says. “When it arrived, it too ‘put people out of work’ and stripped some of the craft out of cutting a lawn by hand. Today nobody would dream of going back. It didn’t kill the job – it made the work less punishing and freed people for higher-value work. AI is the same kind of tool, just a bigger one. It doesn’t make your job disappear or take the humans out of your business. It refocuses human effort on the work that carries real value and real purpose – which, for most of us, is the work we got into this trade to do in the first place.”
