Category: AI in Practice Reading time: ~5 min Published by: Brendan Erofeev, The Techy Side
A builder reached out through a friend of a friend last week.
He'd heard AI could help with admin. Wasn't sure how. Wanted to understand what it actually was before committing to anything. So we sat down for an hour.
The way he described Claude when we started: "it's a fancier Google, right? You type in a question and you get better answers."
That's not an unusual starting point. That's actually pretty much where most people are at right now, they've heard something, they've maybe had a go with it, but they can't quite picture it doing anything specific for their business. It feels like a smarter search engine, and they're not sure that's worth paying for.
So that's where we started. Not with a product demo. Not with a list of features. Just with: what is this thing, and how does it actually think about problems.
Getting the Foundation Right First
There's a reason I don't go straight to connectors and automations with someone who's new to this.
If you don't understand conceptually what the tool can and can't see, what information it has access to, how it reasons through a task, what a connector actually does, then watching it do something impressive in a demo doesn't land the way it should. You just see a magic trick and walk away not really knowing what to do with it.
So we went through the basics first. How Claude thinks about instructions. What it means to give it access to something, a browser, a file, an inbox. How connectors work and why they matter. That's probably the first 15 to 20 minutes of any first session I do with someone.
Once that's there, everything else makes sense. Without it, you're just hoping things click.
Getting Set Up Properly
This part matters more than people realise.
A lot of people who have "tried AI" have done exactly that, tried it. Opened a browser tab, typed something in like they'd type it into Google, got an answer that wasn't quite what they wanted, and decided it wasn't for them.
That's not really a fair test.
So we got him set up properly. The right plan, installed on the desktop rather than living in a browser tab, and I walked him through how to use a scheduled task. Small things, but they shift how you interact with it. It stops being something you occasionally check on and starts being something that's running alongside your work.
Then we started connecting it to a couple of things.
The Moment Things Usually Click
One of the first connections I'll almost always go to with someone from construction or trades is the web browser.
You connect it up, you tell it to go and do something in the browser, and it just does. Opens a tab, navigates, reads what's there, acts on it. You stop thinking of it as a chat window.
I said to him: right, go in here, tell it to go to Woolworths and buy some beans. Something like that. Just watch what happens. It opened a tab and started going.
For someone who's been thinking of it as a fancier Google, that shift is pretty immediate. It's not answering questions about the world. It's moving through your actual work.
That's usually the moment something changes in how they're thinking about it. And from there, once you've got a couple of connections in place, the real conversation starts, where does this actually fit in your work?
What We Started Talking About for His Business
I put a few scenarios to him to help him start thinking about it.
Things like, a builder about to release $60,000 to a subcontractor wants to be sure they've done what they're meant to do. Checking the contract, the progress claim, going through emails. That's all done manually right now for a lot of people. What if something could do that pre-work and have it sitting there ready for you to review? You still make the call. You're still the one signing off. But you're not spending 45 minutes digging through paperwork to get to that point.
Or the tendering process, breaking a build up into trade packages, sending them out for quotes, managing the replies. That's a process in itself. If Claude can read your inbox, your files, your building software, there's no reason you can't task it to work through that.
Just examples, to get him thinking about where it could be useful for his own work. I sent him away to think about where it made the most sense to start. We've got a follow-up this week.
Where He Was by the End of the Hour
By the time we wrapped up, he was typing into the keyboard:
"How much was the paid-in contract on this job?"
And Claude was reading the building software and giving him the answer.
He came in not really sure what this thing was. He left with a pretty clear picture of where it fits in his work, and more importantly, with enough of a foundation to actually start trying things himself rather than just watching someone else use it.
That's what one hour looks like. Not a transformation. Not a fully built system. Just someone going from "fancier Google" to understanding what it actually does and being able to start from there.
Why It Matters That Someone's in the Room
The gap for most people in construction and trades right now isn't willingness. It's not that they've heard about AI and decided it's not for them. It's that nobody has sat down with them and helped them see what it means for their specific work.
That builder got it. Within an hour. He just needed someone in the room to help him connect the dots.
If you're at that stage, you've heard about it, you think there's something in it, but you can't quite picture what it looks like for your business, reach out. That's usually where I start.
Brendan Erofeev is a technology implementation consultant working with construction, trades, and small-to-medium businesses across Australia and New Zealand. He helps businesses get AI and systems working in the real world, not just in theory.
