Benjamin Gibber on AI, paperwork and trust at Atticrawl
Benjamin Gibber is the founder of Atticrawl, which handles insulation, air sealing, rodent proofing, moisture and mold control, and ventilation in attics and crawl spaces across North and Central Jersey. The conversation looks at where AI helps with paperwork, why customer emails remain human-written, and how straight answers set the business apart.
AI saves time at Atticrawl when it helps draft scopes of work and contracts, but customer communication remains personal. For a local service business, the trust built by giving homeowners an honest assessment is more valuable than automating the relationship.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I was the guy getting sent into crawl spaces nobody else wanted to go into, and I figured a company that told people the truth about their house could win. What makes us different is that we tell homeowners when they do not need the work, which most of my competitors will not do.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of it comes from past customers and their neighbors. I wish I could say it came from something I control, but it is word of mouth and it always has been. The fifteen mile radius does the rest.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I hand over the first draft of scope-of-work documents and contracts, which saves me a couple hours a week. I tried it on customer emails and went back to writing those myself. They came out too polished and too long, and our customers are not reading a wall of text from their contractor.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
It’s interesting, people will call already knowing what a vapor barrier is or what R-value means, which did not happen ten years ago!
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do use AI for the paperwork and the drafting, because that is where it actually saves time. Ignore anyone selling you on AI for customer relationships. The reason people call us back is that a human being walked their attic and told them the truth.
Thank you to Benjamin Gibber and the team at Atticrawl for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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