I have been playing around with ChatGPT ever since it launched and realised while there has been some excitement (and equal parts apprehension) about ChatGPT in the HVAC space there is literally nothing, online or otherwise, that provides a clear step-by-step actionable way to actually use chatGPT to improve the productivity of both yourselves and your business.

I am for one, a strong believer in the power of the technology and I am sure it is going to be an exciting time for the HVAC space as a whole - and I cannot wait to see how the industry is going to adapt to the change. To get started, below are 10 ways to get started by incorporating AI for free in some of your workflows right away!

1. Use It To Plan Your Daily Route

Ensure you have the customers you plan to visit for the day and their location details in an excel. Once you have the list in excel, copy the customer name, latitude and longitude columns into ChatGPT. The AI is smart enough to understand the column names and decipher the columns.

Bonus Tip: You can also use actual addresses instead of lat/long for the above to work

2. You Can Also Add Constraints To The Above To Make It More Accurate!

Obviously at times covering the shortest path is not the only criterion - we need the money! Below is an extension of the above where I am also adding the job value into the above prompt - and ask chatGPT to give me the revised priority.

The best part is you can input multiple criteria into ChatGPT to get more accurate results on your day plan. The more detailed inputs you give it, the better the output.

You need to outsource your day to day planning to a tool - you got more important things to do!

3. Generate Job Summaries

Below is a quick use case where it generates a detailed job summary based on a simple prompt.

You can also do the above in a mobile browser - and quickly copy-paste the output into any tool/email or wherever you need to send your job reports.

The export option that you see in the above video is from a Chrome plugin Superpower ChatGPT - that you can search for and install (I am not affiliated to the tool, but it does indeed give you superpowers and lets you make chatGPT more actionable for repeat processes - including saving histories, export options and lot more)

4. Get Your Entire Job History For The Day In One Click

You can take the above one step further and quickly create folders for all your job reports at the end of the day. The below video shows you how to do that:

Daily Reporting, automated!

The above video too uses the mentioned plugin. Once you select the list of job summaries generated in the day and download it automatically gets saved with the date in a folder. This makes it easy to refer to at any point of time down the line too!

5. Read Training Documents And Quickly Help You Know The Right Answer

ChatGPT can also read URLs - so if you do have a public URL with an FAQ or training content, you can pass that information to chatGPT and quickly help you dig up answers from multiple pages of text, instead of you looking to scroll through tons of information at the site

Even if you have your training content in a word document or PDF, there are multiple sites that let you host it for you - and you can pass that URL above to ChatGPT.

You can also think of the conversation history as saved queries, so anytime you want to pull up the training content, search for it on the left sidebar - and edit the query you need to ask.

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This ensures you need not remember or share the URL link anytime

6. Feed Any Data To Find Anomalies Or Insights

You need not be a geek to quickly identify insights from your data or reporting tool. Below I feed in some data on the time the technicians take to install based on the type of system. Again the data can be copied from excel and pasted here like in the below:

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7. Automatically Get Checklists For Various Equipment/Manufacturers And Various Types Of Tasks

Are you sure the checklists that you are filling up are comprehensive and cover every single aspect? ChatGPT can generate detailed checklists for any equipment quickly.

8. Writing Compelling Quotes That Convert

No more plain vanilla quotes with the same template for every single customer - customise your quote content for every customer!

Bonus Tip: Add the link to the website of your client and ask chatGPT to customise the quote based on the insights from the website

9. Write Training Content For Complex Industry-Specific Questions Or Handle And Troubleshoot L1 Customer Enquiries

While we all can go about debating the accuracy of the technical inputs that the tool provides, there is no doubt that it can be a very efficient Level 1 check for emergency breakdown calls to help diagnose the issues.

10. Friendly Assistant

Share your customer stories, complaints, wins & losses while you out there working hard, doing the trades - and make ChatGPT your best friend! Being out there in the field can be lonely and sometimes you just need a companion to chat with!

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Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of Fieldproxy, a field workforce automation platform that helps HVAC organisations deploy technology solutions to streamline the productivity of their field technicians. We are the only tool in the space that provides a no-code web and app builder for organisations, which means you can customize both the technician app and the backend admin portal - exactly the way you want!

I came up with the above research while looking at ways in which we can incorporate GPT into our product to drastically improve the lives of the HVAC technicians and businesses that use us. I wanted to share it with the wider community and hope it helps you and your business.