Construction and trades are sitting out AI, and that's the opening
Construction firms pay for AI tools at barely a fifth the rate of the information sector, and less than a third the rate of professional services, per JPMorgan Chase Institute data. The gap is tooling, not appetite, and it's open to whoever closes it first.
By the end of 2025, businesses in the information sector were paying for AI services at close to 4.4 times the rate construction firms were: 39.3 percent adoption against 8.9 percent, according to JPMorgan Chase Institute’s analysis of real Chase Business Banking payment data (JPMorgan Chase Institute, April 2026). Professional services firms adopted at more than three times the construction rate. If you run a trades business and have assumed AI is a knowledge-worker thing that doesn’t touch what you do, the data backs you up, for now. The gap is real. It’s also the opening.
The gap, in numbers
JPMorgan Chase Institute tracked de-identified transactions from 4.6 million small businesses with Chase Business Banking accounts between 2019 and 2025, measuring actual payments for AI services rather than survey answers about intentions. By December 2025, construction firms had reached 8.9 percent adoption. Transportation and warehousing sat even lower, at 5.4 percent. The information sector led at 39.3 percent, followed by professional services at 30.3 percent and educational services at 29.5 percent (JPMorgan Chase Institute, 2026).
There’s a second data point in the same report worth as much attention as the industry gap: how fast a business closes that first stretch once it actually starts. Firms that began operating in 2019 took more than six years to reach 10 percent adoption. Firms that started up in 2025 reached that same 10 percent in six months (JPMorgan Chase Institute, 2026). The tools have gotten cheaper and easier to plug in every year since. That part of the excuse is gone. What hasn’t moved nearly as fast is which industries have found a reason to start, and that’s still wide open in a trade where almost nobody has.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey tells the same story a different way. As of May 2026, overall AI use across U.S. businesses sat between 17 and 20 percent, but firms with four or fewer employees, the size of most trades operations, reported adoption under 20 percent, and the retail trade sector came in around 14 percent, below the national average (U.S. Census Bureau, 2026). A Federal Reserve review of three national surveys reached the same conclusion from a third direction: professional and financial services lead every measure, and hands-on, asset-heavy sectors trail well behind (Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, April 2026).
It isn’t that your trade doesn’t want this
Here’s the detail that actually matters. Among the small businesses that have adopted AI, what they’re buying looks completely different by industry. Construction firms that do pay for AI put 64.6 percent of that spend into generic generative AI, tools like ChatGPT, used for whatever comes up that week. Professional services firms put a smaller share into generic tools, 54.4 percent, because they’ve diversified into AI built for their specific workflows: marketing automation, customer relationship management, industry platforms built around how they actually operate (JPMorgan Chase Institute, 2026).
That’s the real story. Trades owners aren’t AI skeptics. It’s that almost nobody has built the specific tool for a plumber’s quote follow-up, an electrician’s dispatch board, or a landscaper’s seasonal booking calendar, the way vendors have built one for a marketing agency’s content calendar. When a trades owner tries AI, a general chatbot is often the only thing on offer, and a general chatbot doesn’t answer a missed call or chase a stalled quote. It just sits there, waiting to be prompted.
Where the payoff actually is
The gap closes on the same unglamorous ground every time: routing and answering the calls you can’t get to, drafting the first version of a quote or a follow-up text, keeping a booking calendar full without someone babysitting it. None of that needs a chatbot experiment. It needs a system built around how your specific business runs, and the math on it is plain. If a connected system, one that answers a missed call, logs the job, and follows up automatically, saves five hours a week, do the math for your own rate. At $75 an hour, that’s worth several hundred dollars a month before you’ve counted the first customer it caught that you’d have otherwise lost to whoever called back first.
Where The Trade Script fits
This is exactly the gap automated operations exist to close: not a general AI subscription bolted onto a business that was never built to use it, but a system wired to your calls, your quotes, your follow-ups, and your booking calendar, connected to a real website and a social presence that keeps showing up on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky whether or not you had time to post this week. The trades businesses that close this adoption gap over the next year won’t be the ones that bought a chatbot license. They’ll be the ones that built the specific system once and let it run.
Most of your competitors are sitting in that 8.9 percent, or lower, still deciding AI has nothing to do with them. That isn’t a reason to wait. It’s the reason not to.
This week
Pick the one task in your business that repeats every week and never gets easier: the calls you don’t get to, the quotes that go stale, the calendar you keep updating by hand. Write down what it costs you in hours. That number is the business case. Build the system around that one task before you build anything else.
Sources
- Understanding the use of AI among small businesses, JPMorgan Chase Institute, April 2026
- AI Use at U.S. Businesses, U.S. Census Bureau, May 2026
- Monitoring AI Adoption in the US Economy, Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, April 2026