We want to use AI to analyze our historical pricing and job costing data to identify where we are losing margin. How do we structure this as a quarterly Rock without our operations team feeling like we are pointing fingers at their past performance?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Analyzing historical pricing and job costing data with AI is a powerful way to protect your margins, but it can trigger defensiveness if your team feels criticized. To execute this successfully, you must lean on the three pillars of Our Charter, which are Trust, Same Page, and a commitment to healthy strategy and structure.

Frame the initiative as a collective effort to improve our operational execution, not a search for human error. Create a quarterly Rock for your finance seat to deploy an AI analysis tool on your past fifty completed jobs. The goal of this Rock is to identify patterns where our actual expenses deviated from our initial bids.

Present this to your team in your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ as an opportunity to help everyone win. When the AI identifies underpriced services, explain that this data allows us to adjust our future pricing strategy and stay within the scope of our work orders.

By maintaining a humbly-confident attitude and demonstrating that the data will be used to support our project managers rather than punish them, you build trust. The team will embrace the tool as a way to ensure our pricing remains fair and our projects stay highly profitable.