Bill Kerr: Commercial contractors are up against several skills challenges. A shortage of trained technicians limits capacity and threatens project timelines. And managers, versed in technical trades and practical business knowledge, can struggle with administrative challenges. Amid economic uncertainty and supply chain disruptions, these skills gaps can be especially costly.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. I’m joined in studio by Alok Chanani, co-founder and CEO of BuildOps, a cloud-based operations platform for commercial contractors. The company founded in 2018 has in 2025 been valued at over $1 billion. We’ll talk about what led the former army combat engineer and Wharton MBA to address inefficiencies in the running of HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical firms. We’ll look at the crossover of military skills and leadership to the private sector. We’ll also consider the potential of AI-augmented services like BuildOps to increase the supply of good jobs that don’t require a college degree. Alok, welcome to the podcast.

Alok Chanani: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Kerr: Alok, give us a little bit of your background and how you came to found the firm.

Chanani: So I actually started my career as an army officer. I spent some time actually leading troops on the ground in Baghdad, and that experience taught me what it really means to lead under pressure, to stay calm when decisions carry real weight, and to earn your team’s trust and to execute even when a lot of things are changing around you. It gave me a very deep respect for the work that goes into building and protecting and supporting local communities. Post-military, I didn’t really follow the conventional classic business-school-to-start-up path. I actually went into commercial real estate development, investment, and construction, and I worked very closely hand-in-hand for many years with trade contractors—facility managers, and contractors of all different sizes and shapes. The thing that struck me is a lot of those folks were performing mission-critical work that literally built and maintained this entire country’s infrastructure, and they were getting slowed down with broken systems and outdated systems, running these businesses on WhatsApp, Dropbox, Google, text. It felt like madness—outdated software, manual processes, no visibility. It just didn’t make any sense. Eventually, that led to BuildOps. So I didn’t necessarily come from a traditional tech background. I came from the operational side. But on that side, mistakes cost real time and real money, any safety.

Kerr: And were the inefficiencies you were observing just due to small company size in the contractor space or was this also bigger companies that had the inefficient systems that you just mentioned?

Chanani: It was really across the board. And I think the intuitive thing would be that companies that achieve a certain level of scale and size would inherently have some level of automation and process that would make them more efficient, but that was not necessarily true.

Kerr: Okay. So you set out to solve that. Help me think about, as you get started and you’re building BuildOps from the beginning, what was the suite of services you were hoping to offer? Was it going to be a one-stop shop for the contracting firms? Was it originally going to be one part of their business that you’re going to take on? How did you envision the company developing?

Chanani: One of the biggest challenges that I saw when launching the business is that, even if there were solutions, these were point-siloed solutions. If there was a larger scale platform in place, it was incredibly archaic or outdated. With service and project management—which is really the operational component, which in our view drives EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization], drives profitability, drives growth, drives the true success of the business—it was just mired in a secondary thought in terms of the platform, which was really an accounting-first platform. So I think the thing that was very important for us when launching the business is to create a true all-in-one platform. Then the data analytics that sit on top of it was the true unlock force.

Kerr: Sure. It seemed like your sector is one that the consumer-side salesforce and so forth would be intimately also connected to the HR side, the staffing, the operation. If you’ve promised something to a customer, if something changes at a job site, that may have to also impact very quickly the employee allocation or something similar. Was that connectivity across those silos also more critical in the space?

Chanani: Yeah, absolutely. So, if something changes on a job site, if something changes with the material order, if something changes even with the scheduling that may be out of the hands of the folks that we work with, but they’re our customer’s customer, that inevitably would have downstream impacts. The single most complex piece is managing labor and the human component. So, it would inevitably have a human impact. And the ability for us to help manage that and forecast that and minimize a lot and smooth out that labor-curve component, that was really critical for us. The only way to do that is to have all of the information across all the different data points.

Kerr: So tell us a little bit about that labor side. Let’s dig into a little bit. What does the typical company that uses your software have in terms of its workforce? What is it needing in terms of key scheduling side or what’s the HR need there? And then, also, how differentiated, how are we going to build the skills portions of that, which is really important in your platform?

Chanani: So, in terms of building the skills in the platform, one way that we thought about it was the taxonomies and what needs to happen actually in the platform, itself, and identifying job requirements and identifying what’s critical for our customers. You really start with the underlying work. Sometimes the title doesn’t necessarily represent the actual work involved. I think this somewhat stems also from my military experience. If I was staffing missions in the army or if I was hiring on a job site, the question is the same as “what is the job and what kind of person is the right person to execute on that job?” Skills-based hiring in my view is just being very honest and very real and digging a little deeper than the title, itself, as to what needs to get done. What does success look like in the role? What experience actually matters? What can be taught and what needs to come in the door? So we build our teams that way, and we do our best to ensure that the skills and certifications in the platform highlight those skills that are truly critical and necessary to provide all that data in a way that’s really palatable and easy for our contractors to immediately identify: Here are most successful technicians in these specific roles, three months, six months, nine months, five years into the job. What are the skills and certifications that they have that have led them to drive the most revenue, drive the most profitability, drive the highest customer success rates? We’ve seen it just manifest in a number of different permutations that have allowed our customers to get much more strategic about their hiring.

Kerr: It seems really important, and one that on this podcast we’ve had more than one person come in and talk about how their company would like to arc toward more skills-based hiring. But then, goodness, the devil’s always in the details as to what are the skills you’re going to put into the system, how are you’re going to manage it. This is not even the hiring part. You’ve also, it sounds like, integrated it with, as performance reviews happen and as you see client satisfaction, customer satisfaction, that can be integrated into a person’s profile or provide inputs back upstream to help the hiring process be even stronger for the next phase.

Chanani: And even in terms of how we’ve built out the workforce at BuildOps, something that was very important to us is, we didn’t want to be just, like, another tech company that tried to attack or guest at the trades from the outside. So we started hiring people that understood the trades—so dispatchers, contractors, technicians, people who actually have felt the real pain and the friction that we were trying to solve. That human empathy is really, really important. On top of that, we layered in the top-tier technical and product talent to build with them. That field knowledge and engineering talent in putting it together, it really created magic together. We made sure that they sat together, we solved problems together, they learned. That’s how, for example, we captured asset data from nameplates. That’s how we built workflows that made sense to the people that actually do the work. And when the folks that we serve see the platform, they just immediately know that it speaks to them, because it was built by people that lived in their shoes and understood their pain points.

Kerr: Walk us through, what does the customer engagement look like? End to end, help us understand some of the processes and the flows as somebody is coming to you with some needs. Maybe you can start with, first off, what’s the pain point that they’re most typically circling as they come talk to you, and then how do you build out from there the overall service that you provide?

Chanani: Yeah, so oftentimes our customers come to us when something is not working, and there’s a sufficient amount of pain. Or they look at their overall business, and the rate of growth is not in line with their hopes or expectations for the business. It could be a transitioning from generation A to generation B. It could just be looking at the overall competitive landscape and saying, “Okay, I got to do something, because I need to ensure that I’m the most competitive possible position.” Or it could be something as simple as I just am missing job opportunities and I’m seeing that. Invoices are going out way too late. Techs are calling in constantly, and I’m not scaling at the level that I’d like to scale at. It could be a sense that the wheels are coming off, even though the revenue looks totally fine on paper. The process for us is we start by thinking about our customers. There’s little intricacies with everyone’s business that are minutely different but impact how they operate and how they work. So asking lots of questions: How do you work? How do you get from point A to point B? How do the jobs really get done? What do the handoffs really look like? And where’s information falling through the cracks? And then we go in phases. We try to understand the biggest friction points, and then once that’s flowing and there’s clarity on how that would work, end to end, then we move through the platform, and we try to educate our customers in terms of what the onboarding experience would look like, what the transition would look like, what the change management and the expectation piece is, and what the mutual shared commitment is. Because any ERP implementation, like BuildOps, it requires a partnership on both sides. By the time that we’ve actually fully rolled out, we actually don’t hear customers describe “change” in software terms. We sometimes will hear, “I’m just so much more efficient now. I’m not chasing A, B, C or text for that form or that doc,” or “I can spend far more time with my family and do the things that I really enjoy,” or “I’ve gotten this incredible feedback, because now my team is able to spend time with customers and build those deep, meaningful relationships with a lot of the systems handling the things that the systems are supposed to handle.”

Kerr: And overall, how long from that very first set of conversations until you really feel like somebody’s running at full speed? Just in terms of that very first phase, what’s the typical upcycle look like?

Chanani: We like to see large-scale adoption and an almost immediate ROI typically from that conversation to the go-live in three to six months.

Kerr: I am curious to go back to your military service. One of the things that has been observed by many people is that oftentimes veterans are underappreciated in the labor market for the skills they have because things that they were working on in the military don’t directly translate into what a civilian employer might have instantly thought was going to be able to accomplish the job. So is there a gap between the way the military might look at some of the skills and you worked in the same functions in both sectors? And then also did that shape any way the way you architected the skills at BuildOps?

Chanani: Yeah, so I think the transition for me from the military to entrepreneurship was certainly messy, and it was absolutely humbling at the same time. In the military, the mission most likely is clear, and the structure supports that mission. In business, you have to clarify that for yourself. There is no playbook, there’s no operating manual, there’s not a book of Army Regulations. So what helped me was staying grounded, I think, in the underlying principles around leadership that the military taught me, it was how to keep teams aligned. It was how to execute under pressure. It’s a core value of BuildOps — taking extreme ownership. Ideally, you take extreme ownership in every part of your life—in your marriage and your families and your kids. You say you can do something, you own it. I actually learned quite a bit from a network of veterans that have made this transition successfully and made the entrepreneurship leap. You can’t find success in the military as a lone wolf, and I don’t think you can do that on the business side. Two things that are very useful skills that I believe are taught well are clarity and trust for building an organization. That holds true for any type of organization, a nonprofit, the military, or for-profit. One misconception I think a lot of people have is, they feel that the military is about barking orders. I think if you talk to a lot of people certainly that served overseas, nothing is really further from the truth. But it’s really about making sure that your team understands the objective, that they have what they need to be successful, and they know that they’ll be supported when things get really difficult. Then, ideally, you get out of the way and you enable your teams to be successful. So those are fundamental principles that we have used to build the culture at BuildOps: align the team, set the direction, and then let people do what they’re great at. The counter to that it’s that Mike Tyson line, which is everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. You get punched in the face a lot. And certainly in combat, the moment contact happens, everything changes. I think the same is true for a start-up, and particularly when you’re starting out and you got your first 5, 10, 15 or very large-scale enterprise customer. And then, I think either you listen and adapt, or you get left behind.

Kerr: Yeah, look, let’s go think about your clients here for a minute. What do you think is the biggest value capture for them? Is it something about cost savings on a dimension? Is it better coordination across the functions—or as we were describing earlier from the customer to the employee side? Or is it something else? What ultimately is the thing that they are resonating towards when they are using?

Chanani: Labor and time, I would say, are the really big ones. If you get the schedule right and if your techs do not sit idle between jobs, you gain massive throughput—happier clients, happier customers, happy employees. Everybody is more efficient without materially making an impact to headcount. One of our customers has cut technician downtime by over 40 percent, just by materially improving dispatch and scheduling. Same team, a lot more work completed. Then the other piece is the admin time. Most of our customers come from setups where the job data could live literally in five different places. When you’re reentering info, manually you’re chasing down POs or purchase orders. Sometimes you might be guessing which version of a quote is the correct one. That doesn’t just slow you down, it causes significant financial errors. With BuildOps, we see a lot of that mitigated. We also see payroll processing time drop by sometimes 70, 80, 90 percent. Invoices get done oftentimes the same day or within 24 to 48 hours, instead of end of the week or, surprisingly, sometimes we see end of the month or…

Kerr: …or six months later.

Chanani: Yeah. And data entry really just dissipates. So the ripple effect is that techs are ultimately less frustrated, managers aren’t chasing their tails, customers get billed on time, and the entire machine works more efficiently and allows our customers to really better serve their customers and focus on what they do best.

Kerr: I wanted us to talk a little bit about technology and AI here. And let me first begin with, how much is AI pushing forward your capacity to deliver to customers and to clients on those dimensions? Is the difference from, say, five years ago to now significant in terms of being able to accomplish those tasks? Or is it 10 percent better? Where is the technology moving the goal there?

Chanani: It is a very, very significant piece of the workflow, the process, the thinking, and it’s integrated into a lot of different parts of the platform—and even the culture of how BuildOps internally operates. I think, for us, it was very well-defined, because we had an extremely well-defined customer segment. The questions that we try to answer are, why are jobs getting missed? Why are field teams calling in constantly? Why does a dispatcher have 47 tabs open and have no idea what’s going on with the 300 people they are dispatching real-time in L.A.—which, good luck—and have no confidence in that schedule? So AI became part of that answer after, I think, we got the fundamentals, right? And that meant building a core platform where the data is clean, the data is structured, and we had a high degree of confidence into how the work actually gets done. Once that foundation was in place, the patterns emerged, and we realized we could do more than just organize information. We could actually act on it. An example would be smart dispatch. Instead of having a human assign the next available tech, we actually are able to look at a number of variables—to include skill sets, past performance, similar jobs, location, time-on-site history, revenue, even equipment type—and significantly improve the ability, especially if you have a large number of folks out that you’re trying to dispatch real-time and have the system help make recommendations to the human to make it much more efficient.

Kerr: I’m curious. Oftentimes in many forms of AI adoption or just technology adoption more broadly, there’s the resistance or the hesitancy to go into the unknown place. If you go back to the beginning of our conversation and you described the state of technology that many of the companies you work with were at prior to starting this, it could have been three sheets of paper that had been stapled together and black carbon copies and all the other kinds stuff. You’re trying to push them all the way over here into this new frontier. What types of resistance happen along the way? Or do most of the contractors, once they’re in the platform, instantly want to adopt every aspect of it or swim very quickly?

Chanani: So it depends on a number of factors. One contractor I’m thinking about, particularly, where the senior leader there was actually at our annual conference, and he buzzes me constantly. He’s like, “What’s next? What’s new? I got to get on that. We’ll do whatever it takes.” He was really excited about one specific AI feature and a partnership that we’re launching that allowed younger, less experienced techs to use a GPT-type interface and take pictures of what the work they’re doing on and have real-time responses and then have that get smarter and more intelligent over time. He empowered his teams to think that way and operate that way with the understanding that the feature was still in the early stages. I would say the inverse of that is a large portion of our customer base that’s like, “Hey, we want this thing when it’s fully baked. We don’t have a lot of time. We need to be hyper-efficient.” It really depends on the risk tolerance and aversion or the mindset of the senior leadership at the top, as opposed to really the size of the business.

Kerr: This is such a fast-moving space. When you founded BuildOps in 2018, generative AI was still several years off and not as expected by many people. How do you keep up with that pace, as you’re managing the firm and designing where it’s going to go? “Are we going to invest in building on this generation? Do we think the technology’s going to be fundamentally different six months from now or a year from now? How do we wait on that?” And does this give you certain windows of opportunity that you exploit something, but you need to be prepared for what happens next? Just talk about that management of a very fast-moving tech cycle.

Chanani: I think the things that we come back to is, how can we—in the next evolution, as we’re looking toward the future—drive data-driven, meaningful insights to our customers? So, feedback that we’ve gotten, in terms of some of the predictive insights and the pace of growth that we’re moving at, is crews that are running long on boiler installs and how they can be far more efficient, a customer whose service margin keeps shrinking. We’re able to actually predict a lot of the operational inefficiencies in a way that was very hard to do even 18 or 24 months ago. A lot of that is ensuring that people across the business—so on our customer success, on our implementation—are working hand in hand with very minimal silos across the engineering and product delivery function. We can literally hear something from a customer and then hear this trend continuing as a core customer issue or an opportunity to drive a lot of growth. We’ve turned around things that are, literally, as quick as a week or two weeks and then delivered it and then iterating on that real time. That’s just like a speed and velocity that I think is our competitive advantage.

Kerr: Let’s think a little bit about that employee side. And there are some settings where employees have expressed being upset at too much scheduling, or there’s last-minute adjustments to their schedule, they can’t plan in advance. And then there’s other times where the employee experience is really enhanced by being able to swap with somebody else their shifts in order to make a better thing. Do you have a way of understanding for your customers how that employee experience changes as a consequence of the scheduling advances and the things that help out with the business overall?

Chanani: Yeah, so I think the beauty of BuildOps is that it gives you a very clear picture of your overall business, oftentimes for the first time, in the way that we do it and of what your workforce is doing, what they’re good at, and also where the bottlenecks are. You can see, for example, in terms of scheduling, which techs are overloaded, which are not fully utilized. You can see it in a very simple, easy-to-digest manner who’s growing in the role, and who’s potentially stuck. Then coming back to the skills and the certifications component, what specific skills are matched with success on certain jobs? It changes how dispatchers and managers and operators, operations managers, inventory managers assign work to folks that work for them and with them. It changes who you invest in, what type of investment you may need to make to level somebody up. And it changes how you design your next hire and fundamentally changes the dynamics of that team. So we’ve seen companies completely rethink how they resource plan as a result of the visibility—not because we gave them new data, but because we made the data coherent.

Kerr: Is it developing some type of career pathway for individuals? And I think you probably understand also where I’m going to go next. What would be your role potentially helping individuals move across employers and be in the credentialing or skill spaces as they look for other opportunities or they enter in a new place so you know what they’ve done in other settings?

Chanani: Yeah, the most common thing that we hear—and then this translates into career mobility—is somebody finally sees how I work. For techs, that means the cleaner schedules and fewer callbacks and less admin overhead and not chasing down work orders or being blamed for something that was outside of scope. Then, for managers, less firefighting; and owners, more confidence that jobs are moving. Now all of this is documented. So there’s a lot of history now that’s being tracked because all of this information is being basically captured in a system, as opposed to siloed in a bunch of different data sources that disappear if it’s on paper or on-prem or even in the cloud. I think that really optimizes our customer’s employee’s experience, and they’re able to take that information and, basically, if they needed to reload for any personal reasons or professional reasons, a lot of that information is incredibly valuable for them as they transition from point A to point B and even grow in their career ladder. There’s just such massive demand for skilled technicians.

Kerr: Talk to us about that macro picture—whether it’s called the “skills crunch,” the “skills shortage,” the “middle-skills gap.” There’s a bunch of people that are labeling it in different ways what seems to be an enormous gap in our workforce. How does that get experienced on the ground and with your business, but then also thinking more broadly, what should we do to close that gap?

Chanani: If you actually run through the data and you look at the actual gap of needed skilled technicians over the next several years—5 years, 10 years, 20 years—what you’ll find is that we’re just astonishingly far behind, and we’re not going to catch up. There’s almost no amount of trade schools and federal funding that is going to allow us to actually meet the demand. So, the question that we ask ourselves at BuildOps is, like, how can we help address the skilled-labor crunch? I think we know that we’re just not going to magically produce half a million commercial HVAC service technicians. But what we can do is get companies to get more out of the people that they already have without burning them out. For us, that means smarter onboarding, using job history and skill tags to get junior technicians ramped a lot more quickly, smarter scheduling, matching the right job for the right person so you’re not on the wrong job site with the wrong skill set. Over time, we’re helping expand the pool by showing clearer paths for growth. Then, in tandem with a lot of that is the conversational experience that the tech is able to have with our data set on the mobile application—almost like an AI, more sophisticated companion will allow more junior folks to ramp much more quickly.

Kerr: Yeah, that’s something we’ve seen in several settings, both academically and also out in the real world or academic experiments, is that the AI is often helping people that are more junior on the job level up much faster and become much more productive and build out from that. That seems something similar in your experience as well.

Chanani: Yeah, absolutely. I think that over the next several years—and we’ve already seen it—to become a game changer.

Kerr: It seems like, then, in 2018, when you’re getting this started, a lot of that underlying, I guess, ingredients that might deliver in that way—your employees having smartphones or smart devices that they can take out in the field with them, the technology coming together. A lot is transpiring along with that overall skills gap or shortage to really create a new way of servicing that problem or a new way of making the employees more productive. Is that a correct interpretation? Is it something that you realized was there? Or is it something that you benefited from some tailwinds once you got there?

Chanani: I think it would’ve been very difficult to start BuildOps 15, 20 years ago. I think the adoption of the iPhone, I think the clarity and success and large-scale scalability of platforms like AWS and the cloud and the large-scale adoption of the cloud and technologies that were very nascent in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, that just became widely adopted and much, much easier to use. That even extends to how we built the mobile app. So I would say a combination of technological advancements in some of the critical infrastructure, both in terms of the larger-scale macro cloud and the actual micro in terms of the actual technology that we deployed internally, that just rapidly allowed us to iterate, to build really quickly, to build scalable, to build truly enterprise grade functionality. I think that was really critical. Then simultaneously, Covid was a very material accelerant to the business, because I think it forced people to think in a way that they had not thought was even possible pre-Covid.

Kerr: Tell us a little bit [about] the horizon in your space. There’s a lot of, as we said earlier, fast-moving technologies. Unfortunately, the labor crunch is going to be here for quite a long time, so that one you can bank on. But what are you building toward, and what are you maybe on a three-year horizon, what are you hoping to do next with the business?

Chanani: We are investing very heavily in understanding the data and building predictive tools, leveraging a lot of gen AI and machine learning algorithms in tandem—not just to track what happened, but to anticipate what’s coming down the pike and how they can react to it and be more competitive. That means surfacing risk on a project before they blow up, highlighting skills gaps before they actually impact job quality, recommending assignments that optimize team strength, not just filling the schedule. In terms of workforce and workforce management, we’re also watching credentialing very carefully, especially microcredentials and portable training. The future is certainly not one-size-fits-all. We believe that every customer is almost going to have their own unique experience on BuildOps. The way to do that is real-time skill tracking throughout the platform, flagging when somebody’s ready to level up or when they need a refresher on a specific system. The trades are evolving very, very quickly. The workforce is absolutely evolving, and it’s very important for us to lead the way.

Kerr: Alok, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chanani: Thank you.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.