Why I'm Betting on AI for Australian Trades Businesses

I've spent the last 12 months exploring where AI can create real value for small businesses. Not theoretical value. Not "imagine if" value. The kind where a business owner looks at their numbers at the end of the month and something moved.

After building prototypes across half a dozen verticals — AI receptionists, dating apps, NDIS automation — I keep coming back to the same market: Australian trades businesses. Plumbers, solar installers, electricians, concreters. Here's why.

Most tradies I've spoken to on the Gold Coast and across South East Queensland are running their businesses on a combination of gut feel, word of mouth, and a Facebook page they set up in 2019. That's not a criticism — they're busy actually doing the work. But it means the gap between what's possible with modern tools and what they're currently doing is enormous.

Take Google reviews as one example. A plumber with 150 five-star reviews will win the job over a plumber with 12 reviews almost every time, even if the second plumber is better. Everyone knows this. Almost nobody has a system for consistently generating reviews after every job.

That's the kind of problem I like: important, understood, unsolved at the system level.

I've been working on a few products in this space. The first is a review management engine — AI-powered, built specifically for Australian trades businesses. It automates the process of requesting, generating, and responding to Google reviews. Not a generic SaaS tool with a trades skin on it. Purpose-built for how tradies actually operate: job done, invoice sent, review requested, response handled. The whole loop.

The second is an AI marketing performance service targeting solar installers. The core idea is running automated marketing experiment loops — testing ad creative, landing pages, and targeting variations at a pace that a human marketer can't match — and feeding the results back into the next cycle. Think of it as a marketing R&D function that most small businesses could never afford to run manually.

I could build AI tools for tech companies. The margins might even be better. But I've spent my career in operations — in restaurants, in franchise networks, in environments where the work is physical and the margins are tight. I understand how operators think because I am one.

Trades businesses are also massively underserved by the current wave of AI tools. Most AI products are designed for knowledge workers — people who sit at computers all day. A solar installer doesn't want to log into a dashboard. They want the thing to work in the background and show them results once a week.

That constraint forces better product design. If your tool requires the user to babysit it, you've failed. If it runs autonomously and surfaces outcomes, you've built something a tradie will actually pay for.

Australia's trades market has some unique characteristics that make it attractive. The trades workforce is large and growing — there's a genuine skills shortage driving demand. Local search is the primary acquisition channel for most trades businesses, which means Google reviews and local SEO are disproportionately valuable. And the market is big enough to build a real business but small enough that you're not competing with well-funded US startups on day one.

I'm based on the Gold Coast, which is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. I can test locally, prove the model, and expand from there.

I'm in the build-and-validate phase. Running Meta ads to test messaging and demand. Getting the review product in front of real businesses for feedback. Pricing at $149/month to keep it accessible and reduce friction.

If you're a trades business owner and this resonates, I'd genuinely like to hear what your biggest marketing or operations headache is. That's how I figure out what to build next.