Will AI Replace Contractors

Bill Russell, CEO of LB Capital, sits down with Anand Subbaraj, CEO and Co-Founder of Zuper, the field service management platform. Anand spent fifteen years at Microsoft building products before a single bad customer experience sent him down a different path — he waited eight weeks to get a refrigerator serviced by one of the largest service companies in the country, and being a product person, he went looking for why.

What he found was an industry full of exceptional operators whose technology had not kept pace with the complexity of their businesses. Zuper started in 2020. In January of 2025 Anand stood up in an all-hands and told the company they were becoming AI-native, then took two weeks off his own calendar to build eight working tools himself, because he believes that kind of transformation has to come top down or it doesn’t come at all.

The conversation gets practical fast. Anand walks through Zuper Sense, which answers plain-English questions about the business and returns recommendations rather than reports, and Zuper Coach, which captures what’s actually said in the home, scores it against the company’s playbook, and runs new reps through AI role-play before they ever knock on a door.

Bill pushes on the part most owners aren’t thinking about: if everyone is a coder now, what happens to your data when you upload it into a tool you haven’t read the fine print on. Anand’s answer is blunt, and it’s worth hearing before you build your own anything. They close on where this all lands for roofing, and Anand’s read is that the winners won’t be the companies with the most trucks.