Category: CRM

October 17, 2026

Our first AI Office Hours went inside a real roofing company to see what AI automation looks like when it stops being a demo and starts running the business. Our team walked through a live end-to-end job built from two PDFs, and special guest Adam Lynn of First National Roofing, a roofer for 17 years and a longtime Contractors Cloud client, showed the AI agents he has running today.

The full recording is below and on our YouTube channel you can subscribe to. If you missed our AI Assistant webinar this summer, that webinar is also on the blog and is a good starting point before this one.

Contractors Cloud founder Dwight Gunnarson framed the session with a simple claim: learning AI is the most important business decision a contractor can make right now. AI lets you analyze data faster and connect software with little to no developer experience, but it still needs a central place to store and access your data.

Over the past few years Contractors Cloud rebuilt its infrastructure around native Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, which is what makes everything below possible. Three takeaways stood out.

Takeaway 1: Start with the repetitive tasks eating your staff’s time

Adam’s first words were “I am not a tech guy.” He doesn’t write code. He asks the AI how to do things, and it tells him. When the MCP tools rolled out, he started with one question: what repetitive tasks are consuming my employees’ time? That question produced a list of agents that now run at First National Roofing:

• Supplier invoices. Their supplier sends batch PDFs with many invoices inside. His office associate used to snip and upload each one by hand, about an hour per batch. Now an AI agent has its own email address: it splits the PDF, uploads each invoice to the right project in Contractors Cloud, and notifies her. As of last week, it enters the expenses too.
• EagleViews and adjuster emails. EagleView reports are routed to the agent for automatic upload. Public adjuster emails are read by an agent that creates and updates project Jet Streams.
• Contracts and lead reports. A signed contract triggers project creation and document upload. For paid leads, he gets a morning report of yesterday’s leads and where each one stands.
• Supplements. An agent takes the EagleView, the adjuster’s estimate and Xactimate pricing and produces an estimate or supplement in seconds.
• Material orders. He taught the AI his ordering standards. It reads the EagleView and sales checklist to draft orders, and it compares original orders against returns across hundreds of jobs to tighten the numbers.

His learning curve was a couple of days at most. He treats the AI as an assistant he talks to all day about marketing and process, and he has plans for 21 agent “employees,” including a board of directors that reviews decisions across the company.

Two points he was careful to make. First, automation hasn’t meant firing anyone; a human still reviews the work, and the people freed up move to higher-value tasks. Second, he skipped the small stuff and went straight to the hard problems: how to make staff happier and the business more efficient.

Takeaway 2: The MCP server puts your whole business within reach

Contractors Cloud’s Mike Kampa showed what this looks like inside our app. Starting from just a State Farm scope of loss PDF and an EagleView PDF from a past job, he ran an entire project from Claude without clicking around in the app:

• Project creation. Uploading the scope PDF created the project, filled the estimated project value, selected the roofing and siding custom fields, and wrote an insurance claim details note.
• Scheduling and estimates. It set an inspection appointment on the calendar, parsed the EagleView, and line-item matched the insurance scope, flagging about $1,700 of non-trade items, to build proposal estimates.
• Material and work orders. Applying local Minnesota code rules (ice and water shield to 24 inches inside the exterior wall, for example), it generated material and crew work orders and put them on the whiteboard calendar for Saturday.
• Email and invoicing. It sent the project attachments to the Stratus project email address and generated the project invoice.
• An audit. Asked “What am I missing on this job?”, it caught that the deductible was missing from the State Farm invoice, noted the scope might be nearing expiration, and warned that signed paperwork wasn’t on file.

The point isn’t that each step is impressive on its own. It’s that the AI can read the documents you already receive and do the data entry, scheduling, ordering and checking that normally happens across a dozen screens.

Takeaway 3: Specialized agents, your permissions, and reports that watch for you

A few practical questions from the Q&A are worth repeating.

Your team can use it, with the same permissions. Employees connect through their own accounts, and every business rule, user permission and restriction already configured in Contractors Cloud still applies. If someone asks the AI to do something they can’t do in the app, it tells them they don’t have access.

Build specialized agents, not one that does everything. Adam’s strongest advice was to give each agent one job. Mike echoed this with skills built inside Claude or ChatGPT for ordering standards and formulas: hand one an EagleView and it produces a list tailored to your company’s waste margins and ordering rules, over and above the settings in the app.

Let scheduled reports do the watching. Adam is setting up a report that alerts him when an Atlanta job hits 80 days, leaving 10 days to file a lien before the 90-day deadline. Mike described weekly or monthly Accounts Receivable reports that create historical snapshots so you can see trends, and that can automatically trigger warnings or Jet Streams on accounts more than 30 days delinquent.

What’s next with AI and Contractors Cloud

Dwight closed with what’s coming from Contractors Cloud:

• Continued expansion of the MCP tools and API
• New production features rolling out in Stratus this week
• Integration with Hover, which already has its own MCP server
• Supplier integrations, starting with ABC Supply in the next few weeks

If you’re wondering where to start, borrow Adam’s question: what repetitive task is eating an hour of someone’s day? Pick that one, connect the MCP server, and ask the AI how to automate it. We’ll keep running these office hours periodically, so bring your questions and your own use cases to the next one.

July 29, 2026

Contractors Cloud is taking a massive leap forward and becoming an AI-first CRM and project management app. We are incredibly excited to announce the launch of our very own, fully functional Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. 

This isn’t just a tacked-on feature; it is a foundational integration that changes the game for roofing and other contractors, allowing AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT to directly interact with Contractors Cloud data to perform an almost unlimited range of functions.

For years, Contractors Cloud has empowered roofers with market-leading database architecture, hyper-customizable workflows, and superior entity mapping. We’ve given you the tools to manage complex projects from lead to final payment. 

Now, we are unlocking that entire foundational ecosystem. By introducing a native MCP layer, the emerging industry standard for securely connecting AI assistants to business software. This move has transformed Contractors Cloud from a closed UI into an open, high-integrity data engine.

Watch our summer webinar recording to see more on our new AI capabilities and real examples at work.

“The Shift is Here”: How AI Assistants Are Redefining Contracting Workflows

The impact of this cannot be overstated. We are moving beyond screens and static reports toward a reality of automated, UI-less ingestion and unrestricted business intelligence. The freedom to connect your favorite AI tool to Contractors Cloud to create the ultimate AI assistant for your roofing and contracting business is a cheat code.

As Contractors Cloud CEO Dwight Gunnarson explains, the AI shift is already here. “Once you get a taste of the power and the productivity this brings and what you’re able to do in an hour today with an AI assistant versus what you were able to do an hour yesterday, there’s no denying that it’s incredible,” Dwight says. “This is the go forward, the writing’s on the wall.”

Unlimited possibilities at your fingertips

This move allows you to continue using the AI assistants you or your team already know and love—like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor—but now those assistants can work directly inside Contractors Cloud. You don’t need to learn a new application or constantly copy-paste data between screens. You simply talk to your AI agent in plain English, and it executes actions in the CRM for you.

When Dwight Gunnarson saw how fast AI tech was advancing, he knew Contractors Cloud had to act. “The moment you say it’s still a ways off, with what’s happening with this new revolution, it’s already here,” Dwight emphasizes. “We wanted to figure out how we can help our clients get stuff done faster.”

Once connected, your AI agent has secure access to tools that will grow over time. Today, you can use AI to do the following with more being added:

• Find and manage contacts: Search, create, update, and link contacts to accounts or projects.
• Manage customer accounts: Look up, create, and update accounts.
• Work with projects: Search projects, create new ones with the correct setup options, and add project notes. Your AI agent can also update project details, such as finding out its current milestone or workflow and changing details.
• Handle tasks: Find, create, and update tasks.
• Run reports: Find the right report and pull live data to answer immediate questions, on demand.
• Answer product questions: Search our official help documentation to answer any “How do I…” questions about Contractors Cloud.
• Project files and photos: Have your agent find files/photos in a project’s File Cabinet, or upload files from a link/attachment. It can rename, move, and tag files, and even set a project’s cover photo.
• Email: Ask about emails in your own inbox or any project’s inbox.
• Appointments: Ask “What’s on my calendar today?” to get immediate answers, schedule new appointments tied to projects, and reschedule ones that haven’t started.
• Material orders: Upload a supplier invoice and ask the assistant to find the matching material order by PO and supplier to compare costs.

Imagine asking your agent things like:

• “Run my Production Pipeline report and tell me what roofing projects were created this month.”
• “Find the Hendersons’ customer account and add a note to their active project.”
• “Show me the photos on the Johnson project.”
• “How do I connect QuickBooks Online to Contractors Cloud?”
  

Or you want to create a dashboard for reporting insights:

• “I need you to build me a personal dashboard with my Contractors Cloud account. I want it to give me an overview of my business. Show me what’s coming, what’s rotting, and specifically I want to know expenses this month versus last month, and I want sales this month versus last month with chart comparisons.”

How the Magic Works: The Engine of AI-First Contracting

The launch of the Contractors Cloud MCP Server is more than just a new feature—it represents a fundamental decoupling of our platform’s immense power from the traditional user interface. Instead of manually clicking through screens to find information, update records, or generate reports, you are now delegating those complex operations directly to your AI agent.

This seamless integration isn’t accidental; it is built on a precise, two-part orchestration of advanced infrastructure, security governance, and meticulous documentation, designed to make your business faster, your agents smarter, and your data safer.

The Foundation: Our AI-Ready API and Semantically Clear Core

Before an AI can act on your data, it needs a perfect mathematical blueprint of what is possible within our system. At Contractors Cloud, we’ve always prioritized superior architecture. We’ve meticulously organized, structured, and machine-documented our APIs—programmatically documented via the OpenAPI specification.

This structured approach is critical for pairing with an MCP Server. Traditional APIs often rely on human intuition to parse ambiguous naming or multi-step processes. To fuel an LLM (Large Language Model), however, we must provide absolute precision.

A well-structured API creates predictive input and output. When we define logical granularity—endpoint composition, parameter specificity (e.g., ensuring “temperatureCelsius” is a string), and robust semantic descriptions—we are essentially teaching the AI exactly how to use our app’s capabilities correctly. This deep, programmatic clarity is the primary mechanism that eliminates the hallucinations and errors that plague AIs trying to guess how poorly designed systems operate.

The Automated Interpreter: What the MCP Server Actually Does

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server sits as a dynamic intelligence layer between your AI assistant and our core data engine, functioning as an Automated Interpreter that translates simple human intent into complex technical actions.

To understand how this partnership creates unstoppable intelligence, consider this relationship:

The well-structured, documented API teaches the LLM what can be done. The MCP Server manages when and how to do it at runtime.

By reading our programmatic documentation at runtime, the MCP server allows your AI agent to understand precisely which functions to call, what data to provide, and the exact consequences of its actions. This ensures your autonomous agents are stable, safe, and always synchronized with our core app’s business logic. 

Furthermore, when our API is updated, those updates are automatically propagated through the MCP server, instantly giving your agent access to the newest features without your having to re-read documentation or manually re-code a single line.

Safe, Autonomous Operations

The integration is built with clear governance.

• Your Permissions are the Ceiling: This is the most crucial tenet of our AI architecture. The AI agent acts as you, not with administrative super-user powers. It can only see data, update records, and execute actions that your own user login allows. Nothing more.
• Built-in Action Confirmations: Most AI platforms show you a preview of what a “tool call” is about to do before it executes. We strongly recommend keeping these confirmations active, allowing your agent to run autonomously under your explicit review.
• Safe-Action Scopes: While your agent can perform almost unlimited actions, certain sensitive capabilities are excluded by design. It cannot, for example, delete files, Jet Streams, or appointments, ensuring that while it acts on your behalf, it can never accidentally destroy critical business history.
• Total Transparency: Every action taken by your agent is recorded in the project activity feed just like a normal user update, ensuring there are no invisible changes.

Connecting your AI Assistant

The connection process for your AI tool of choice to Contractors Cloud will vary.

Claude

For Claude we are an approved connection in their store. You will start by selecting Customize (toolbox icon) from your main left menu. Then select Connectors, click Add (upper right), Browse Connectors and search for Contractors Cloud and complete the connection process.

ChatGPT

To start with ChatGPT you will select Plugins from the left menu. Then click the + button to the right of the search field. You will then input the Contractors Cloud info, including the connection URL from our docs. You will then complete the connection and process. (Note: We are currently a custom plugin addition for ChatGPT but will be an official connection soon.)

Partner with the Leader: Follow Contractors Cloud into the AI frontier

This launch is a defining moment. We haven’t built another feature for roofers; we’ve defined (with you) a new operational standard for the entire construction software industry. While others are still figuring out what AI means for their bloat-filled codebases, Contractors Cloud is acting. We are the trailblazers, the first to provide native MCP capabilities and unlock infinite data analysis on an auditable, enterprise-grade system.

Our market-leading database structure and complex entity mapping are no longer static assets behind an interface; they are the high-octane fuel for your autonomous workflows. When you pair our programmatically perfect API documentation with this revolutionary MCP server, you are not just getting faster; you are deploying an unstoppable AI engine that acts as the Jarvis for your entire operation.

Lately, roofers and contractors have been asking us: “What can I do with Contractors Cloud and AI?”

With the combined power of our Model Context Protocol (MCP) and robust API, that question just officially flipped on its head. Now, the real question is: “What can’t you do?”

We’re no longer just talking about incremental time savings—we’ve removed the ceiling entirely. How you automate, analyze, and scale your business is now limited only by your imagination.

Want to see this in action? Watch our summer webinar recording to learn more.

June 17, 2025

The fencing industry might seem straightforward—measure, quote, install—but any contractor knows it’s far more complex behind the scenes. From juggling bids and permits to coordinating materials, crews, and customers across multiple job sites, success hinges on staying organized and responsive. 

That’s where a fencing CRM and project management platform like Contractors Cloud becomes a game-changer for companies looking to grow their business.

What Is a CRM for Fence Companies?

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system helps you track leads, quotes, and customers through every stage of the sales and project lifecycle. Add project management tools into the mix, and you have an all-in-one solution to manage everything from your first call to the final invoice, all with visibility, accountability, and automation at every step.

Why Fence Contractors Need More Than a Spreadsheet

Here are the biggest reasons contractors are switching to purpose-built fencing CRMs and project management software. Contractors Cloud gives you the tools to grow, scale, profit, and deliver a better customer experience:

1. Turn More Leads into Jobs

Fence leads often come from phone calls, form submissions, or referrals. Contractors Cloud captures and organizes these leads instantly through custom lead forms and imports. You can assign reps, track lead sources, and automatically trigger tasks or reminders.

Built-in automation ensures every inquiry is followed up, while detailed sales reporting helps you track conversion rates and team performance.

2. Create and Send Estimates in Minutes

Stop wasting time retyping every quote. With Contractors Cloud, you can create template-driven estimates for your most common fence types and configurations like wood, vinyl, chain-link, and more. Then easily convert those estimates into branded proposals with your pricing, scope, and contract terms.

Customers can view, approve, and sign online, and your team can move forward faster. You can operate with fewer errors and no paperwork delays.

3. Keep Projects (and Crews) Moving

Material delays, permitting issues, and jobsite changes can derail your schedule fast. Contractors Cloud keeps your whole team in sync with real-time updates, task automation, and custom project workflows that adapt to how you operate, not the other way around.

Use Milestones to map out your process (like “Utility Marking Complete” or “Gate Installed”), automate handoffs between departments, and track progress across dozens of jobs. Internal communication tools like Jet Stream team chat keep conversations organized and on record.

4. Track Materials, Suppliers, and Costs

Margins matter—and mismanaged materials eat into your profits. Contractors Cloud lets you manage material orders, vendor communication, and supplier tracking from a centralized dashboard.

Easily see what’s been ordered, delivered, or delayed. You’ll also track project-level costs, payouts, and final margins so you can make smart decisions and protect your bottom line.

5. Centralize Communication and Documentation

Ditch the paper trail and text thread chaos. Contractors Cloud keeps everything in one place. Project notes, contracts, files, photos, and portal communication are accessible to your entire team anytime, anywhere.

You can even use our customer portal to share updates, collect signatures, and enhance transparency with your clients. The result? Fewer surprises and more satisfied homeowners.

More Than Just CRM: Built for Fence Contractors

Contractors Cloud isn’t generic software. It’s built for the unique demands of fencing and specialty contractors with fencing CRM features for:

• Custom Workflows – Manage your project process the way you want, with total flexibility
  
• Internal Scheduling – Assign and track appointments, jobs, and inspections
  
• QuickBooks Integration – Sync your invoices, payments, and financials seamlessly
  
• Team Communication Tools – Jet Stream team chat, alerts, and notes to keep everyone aligned
  
• Project Reporting – Understand where you’re winning (and losing) across jobs, reps, and regions
  
• Mobile app – Access the project info you need when in the field and communicate with your team
  

Whether you’re a small crew looking to streamline your day-to-day or a growing company managing dozens of installs a week, upgrading your operations with Contractors Cloud gives you the tools to run a faster, smarter, and more scalable business.

A fencing CRM to work smarter

Contractors Cloud is a fencing CRM you can start with and grow with. It connects your fencing leads, jobs, and teams in one simple platform—so you can install more fences and stress less.
 

👉 Schedule a demo today to see how it works for your fencing business.