What does Katie King’s AI strategy mean for home service contractors?
Katie King’s AI strategy comes down to one idea a contractor can use tomorrow: put strategy before tools. Pick the two or three problems that cost you jobs, fix your data and your people’s habits, and only then buy software. Most of the payoff comes from how your team works, not from the app you bought.
Key takeaways
- King, author of AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing, says brands fail by buying AI tools before they have a strategy.
- Boston Consulting Group’s 10-20-70 rule puts 70% of AI success on people and processes, not algorithms.
- For a contractor, the best AI wins sit in the middle of the funnel, where homeowners compare and decide.
King is the CEO of AI in Business, a UK consultancy, and has written three books on AI in marketing. Her newest, the second edition of AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing (Kogan Page, 2025), is aimed at big brands like L’Oréal and Salesforce. But the lessons fit a 12-truck HVAC shop just as well, because the mistakes are the same.
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What is Katie King’s main advice about AI?
King’s main advice is to start with the business problem, not the technology. In a 2026 interview she named three reasons companies stall: buying AI platforms without a clear strategy, messy data spread across separate systems, and, most important, people and culture. Expensive tools on broken foundations just make the mess faster.
For a contractor, “broken foundations” usually means three things. Leads live in five places: the phone, a web form, Facebook messages, Angi and a notebook in the truck. Nobody owns follow-up. And the website was built years ago, before anyone thought about AI search.
Fix those first. An AI receptionist or a chatbot bolted onto that mess will answer faster, then hand the lead to the same broken process.
What is the 10-20-70 rule, and how does it apply to a small company?
The 10-20-70 rule, from Boston Consulting Group, says AI success comes 10% from the algorithm, 20% from technology and data, and 70% from people and processes. King cites it often. For a home service company, that means most of your AI budget and attention should go to training and habits, not software.
| Share of success | What it means for a contractor |
|---|---|
| 10% algorithm | Which AI tool you pick. Matters least. |
| 20% tech and data | One CRM, clean customer records, call tracking. |
| 70% people and process | Who answers calls, how fast, what they say, who follows up. |
The research backs her up. BCG found only about a quarter of companies get meaningful value from AI, and MIT’s 2025 GenAI Divide report found 95% of companies saw no measurable profit from their AI pilots. The winners redesigned how work gets done instead of adding tools on top.
Where should a contractor use AI first?
A contractor should use AI first in the “messy middle,” King’s phrase for the stretch where homeowners research, compare and form opinions. Most businesses spend their AI effort on the top of the funnel (ads, content) or the bottom (checkout). The middle, where trust is built, is underserved, and it is where home service jobs are won or lost.
In practice, the middle of the funnel for a contractor looks like this:
- The homeowner asks Google or ChatGPT who to call.
- They compare two or three companies on reviews, photos and price clues.
- They call or book, and judge you by how fast and clearly you answer.
- They wait for the estimate and decide.
AI helps at every step: getting you named in AI answers, answering questions on your website, catching the call you would have missed and following up on the estimate that went quiet.
This is what Get Chosen is built for: we check your website converts, get you recommended on Google and AI, and make sure the call gets booked.
What is an AI Playbook, and does a small company need one?
An AI Playbook is King’s name for a short, living set of rules for how a company uses AI. Big brands build it with a group of “AI champions” from different departments who meet weekly. A small contractor needs the same thing, just smaller: one owner or office manager and a one-page document.
Your one-page playbook should answer five questions:
- Which tools are approved, and who pays for them?
- What customer information can never go into an AI tool?
- Which prompts work best for estimates, review replies and job write-ups?
- Who checks AI-written content before customers see it?
- What problem are we using AI to fix this quarter?
What does King warn contractors to avoid?
King warns against three risks: lazy over-reliance on AI-written content, data governance gaps, and neglecting the human skills that make marketing work. The first matters most for contractors. If every roofer uses AI to write the same website copy and the same review replies, every roofer sounds the same, and the homeowner has nothing to choose on.
She also urges caution with agentic AI, tools that act on their own. She says the trust isn’t there yet for letting agents make payments and decisions, and that companies need guardrails and escalation points to a human first. Gartner agrees, predicting over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Katie King?
Katie King is the CEO of AI in Business, a UK consultancy that trains companies to use AI in marketing, sales and customer experience. She wrote AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing for Kogan Page, serves on a UK parliamentary group on AI adoption and sits on the editorial board of the journal AI and Ethics.
Is Katie King’s book useful for small businesses?
Yes, with translation. The case studies feature large brands, but the core lessons apply to any company: strategy before tools, clean data, trained people and ethical use of customer information. A home service owner can apply the same ideas with a one-page playbook and a few well-chosen tools.
What is the 10-20-70 rule for AI?
The 10-20-70 rule from Boston Consulting Group says AI value comes 10% from algorithms, 20% from technology and data, and 70% from people and processes. It means most of the work in adopting AI is changing how your team operates, not choosing software.
Where should a contractor start with AI?
Start with the problem that costs you the most jobs, usually missed calls, slow follow-up or not showing up when homeowners search. Fix the process first, such as who answers and how fast, then add an AI tool that supports it. Measure booked jobs, not activity.
The bottom line
King’s strategy is simple to say and hard to do: decide what problem you are solving, fix your data and your team’s habits, then add AI where homeowners decide. For most contractors, that means getting recommended, getting trusted and getting the call booked. Get Chosen is built on exactly that order, or book a free call with Mike to map your first three moves.
Sources
- Bigeye, IN CLEAR FOCUS: AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing, 2nd ed., with Katie King (2026)
- Kogan Page, AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing, 2nd edition
- Boston Consulting Group, Closing the AI Impact Gap (2025)
- MIT Project NANDA, The GenAI Divide (2025), via Virtualization Review
- Gartner, agentic AI project forecast (2025), via Outlook Business
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