How One Remodeling Firm is Using AI to Simplify Workflows and Sharpen its Edge

The home building industry is evolving, and Florida-based home remodeling and design firm KBF Design Gallery isn't waiting to catch up. In this episode of Women at WIRC, Ashley Sheaffer talks about how her team is using AI to simplify workflows, improve project timelines, and more importantly, to free up more time for client relationships.

Welcome back to Women at WIRC, where our editors from sister media brands—Pro Builder, Pro Remodeler, and Custom Builder—sit down with standout women across home building, remodeling, and design. We share their stories and business insights, and explore how women are reshaping the residential building industry.

Catherine Sweeney: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Women at WIRC podcast. I'm your host, Catherine, and I'm joined here today by Ashley Sheaffer, who's a principal at the Florida-based residential remodeling firm KBF Design Gallery. As AI has become more integrated into the home building industry, KBF Design Gallery has found a way to make AI really work for them.

So, thank you, Ashley, for coming on. We're so excited to talk to you today.

Ashley Sheaffer: Thank you so much for having me.

Catherine: For those who might not be familiar, can you just kind of talk about KBF Design Gallery, what you do there, and what specifically your role is?

Ashley: Yeah. KBF Design Gallery is a full-service home remodeling and interior design firm. We're out of Maitland, Fla., which is just north of Orlando. We've been around for about 20 years, and my brother Adam and I bought it from our father six years ago when he retired. My title is principal, but really, you know, as I've grown up in the business, I'm focused less on the day-to-day and more on strategy leadership, sales and design. 

I came up through sales and design, so I really do love the client-facing side deeply, but now that I've stepped out of that day-to-day, I focus on where the company is headed, and AI is a huge part of that.

Catherine: Yeah. So, you said 20 years, is that right?

Ashley: Yes, 20—22 technically.

Catherine: Oh, wow. So, you've seen [the industry] kind of change over the years. How has that implementation of AI been for your company, and what specific ways is KBF implementing AI?

Ashley: Yeah, I think before the “what,” the “why” is probably the most relatable part of this, and really I think the last few years as Adam and I have taken this over, the company has obviously learned a lot of lessons in 22 years, but as our business has changed, so has the industry.

And there are pain points that every company hits with new levels of growth or new additions to the team, and our vow to each other—Adam and I—a few years ago was that we're not going to go into every new year with the same pain points that we had last year.

And AI has really helped us with systemizing things that, before, in this kind of cottage industry weren't systemized before. So, you know, one of the biggest things that I'm working on right now is our sales intelligence system. A few years ago, we started using Otter AI to record every client meeting that we have or internal meetings or sales meetings.

And what I've been able to do is take that tribal knowledge of, you know, all of my years in the industry and in the business, and aggregate it into a sales playbook. It used to be that I was the person that everyone on the team came to to say, “Hey, you know, the client said this.”

And while I love that, and I love working with the team in that way, it doesn't scale.

So now what we have is this playbook uploaded into, we use Claude Cowork. So, our playbook is uploaded into there, and they have this interactive tool that they can upload the client's contract, upload the client conversations and emails and kind of all of this project data along with the sales playbook and ask, you know, help me with a breakdown for this.

And it understands our way of pricing, our way of doing things, so it's really helped me to kind of take a step back out of the day-to-day sales management and more into that leadership role. 

Another one is, and I think probably our industry is so archaic—and I say that lovingly—but most of our contracts are built either in QuickBooks or in Excel or Word documents.

Some companies are still doing, you know, like handwritten estimates and one of the biggest areas of oversight for us is when a client makes a change that is as simple as, “I want to change the countertop from quartz to marble, and let's do a full height backsplash,” and for most design build companies that I know, that change has to be translated in let's say six different places. And heaven forbid you're having a face-to-face conversation with the client and you forget to document that that becomes downstream a serious issue for the actual building of the kitchen or whatever the project is.

So what we have built, and something that I'm actually going live with next week, is what we're calling our Single Source of Truth contract tool, [using] Claude Cowork.

I've basically spent the last two weeks in plain language kind of griping to it about these problems, these are our documents, this is, you know, where mistakes happen, etc. And it has helped me build this tool—I've fed it QuickBooks, I've fed it historical data on projects. I've fed it our previous estimates, our storyboard, Zapier to connect Otter to it so that, as we are in a meeting with a client, we can use historical data to price it.

The user interface has one place that I can put all of the material information, and then it parses those images or details into the different areas of the client's proposal. And then I've prompted it so that when Otter transcripts are uploaded into this tool after the meeting ends, it flags the members of my team. These are the decisions that are still pending. These are the decisions that were made.

And, then, say there's multiple meetings with the client because it's a whole house remodel, it will chronologically record the timestamps of when “X” decision was made, or, you know, they changed their mind on “X” decision. It's the brain of the project, so to speak.

Catherine: One of the things that's interesting to me about what you're saying, and I think one of the big gripes with AI in general is the dehumanization of things, and it sounds to me like you're able to work with these programs and also present humans first and really work better with your clients. Would you say that's true? 

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. The whole end goal is to take the hard stuff off of my employees, the things that cause pain points year-over-year and also to simplify the process for the client so they're not also experiencing things like the project taking longer than it needed to, because historically, when something goes wrong, it's about how you respond to the issue and that's how your reputation is built as a company.

And in construction, we work with humans every day. There is going to be something that goes wrong on a project. And it's all about the response.

But if I can take a portion of those mistakes out of it, the human error, any portion that I can take of human error out of a remodel project, I'm all for it.

Catherine: Absolutely. And what would you say the reception has been like, not just across the industry, but specifically at your firm?

Ashley: I would say it's mixed.

The one thing that we're constantly telling our team is we're not looking at AI as a tool to replace any one of you. We're looking at AI as a tool to take the things that you don't want to do off of your plate so that you can spend more time doing what you do. 

We're positioned for growth. The industry is booming right now, especially, you know, we're in Florida, and so, this is not about looking to cut costs and overhead, but to scale what each employee is able to do and make them better. 

Catherine: And how long have you been working with these platforms? When did you start using some of these AI tools, and how has that [usage] changed over time?

Ashley: I would say probably late 2024 is when we started getting serious about it. It starts as curiosity, right? So it's, “help me write this email.” We've all heard that, but I think that what really clicked for me is when I stopped treating AI like it was a search engine and started treating it like a team member. So, instead of asking it like random questions, [it's about] giving it more of the context of, here's my business, here's how we work, here's what I need, here are the constraints; [that] has really changed the way that I see it. 

So, it's not, “write me a follow-up email,” but it's like [vet] my process, you know, [or analyze] this client situation, etc., and it's smarter than I am, so I don't have to have all the answers. I just know how to use the tools at hand.

Catherine: And we talked about some of the tools that have obviously been working well. Was there anything that you tried initially that ended up not working out?

Ashley: Anytime I'm asked that question or I'm talking to a team member about that, uh, there's that caveat or that asterisk that goes before what hasn't worked.

And the big thing is yet, right, because it is constant, it's iterative learning, right? It's constantly getting smarter, but the things that haven't worked for us yet are a lot of, you know, design tools that are coded or classified as construction for AI. With what we do, it’s very custom, and these tools are very generic, and generic doesn't really work for a business where every client's kitchen is different. We say internally, “We go from builder grade to custom-made,” and AI certainly isn't there yet with any sort of design tools.

Catherine: Broadly speaking, how are you seeing AI change the workflows across the industry? Are you seeing negative changes, positive changes? Maybe both in some instances?

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely both. I think it's overwhelmingly positive for our clients. Everything that frustrates them about remodeling, root causes that we can do to make the process simpler, and I think it's positive for the trades people, too. It takes the administrative work off of them, so they can focus more on their craft. I would say the workflows right now, primarily, it's pre-construction, and I think it's going to be a long time before we see anything in construction that's an applicable tool, right? We don't have robots laying tile, and that's not going to be the case for a very long time, but estimates, material takeoffs, things that used to take days for more senior level people now take hours. 

I think the biggest change for us was when we started recording our clients’ meetings. So, Otter AI is what we use, but I know there are a million of them. Even if you don't do anything fancy with it, with the transcripts right away, just having a searchable record of what was discussed is incredibly powerful. 

And then uploading your client's most important or your company's most important documents. So just your contract template, your sales process, your scope of work language into a project, gives your team the access to ask questions and get answers that are grounded in your way of doing the business instead of Claude or [Chat]GPT kind of hallucinating or guessing.

Catherine: Right. And is there anything else that you want to add? Anything else you want people to know? Or just any big takeaways that you've had from using AI?

Ashley: People that I talk to in our industry are afraid of what [AI] is going to do. But don't think of AI as like a technology project. Think of it as if it's almost like a hiring decision. Like if you could hire someone that works 24-7, doesn't call in sick, they can read 100 documents in 30 seconds, would you hire that person? And you would, and like that is what you're saying no to when you put off learning or saying, “I'm going to figure AI out later. I've got too much to do.” Just time-block and set aside, let's say a day, a month to just experiment with it. It absolutely changes your scalability and what you can accomplish in a day, and also the quality of the output.

Catherine: I think that's great, and thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of that insight. I appreciate it.

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to Women at WIRC. This podcast is a spinoff of our annual Women in Residential Construction Conference, which we’ve hosted since 2016. You can learn more about the conference and see when we’ll be in your area by visiting womensconstructionconference.com. Women at Work is a production of Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B. Until next time, keep up the good work.

Women at WIRC is produced by Custom Builder, ProBuilder, and ProRemodeler. Subscribe to the podcast at:

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