She booked the flight before she knew why

Julie Dumoulin was the only European entrepreneur invited to speak to American legislators about AI in construction. She had already booked the ticket, the flight and the hotel before anyone told her what the event was for.

The story starts earlier, in January, at the roofing expo in Las Vegas. Spotable's first US prospecting trip. The three founders did not go quietly: they hired a boat, built a full Belgian stand, handed out chocolate, ran waffle scent through the hall and put up an AI-generated backdrop with waffles and Manneken Pis. And then mentioned, by the way, that they also make roofing software.

"I say yes to everything, so I end up doing it," she tells the Ben's Mentors podcast. "Business-related, obviously. It has to actually be useful."

‍

People at that expo told her that if she could talk like that, she should come to the NRCA, the largest contractor association in the United States. So she booked herself in, a week before the event, still not knowing that a handful of attendees would be invited to speak in Washington. Everyone else in the room was from construction. Congress wanted to hear about IT and AI. That made her the obvious person to explain one to the other.

‍

What made it land was someone else's reaction. The CEO of one of the largest US roofing distributors, speaking before her, told the room he would only experience something like this once in his life.

"That's when it hit me," she says. "This is a big deal, and we're never doing this again, so let's make the most of it."

"In ten years, a roofer will still be on the roof"

Her argument about AI in the trade is narrower than the headlines usually are, and it is the reason contractors listen to her.

"The only question is how we use AI to help a roofer with their admin and sales, so they can focus on getting as many projects actually built as possible."

‍

The quoting is where she thinks the damage happens now. Measuring on site and writing the quote costs half a day even for a small house, she says, and a full day for the complex ones, the dormers and turrets and awkward villas that European roofs are full of. Material prices move, new products arrive constantly, and the calculation gets done by feel.

"A lot of admin is done ad hoc, and then hoping that at the end of the year the roofer has made a profit."

The customer is the father, not the son

The counterintuitive part is who buys. Spotable's ideal customer on paper is the digital-first roofer, usually the son who has taken over the family firm. In practice he has already built his own processes and will not switch.

The people who buy fastest are the ones who have been on roofs their whole working lives, cannot find anyone to do the calculations any more, and do not want to climb up there to measure. Her rule from that: usage and willingness to pay are not the same thing, and founders confuse them constantly.

‍

She is also clear about what the software does not touch. It removes the measuring and the typing. The price stays the roofer's call.

Why they didn't build an AI wrapper

Spotable calls itself an AI company, but Dumoulin says the product does not run on the kind of AI most people now picture. No large language model sitting underneath it. They built their own mathematical algorithms instead, stacked model on model, because the output has to be the same every time.

"We don't give advice," she says. "We give a result."

Where they do use the familiar sort of AI is internally, to ship code faster and to build their own small tools rather than buying another licence.

Ambition isn't a dirty word

She has a complaint about Belgium.

"Ambition and confidence get read as arrogance here. That's simply not true."

Saying out loud that you intend to build something very large is, in her view, the minimum requirement for building it.

Her advice to anyone starting is duller than the Senate story.

"There's only one thing that makes you succeed, and that's working consistently."

The quotes in this article have been translated from Dutch.