Artificial intelligence (A.I.) is a major headline maker these days, and while some electrical contractors may be weary of all the news coverage, others have some questions.

What does it all mean? How will A.I. impact my business? Will it replace my secretary? Will it replace even me?

A.I. shouldn’t be alarming, if you know how it works, according to Anton Mikec, owner of Lighthouse Electric Co. Inc., Canonsburg, Pa., and Christopher Carr, founder and president of Dynaimix, an A.I. business and strategy company based in Horsham, Pa.

The pair made a presentation, “The State of A.I. in Electrical Contracting,” at NECA 2025 Chicago on Sept. 13. I talked to Mikec and Carr, along with Jesse Mikec, president of Safe.Right.Fast, Canonsburg, Pa., which helps contractors develop solutions to find ways to do processes right, safe and in an efficient manner to improve performance and reduce labor costs. 

From left, Jesse Mikec, president of Safe.Right.Fast; Christopher Carr, founder and president of Dynaimix; and Anton Mikec, owner of Lighthouse Electric, presented “The State of A.I. in Electrical Contracting” at NECA 2025 Chicago. Photo courtesy of Jesse Mikec.

Like virtually every other business, contractors are swimming in a sea of data. A.I. helps make sense of it all, and more importantly, makes it actionable, Jesse Mikec said.

“I’ll be honest, most contractors collect data and don’t know what to do with it,” he said. “That’s been a common theme, because they use it to manage, they use it to support, but they don’t necessarily use it to predict or to change.”

The good news, he said, is that most contractors are sitting on substantial reserves of data from years past. That’s why they are so intrigued when they hear that they can leverage A.I. to make better business decisions.

“It’s like, ‘I never thought we could do that,’” he said. “‘You mean I can dump my financials in there for last six years and it can tell me who my best-paying customers are? What their trends are?’ It’s all in there.”

Carr said that like any company collecting data, it has to be structured and made actionable. The challenge is that a contractor is going to want to talk about that in natural language. One of the things A.I. does is natural language processing.

“It means I can have a source of data, and I can ask a question, and based on the answer to that question, I can ask endless follow-up questions,” he said. “The A.I. is going to predict better answers, and it’s going to feel like a more collaborative experience.”

Anton Mikec said Lighthouse Electric has accumulated data since 2017, so it can take it all and work with Carr to sort it out with A.I.

“And now, we’re smarter,” he said, but that’s not all. Carr said that the big picture is he and his colleagues are outlining the preliminary stages of the future of work. The technology is going to radically change society and electrical contracting. Consider that A.I. simply doesn’t happen without data centers, which need a significant amount of electric power.

“None of this happens unless we all get 10 times more productive,” Anton Mikec said. “All this comes together to meet the demand of what the world is asking for. And electrical contractors are sitting right in the heart of it.”

Carr added the business opportunity is $7 trillion, which “sounds like a fairy tale. But two of those are chips and data centers. It’s the space race of all space races.”