How one contractor got three extra months of production without adding a crew
A family-owned Midwest contractor faced a $1.6 million decision: add a new CCTV unit and crew, or get more from the five vans already in the field. They ran AI coding on one crew for six months. Across 7,634 field hours, daily production went up 20%, about three extra months of output a year from the same crews.
Every week, the crews at one family-owned CCTV contractor in the Midwest dropped their footage at the office on thumb drives. The office was the only place the data lived. Footage got lost, and more than 24 terabytes of video piled up where nobody could easily get to it.
In the field, the work was stop-and-go. On mains with 30 or more taps, operators hand-coded every one, stopping the camera again and again. The contractor had run on the same legacy software since 2001, on four-year municipal inspection cycles where every lost hour put a contract at risk.
A $1.6 million decision
The business was growing, and growth forced a choice. They could add a new CCTV unit and crew for $1.6 million, or find a way to get more from the five vans already in the field.
They evaluated several options. SewerAI was the only one that combined AI-powered defect coding with centralized data management, which meant the coding backlog and the scattered footage could be solved together.
One crew first
They started with a single crew, running AutoCode alongside their legacy software. After one week, the time savings were undeniable.
The pilot ran for six months. By January, all five vans were running PIONEER®.
What changed
AutoCode now returns coded results within 24 hours, so the manual coding backlog is gone. PIONEER® holds 1.8 million feet of inspection footage that the team can pull up in minutes, with no thumb drives to track down.
Across 7,634 field hours, daily CCTV production went up 20%. That adds up to about three extra months of output a year from the same crews, and $1.7 million in capital cost avoided by not adding a new crew.
Faster bids, cleaner data
The gains reached past the field. With footage and coded results in one place, the contractor turns bids around faster and delivers cleaner data to the municipalities it serves. That combination has become a competitive moat in their market.
Growth for this contractor came from the trucks already on the road, and a single crew was enough to prove it.
Start with one truck. See what a single crew can do with AI coding before you commit the fleet. Book a demo →
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