Industry News
The Pool Business Phone Problem Nobody Talks About
AI is quietly closing one of pool service’s oldest competitive gaps — but the technology is only as good as the operator behind it
There’s a telling detail buried in the way pool service companies have historically grown. It has nothing to do with pricing, technical skill, or route density. It comes down to who picked up the phone.
Hal Denbar spent years running one of the larger pool service operations in the country. Speaking recently on the Pool Guy Podcast, he described a growth pattern so consistent it had become almost a formula: customers would call two or three smaller companies, nobody would answer, and his team would get the business by default.
“So much of our growth would come from a customer that had called two or three smaller companies where nobody picked up the phone,” he said. “We would by default get those customers because we were going to always pick up the phone in a way the smaller companies couldn’t.”
That’s a remarkably honest summary of a structural disadvantage that has quietly shaped this industry for decades. Solo operators and small crews service pools during business hours. Inbound calls come during business hours. When those two facts collide, leads disappear into voicemail. Studies of small business call behavior suggest that the majority of callers who hit voicemail don’t call back and simply move on to the next name in their search results.
AI-powered phone handling is starting to address this across the trades, and pool service — with its heavy concentration of solo operators and small crews — is a natural fit. Skimmer is the pool service management platform with the largest installed base in the industry, and became the first major vertical software vendor to ship an AI phone product purpose-built for pool pros earlier this year. Where that product sits within a broader industry shift toward AI adoption says something worth paying attention to.
A Practical Industry, Moving Carefully
2026 is the first year the pool service industry has structured data on how owners actually think about AI. Skimmer’s 2026 State of Pool Service Report showed that nearly 60% of owners intended to invest in AI-driven tools in 2026, with 21% describing themselves as very likely to do so.
Read alongside the skepticism in the same data set, that number tells a more complete story. 40% of owners say they would never trust AI to fully handle invoicing and payments. 28% wouldn’t trust it with quotes and estimates. 19% wouldn’t trust it with customer communication. Pool pros are broadly open to AI as an assistant and broadly resistant to AI as an autonomous agent and the line tightens wherever revenue or the customer relationship is directly at stake.
The concerns owners cite are operational rather than philosophical: Will it actually work reliably? Will it confuse my customers? Will my staff use it? That’s how professionals who run tight operations have always evaluated change. The use cases gaining ground reflect that posture.
Writing and communication tasks, like drafting customer responses, rate increase letters, policy documents, and social media content, are where real-world adoption has taken hold. In every case, the AI produces a draft that a human reviews before anything goes out. Low risk, real time saving, no automated decision with consequences attached. getskimmergetskimmer
Inbound phone handling fits a similar profile, which is why it has emerged as one of the first AI capabilities to gain meaningful traction not just in pool service but across field service industries broadly.
Why the Phone is Where AI is Landing First
The asymmetry of the problem is worth understanding. A call going poorly leaves a poor first impression. A missed call is a customer the operator never knew they had. That risk profile makes phone handling one of the more defensible entry points for AI in any trade business.
AI phone handling requires no service history to function. The data requirements are minimal: the operator’s services, pricing, policies, and service areas. Compare that to the more sophisticated capabilities pool service software vendors are beginning to build toward — churn prediction, route profitability scoring, predictive maintenance — all of which require months or years of clean, structured operational data before they can deliver anything meaningful. Phone handling works on day one.
The underlying technology has also matured. AI voice agents five years ago were brittle, easy to confuse, prone to loops, and recognizable as automated in ways that actively irritated callers. The current generation handles natural language considerably better, can be trained on domain-specific knowledge, and escalates intelligently when it hits the boundaries of what it knows. That’s a categorically different product from the IVR systems the trades experimented with for years.
Generic answering services, which have been the traditional alternative for operators who couldn’t staff a receptionist, can run up to $500 per month, with no knowledge of the operator’s business, customer base, or service area. A domain-trained agent integrated into the operator’s management platform, capable of creating a lead record before the caller hangs up, represents a meaningfully different capability. Skimmer’s AI Phone is priced at $99 per month and operates within the platform rather than as a standalone tool, giving it access to existing customer data from the start. Operators configure the system before it goes live, reviewing and editing everything it pulls from their website. If the agent doesn’t know something, it says so and offers to take a message or transfer the caller.
The knowledge base is bounded by what the operator puts in. A well-configured system performs very differently from one set up in ten minutes and never revisited.
The Limits That Matter
AI in pool service cannot replace field judgment. It cannot assess whether a pump is developing a bearing problem from the sound it makes, recognize that a pool has higher bather load than the readings suggest, or make a real-time call about whether conditions are safe for a chemical treatment. These are sensory, contextual judgments built on years of experience.
Phone handling sits well outside that risk zone, but there are subtler limits worth naming. AI has no knowledge that a particular customer had a difficult conversation about pricing last season, that another has been with the company for eleven years and deserves a personal call, or that a third wants the technical explanation rather than the summary. That relational knowledge lives with the operator and their team.
There’s also an adoption question that gets underweighted in most vendor conversations. Most AI errors in small business settings trace back to unclear instructions or rushed use, not technology failure. Staff who haven’t been shown how to use a tool properly will either misuse it or avoid it. An AI phone system configured with incomplete service areas, outdated pricing, or no escalation rules for emergencies creates problems the launch metrics don’t capture. The owners getting the most value from AI right now started with a narrow use case, kept humans reviewing output, and built from there. That model applies to phone handling as much as anywhere else.
What’s Actually Changing
For years, the ability to answer every inbound call was a competitive advantage that scaled with headcount. Larger operations with office staff picked up. Smaller ones didn’t. That gap shaped customer acquisition in ways Denbar described plainly — the bigger operators captured leads the smaller ones were simply unavailable to take.
AI compresses that gap at the entry level. A solo operator using AI phone handling can offer the same baseline responsiveness as a company with dedicated office staff, around the clock, at a fraction of the cost. The ceiling on what AI can do in a pool service business scales with operational data — clean service records, consistent chemical logs, complete billing history. Operators building those records now are the ones who will be positioned to use more sophisticated capabilities as they mature.
Research on small business AI adoption consistently finds that very small businesses are most likely to believe AI isn’t applicable to their scale, but this belief drops significantly as business size increases. The evidence suggests this is primarily an education problem, not an applicability problem.
The use cases exist for the one-truck operator, and we know the phone has always been a growth lever in pool service. Whether smaller operators take up the AI version of it — and configure it carefully enough to actually work — is the open question.
For an industry that spends a great deal of time talking about how pools are built, operated and maintained, Pool Horizons is advancing a different conversation: why swimming pools matter in the first place.
Launched in 2023, Pool Horizons is a global initiative bringing together leaders from the swimming pool industry and broader aquatic community to examine and communicate the role pools play in society. Its work focuses on areas including health and wellbeing, community development, water safety and sustainability, with an emphasis on giving the industry research and real-world examples that demonstrate the value of aquatic spaces beyond recreation.
Over the next several months, Pool Horizons will continue that conversation at major industry gatherings in the United States and Europe, with appearances scheduled in Phoenix, Lyon and Atlantic City.
Pool Horizons Heads to the MasterMind Summit
The first stop will be the PHTA & GENESIS MasterMind Summit, taking place September 16–18 at The Wigwam in Litchfield Park, Arizona.
Pool Horizons will host a two-hour session on Friday, September 18, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., connecting the cultural and social history of swimming pools with the data-backed narrative the industry is working to develop.
Author and historian Jeff Wiltse will explore the history of swimming pools and their enduring social, cultural and economic importance. Attendees will then hear about the latest Pool Horizons initiatives and how that work applies to the U.S. market.
The session will conclude with industry leaders discussing how different stakeholders can work together to better communicate the value of pools and create new opportunities for the industry.
Taking the Conversation to France
The initiative will head overseas in November for Piscine Global 2026 in Lyon, France.
On November 18 from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., Pool Horizons will present preliminary findings from the Global Aquatic Social Impact Framework (GASIF) pilot study. The project is aimed at developing a more data-driven understanding of the social impact created by swimming pools and aquatic facilities.
Representatives from participating industry associations in France, Spain and the United States will take part, followed by a roundtable examining the challenges and future of the swimming pool industry. Leaders from CF Group, Fluidra, Hayward and Pentair are scheduled to participate in the discussion.
Pool Horizons will make a second appearance in Lyon during Aqualie on November 19 from 4:45 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. That session will introduce Pool Horizons and showcase a French public swimming pool Best-in-Class project, providing a real-world example of the role aquatic facilities can play within their communities.
Returning to Connect With The Industry in Atlantic City in 2027
The schedule continues into the new year with the Pool Horizons Summit in Atlantic City on January 25, 2027, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Following its 2026 gathering, Pool Horizons will return with a program that includes a keynote presentation, a new Best-in-Class project and contributions from leading figures throughout the swimming pool industry.
Together, the upcoming events provide Pool Horizons with an opportunity to continue building the conversation on both sides of the pond.
Industry News
Skimmer Expands Into Pool Construction Software With Acquisitions of Pool Builder Geek and Poologics
The two software platforms form the foundation of a unified offering for pool professionals; Pool Builder Geek founder Tommy Reynolds joins Skimmer to lead construction strategy.
AUSTIN, TX, August 24, 2026 — Skimmer, the leading operating system for pool service and maintenance professionals, today announced the acquisitions of Pool Builder Geek and Poologics, two software platforms purpose-built for pool construction businesses.
The acquisitions mark Skimmer’s expansion into pool construction and establish the foundation for a unified platform serving pool professionals from construction through ongoing service and maintenance.
As part of the acquisition, Pool Builder Geek founder Tommy Reynolds, who has extensive experience in the pool construction software space, will join Skimmer, leading the company’s construction strategy and continued investment in solutions for pool builders.
“Our vision is to build an end-to-end platform for the pool and spa industry,” said Jack Nelson, CEO of Skimmer. “Pool Builder Geek brings an AI-native platform designed to evolve quickly with the industry, while Poologics brings a proven product that builders have relied on for years. Together, they significantly accelerate our ability to serve pool construction businesses.”
Pool builders manage complex estimating, permitting, project management, subcontractor coordination, customer communication, and job costing processes. Many still rely on spreadsheets or generic construction tools that were not designed for their specific needs. Pool Builder Geek and Poologics address those challenges with purpose-built capabilities, including estimating, project management, permitting, job costing, and AI-powered visualization.
“Pool builders do not need generic contracting software with a pool label added to it,” said Reynolds. “We built Pool Builder Geek specifically around how pools are sold and built with AI at the core of the platform. Joining Skimmer gives us the resources and expertise to accelerate our product roadmap and deliver even more for the builders we serve. I’m excited about what we can build together and what this means for the future of the pool industry.”
“We built Poologics on the belief that pool construction deserves software designed specifically for the industry,” said Nate Pruitt, CEO of Poologics. “Skimmer has built its business on that same belief for pool service. Together, we can give builders more resources, stronger support, and a faster path to innovation.”
Service and maintenance remain a core focus of Skimmer. The expansion into construction advances the company’s long-term strategy to provide connected, purpose-built tools for pool professionals across the industry.
About Skimmer
Skimmer is one of America’s leading pool service platforms. The company is on a mission to modernize the pool and spa service and repair industry through easy-to-use software and best-in-class support. Over 35,000 pool service professionals servicing 1,000,000+ pools in North America use Skimmer to get organized, get paid faster, and grow their businesses. For more information, visit getskimmer.com.
About Poologics
Poologics is an all-in-one business management platform built specifically for swimming pool builders. It streamlines CRM, estimating, project management, and job costing, helping professionals run their businesses with greater efficiency, accuracy, and control. For more information, visit poologics.com.
About Pool Builder Geek
Pool Builder Geek is an AI-powered project management platform built exclusively for the swimming pool construction and renovation industry. Created by a team with deep experience building software for pool builders, it gives builders purpose-built tools for project tracking, scheduling, subcontractor coordination, budgeting, job costing, and AI-powered backyard visualization. For more information, visit poolbuildergeek.com.
Media contact
Travis Wingate
Skimmer, CMO, [email protected], 416-838-9161
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Landmark Aquatic, a national leader in commercial aquatic construction and renovation, is pleased to announce the promotion of Jason Hill to General Manager of its Kansas City, Missouri market. Hill brings nearly two decades of commercial aquatic experience to the role, having worked his way through the industry as a laborer, plumber, project superintendent and project manager. That hands-on path through the trades gives him a perspective few general managers share.
“I truly understand the jobs of everyone here,” explains Hill. “It’s not just how they’re supposed to perform, I actually understand their day-to-day struggles, their desire for growth, and their need to have the best tools at their disposal to do their job efficiently.”
As he begins his tenure, Hill said mentorship and workforce development will be a top priority, particularly given how few professionals nationwide specialize in commercial pools.
“The commercial pool industry is such an anomaly,” he said. “As we grow our team, we are not likely to find commercial pool people waiting in our market to be hired, rather I am going to have to make commercial pool people. Training and coaching them is a big part of making that happen.” Hill’s emphasis on training echoes the company culture that earned Landmark a Top Workplace award, given in part for its investment in employee career development.
Hill is already collaborating closely with Landmark’s marketing team to grow the company’s visibility across the Kansas City market, contributing fresh ideas that are helping generate excitement. “I’m excited to compete with our other markets and see how far we can climb,” he said, noting his hometown ties add extra motivation.
With his depth of field experience and people-first approach, Hill is positioned to grow Landmark Aquatic’s presence and reputation throughout the region.
Jason can be reached at [email protected].
About Landmark Aquatic:
Landmark Aquatic is a nationwide provider of commercial aquatic facility design, construction, and maintenance services, with more than six decades of industry experience. Serving clients across most of the U.S., Landmark delivers construction-led solutions and on-going support though its AquatiCare maintenance team, ensuring excellence “for the life of your pool.” Committed to the full lifecycle of every facility, Landmark prioritizes long-term partnerships while adapting to client needs through exceptional service, operational excellence, and forward-thinking solutions. For more about Landmark Aquatic visit www.landmarkaquatic.com.
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