Prove the Work

Ryan Eaton got his first job at 14, working at Tate's Rents in Boise for a family he grew up going to church with. He stayed through junior high, high school, and part of college, and he has now spent close to 18 years at United Rentals, the largest equipment rental company in the world, where he is the Vice President of the Midwest Region.

That puts him in the middle of nearly every construction project in the Treasure Valley. He has watched the rental industry grow from mom and pop shops into national firms, and he has watched the cost of the equipment climb while rental rates stood still. In July, United Rentals rolled AI out to its VPs, and less than a month in, his team was already using it for maintenance curves, meeting prep, and call summaries.

What sets Ryan apart is where he sees AI mattering most. Not at the giants like his own company, but at the small subcontractors he works with every day. He gave the clearest answer to where AI can change a small contractor's business: proving the work is done so they can get paid.

You started in equipment rental at 14. How did you get into it?

I started when I was 14 at Tate's Rents. I grew up with the Tate family, went to church with them, and they gave me one of my very first jobs. I worked there all through junior high and high school and a little bit of college. Then I left and worked for six years, and I've been at United now for almost 18 years.

United Rentals rolled out AI to its VPs in July. What are you actually using it for?

We're starting to use it for everything. We're using it for maintenance curves on equipment. We're using it for emails. We're using it for meeting preparation. We use it for a lot of our online calls, to summarize our notes from the call and what the options are.

For my team, the email summarizing is a big thing, because we get inundated with scorecards every day. My district managers have rate approvals they have to sort through. They have approvals from their guys, whether it's expenses or a major repair. So a lot of it is just organizing all the approvals they get in a day.

You said a scissor lift costs twice what it did 25 years ago, and rents for less. How does that happen?

I wish I had the answer. On average, the cost of our equipment has gone up probably 32% in the last four or five years. That scissor lift costs twice as much today as it did 25 years ago, and the rate to rent it is less than I rented it for back then.

So much of it I think is increased competition. The rental industry is still pretty young compared to construction. Thirty years ago there weren't national firms renting equipment. There were a lot of small mom and pop rental shops like Tate's Rents. Tate was so far ahead of his time. He went to Seattle with his wife to see a friend who was renting mortar mixers and scaffolding to mason contractors, came home to Boise, and said, we should do this.

The rates and the pricing have just not kept up with the cost of the business. So we have to find other ways, and a lot of that is the customer mix we target.

You work with contractors across the Treasure Valley. How are they doing with AI?

I think it's probably similar to us. The bigger ones are using it. The big national firms, and obviously everybody working at Micron, would be encouraged to use AI, because that's what they're building. They're building to take AI to the next level.

The smaller HVAC contractor or the smaller electrical guy are a little bit slower to the party.

Where's the biggest opportunity for those smaller contractors?

One of the challenges you see a lot is just their cash flow. Take a small HVAC contractor with half a dozen employees. He's probably not got money in the bank. If the general contractor he's working for withholds payment, because the project isn't going as fast as it should or the owner hasn't paid the general contractor, he can have a hard time making payroll. A small guy like that will lose half of his crew if he doesn't pay them.

Most of the time what I see there is the documentation of the work that has been done. So I see that being very critical, especially for the small to medium sized guys. Using AI to track progress and the work that's been completed, so they can get paid in a more timely fashion. Telling AI, this is what we did today, and putting it into whatever format they use to submit their request for payment. Proving the work they did.

And for the bigger outfits?

Labor curves. Taking a completed project and having AI put together what the labor curves were, so they can communicate more clearly with the owners on expectations. At this point in the project, we're going to have to ramp up to 2,000 laborers. I think labor curves is going to be a big one. Material tracking is going to be a big one too.

What do you wish AI could do for you that it can't yet?

When we first rolled it out, I was trying to take my emails and build a PowerPoint. It did that, but it didn't drop it into PowerPoint. It just did it in Copilot. I know there are programs coming where that just needs to talk to another program to do what I wanted it to do. That would be huge, because I have to do quarterly business reviews, and that could turn into maybe a two hour process, even less.

We're pretty limited because we're publicly traded. We have to be really careful about what we allow our employees to use. When ChatGPT first came out, we basically created our own, because we didn't want employees putting information out there that could be an SEC violation. There's just a lot of confidential information, and the timing of when you can release it. The compliance side is going to be a little dicey.

Ryan Eaton is the VP of the Midwest Region at United Rentals in Boise, Idaho.
Part of AIdaho Conversations, a series with Idaho business leaders on how they’re actually using technology and where it falls short.