In a trade business, the best technicians know things no manual covers: the quirks of an old boiler model, the fix that works on the third visit, the customer who wants a call first.
T&R Gebäude Service GmbH in Lemgo, Germany, the largest firm of its kind in its region with 90 employees at the time of the interview, is planning for the day those people retire.
What T&R Gebäude Service GmbH did
In an interview for the KIDiHa research project on AI in the skilled trades, managing director Thomas Tovote described the firm's path. T&R runs on one unified trade software system, gives every employee and apprentice an iPad and already uses Microsoft Copilot for texts.
Within the project, the firm planned a virtual master for its website: a chatbot that answers customer requests, books appointments and serves the team internally as a kind of interactive wiki. In the 2024 publication this was a plan, and we found no public sign that it has launched.
What it already gives the business
Tovote names the priority clearly: "Another very important AI topic is knowledge transfer from older employees who are retiring to younger ones. That is our key task: to somehow store this experience."
He also sets the limit: "For all the AI, it still has to stay human." A digital base and a clear owner priority are the right starting point.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
A chatbot answers questions. The harder part is getting the answers out of the retiring technicians while they are still on the team.
A Company Brain could collect their experience in short conversations after jobs, tie it to equipment types and customers and make it available to apprentices on the iPads they already carry. That is our hypothesis.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
Track how much knowledge is recorded per senior technician, first-time fix rates and how long apprentices take to work alone.
A buyer of a trade business asks what happens when the senior people retire. A recorded, searchable base of their experience answers that question. Customer data and recordings of employees need a legal basis and the team's agreement.
The problem behind this case
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About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show T&R Gebäude Service GmbH staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 12, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside T&R Gebäude Service GmbH. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected]. Quotes from the German-language source are translated by our team.
Primary source: Research project publication, KIDiHa project, 2024. Available at www.ki-di-ha.de/fileadmin/ki-di-ha/content/kidiha_publikation_web.pdf.