How to capture your maintenance technicians’ knowledge

When a job stalls, you know who to call: the colleague who knows that system. In a typical maintenance business with a dozen technicians, the most experienced colleague is retiring in a year. This is an example, not the story of a specific business. In the office, the same comment keeps coming up: “He’s the only one who knows that system.”

A colleague calls him from a job and describes the problem. He asks a few questions, suggests a check and helps identify the fault. Yet the service report records only the outcome: component replaced, system back up and running. The reasoning that led to the solution gets lost in the conversation.

For whoever handles the next visit, understanding that reasoning could be just as useful as knowing which part was replaced. Yet it’s easy to leave it out of the report when closing the job.

In the United States, someone has decided to pay to capture those very steps: watching a technician’s hands, following the checks they carry out and listening to them explain what they’re doing. The story is relevant to the small business we started with, too, because it shows how much knowledge can be left out of a standard service report.

Why someone is paying to watch a technician at work

HUMXN, a Minneapolis company, describes a program on its website for people who need plumbing, electrical or air conditioning work in their homes. The work can be free for the customer: the company pays the local business carrying out the job and, in return, gets a recording of the work to train AI and teach robots.

The technician wears equipment that records the work from their point of view. The camera captures their hands, tools and the system they’re working on. Viewers can follow the sequence of tasks as the work takes place.

Applications are open in Minneapolis, Chicago and Miami. The program covers one service visit or one day’s work and excludes major renovations, new construction, roofing and emergencies.

On October 13, 2026, the company announced that it also intended to buy material already held in businesses’ archives: service records, repair histories, photographs, manuals and training videos, which it would then license to others. Its interest therefore extends to the material a business has accumulated over years of work.

Homepros, a trade publication for the building services industry, reports one further detail: technicians are asked to talk through the work as they do it. The images show their actions, while their words help explain their decisions.

The program covers residential work in three US cities, and purchasing archive material remains an announced goal. For an Italian maintenance business, the relevant point is the value being placed on experience that often stays within conversations between colleagues.

What’s missing when a service report records only the outcome

Let’s return to the business with a dozen technicians. As the owner, you could take a service report and read it with your most experienced colleague. It says the system was working again after a component was replaced. But does it also explain why the technician decided to replace that particular component?

Some steps may seem obvious to the person who did the work. For the colleague who comes next, knowing which check came first and which test proved unhelpful can change how they approach the problem.

This is where the difference between recording a job and preserving the reasoning behind it becomes clear. A service report can also document the steps taken, helping whoever returns to that system.

In the opening scenario, the less experienced colleague gets that explanation by calling the right person. If the explanation goes into the service report, they can find it again later without having to reconstruct the conversation. That’s the change that matters to you as an owner: making some of that experience available for others to consult, when access to it currently depends on one person’s availability.

In his interview with Homepros, the American company’s founder predicts that the market for the collected data will become saturated and its commercial value will run out. For a business using its own service reports to support new technicians, their usefulness follows a different logic: a report remains useful for as long as it helps someone understand a system and the work already done.

How to turn a spoken account into a useful service report

For this example business, capturing this knowledge can become part of closing each job. The technician talks through what they found, which checks they carried out and what solved the problem. AI uses that account to draft the service report.

The quality of the content depends on what the technician chooses to explain. Simply saying that a component was replaced leaves out the steps that led to the decision. Adding why a check was carried out and what the tests revealed allows a colleague to follow the reasoning.

Even an unsuccessful test deserves a place if it helps explain the fault. Whoever reads the report can see that a possibility was already explored and what the result was. Experience also includes the approaches tried and ruled out during the job.

Someone then reviews and approves the draft. They check that the text accurately reflects the technician’s account and clearly describes the work. AI prepares the document from the information it receives; human review remains necessary to confirm its content.

The approved service report stays in the company’s records. Before returning to the system, a colleague can read what was observed and tested during the previous visit. The experienced technician remains someone the team can turn to, while some of their knowledge also becomes accessible through the documents.

The archive grows through everyday work. Its usefulness depends on how clear and complete the accounts behind it are. That’s why it makes sense to start with one team or one type of job, paying attention to how the information is captured.

How we work with maintenance businesses

At Gitogi, we help Italian maintenance businesses digitize their work and use AI through custom software and integrations (https://www.gitogi.com/it/servizi/integrazione-ai/). This also includes training and supporting people as they move to a new way of working.

We can use a technician’s spoken account to draft a service report for someone to review and approve. During the initial assessment, we work with you to choose a team or type of job to start with. We begin with your technicians’ work to identify where capturing information more effectively could help.

Our approach also allows the account of a job to be used to draft documents, administrative paperwork and invoices, along with their associated deadlines. You approve them as the business owner, and the knowledge captured stays with your company. Each document is therefore based on information about the job, with someone responsible for checking it before approval.

You can find our approach for maintenance and technical service businesses at https://www.gitogi.com/it/field-service/.

For the owner of this example business, this means starting to capture what makes the experienced colleague so valuable while he’s still working with the team. His contribution can become part of individual service reports and help whoever returns to the same systems.

The first step: a month of your service work

With Gitogi, you start with a month of work that has already been closed, including service reports, invoices and contracts. We use these documents to see where the service work, the contract and the invoices don’t connect.

We then measure the step that costs the most and, before building anything, show you the calculation.

If “he’s the only one who knows that system” sounds familiar, write to us and tell us how you work. We’ll start with a month of your service work.