The tech shortage isn’t new to anyone in heavy-duty repair. Shops have been struggling to find qualified techs for years, and there’s little reason to believe that challenge is going away anytime soon. According to the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), 65.5% of heavy-duty repair shops reported being understaffed in 2025.

We absolutely need better recruiting, better training, and clearer career paths for the next generation of technicians. But none of those things solve the problem a shop owner or manager has today: There’s work that needs to get done, and they may not have enough people to do it. That makes the time of the techs they already have incredibly valuable.

The question I think shops need to be asking is not, “How do I get my technicians to work harder?” It’s, “How much of their day is actually spent on billable hours?”

Diagnosing a difficult problem requires skill. Inspecting a unit and making the repair requires skill. Cleaning up notes and working through administrative tasks shouldn’t take skilled time away from that work.
This is where we see AI making an enormous difference in shops that have adopted it.

Protect Wrench Time

The best use of AI in the shop is to reduce or remove non-billable work for the technician.

A tech finishes a job and has to clean up notes before they’re sent to the customer. This is often the least favorite part of their job.  They have to spend time digging through service information or trying to make sense of a long list of fault codes. They stop what they are doing to track down information that may already exist somewhere else in the system.

None of those steps sound like a major productivity problem on their own. But five minutes here, 10 minutes there — across multiple jobs and multiple technicians — adds up quickly.

AI can help eliminate some of that friction. A tech can record rough notes, whether spoken into the system or typed, and have AI turn them into clear documentation for review. AI can help organize repair information, surface relevant history and narrow down the data a tech needs to look at instead of making them sort through everything themselves.

This is especially important on the diagnostic side. The tech still makes the diagnosis; AI simply helps them get to the useful information faster.

45 Minutes Per Work Order Saved

We’ve already seen shops using AI-assisted workflows save around 45 minutes per work order. That time comes from removing steps that slow them down and that they frankly don’t want to do in the first place. Think cleaning up notes, searching for information, and handling tasks that can be streamlined with the right tools.

Now multiply that across a full day and a full week. Those small gains stop being small and start impacting your job satisfaction and overall capacity. This is why we believe AI works best when it is built directly into the tools technicians already use. With Fullbay Next, for example, AI-powered features are part of the shop workflow instead of something a tech has to open in a separate application.

When hiring is difficult, job satisfaction as well as extra capacity matters. You may not be able to add another technician tomorrow, but you can make sure the ones you already have stay happy and efficient.

We’re still early in what AI can do for heavy-duty repair, and it won’t solve the tech shortage on its own. But if we can use it to remove friction and keep skilled people focused on billable work, we can make every hour in the bay happier and healthier.

If you’re interested in putting more of this into practice, Fullbay Next brings AI-powered tools directly into the shop workflow. Our goal is simple: remove friction, protect tech time, and help your team get more done with the folks you have.