Agentic AI in Skilled Trades: Scaling Productivity and Private Equity Value Creation | Wyatt Smith

Wyatt Smith, founder and CEO of UpSmith, sits down to discuss how agentic AI is transforming the skilled trades industry and why America's workforce shortage is both a crisis and a massive opportunity.

Wyatt traces his unconventional path from a family farm in Alabama to Teach for America, McKinsey, and Uber—where he helped build and spin out Uber Elevate, the flying car division that catalyzed $10 billion in investment into next-gen aviation. After moving to Texas during the pandemic, he launched UpSmith to tackle the skilled labor shortage using AI.

The conversation dives deep into how AI agents are revolutionizing home service businesses—following up on open estimates, booking jobs, and mining customer data for upsell opportunities—all without adding headcount. Wyatt explains the critical difference between deterministic and probabilistic software, and why this shift unlocks problems that were never economically solvable before.

The discussion explores why private equity firms are paying historically high multiples for trades businesses, how AI-driven productivity gains can dramatically expand free cash flow without additional indirect labor costs, and why the application layer of AI—not the models themselves—is where real value gets created.

From the dignity of skilled work to the crisis of fatherhood, from Condoleezza Rice's wisdom on AI to building resilience through failure, Wyatt offers a compelling vision of technology as a force for human flourishing and American competitiveness.