About

I'm Richard Schmidt. I own Valley Tree Care, a tree care company in the Phoenix area with about 80 people on the team. We prune, remove, plant, and keep trees alive in the desert. It's physical work: crews in the air and customers on the phone, with a schedule that has no slack in it.

I've been following AI since reading Prediction Machines in 2018, and I got access to the OpenAI Playground in 2022. When the models finally got useful, I started pointing them at my own company instead of going off to found something new.

The result is Happy Tools: one ecosystem of tools built to find the work that was slipping through the cracks, fit into how the company already runs, and measurably move efficiency and profitability. A lead comes in and reaches the right person in minutes instead of sitting in an inbox. Every inbound call gets reviewed so a missed booking still gets a callback. Reports go out on schedule without anyone writing them, and watchdogs keep an eye on all of it.

The team behind it is Happy Labs, my in-house group for research, automation, and generative AI engineering. Our philosophy is happy tools, happy people. I'm not trying to automate people out of the business. I'm trying to take our hardest workers and give them better tools, so the menial stuff comes off their plate and they can spend their time on what they're best at. That's the whole point.

These automations run where a missed lead is a missed job and a silent failure costs money, so they get tested hard every day. When people ask what AI adoption looks like for a normal company, I can usually answer from the logs.

I don't know exactly where it's headed yet. The ambition is an AI-native company, where automation is the default and people spend their time on the judgment calls and the customers. Maybe a proper lab grows out of it. For now the daily work comes first.

Gabrielle and I met right out of high school. Twelve years of marriage and three kids later, home is a busier operation than the company. Honestly, that is most of why I automate: every hour a system handles is an hour I am not doing paperwork after dinner.

If any of that is useful to you, follow along. I publish what I learn as I go. You can reach me at richard@richardschmidt.ai.