When Patrick Moloney bought Wellington-based Door Specs just over a year ago, he inherited a well-established business with more than 16 years of history. It also involves thousands of small decisions that consume time every single day.
Door Specs specialises in pre-hung doors, manufacturing custom door and jamb assemblies for builders throughout the Wellington region. Every project involves measurements, material calculations, supplier pricing and detailed production instructions, making accuracy just as important as efficiency.
For Patrick, artificial intelligence has quickly become another member of the team dramatically reducing the time spent on repetitive calculations and administration.
Rather than using AI for marketing or content creation, Patrick has focused on practical operational improvements. One of his first uses was uploading supplier price lists into AI.
Instead of manually searching through multiple catalogues whenever he needs to quote a job, he can simply ask AI to identify the most cost-effective supplier. "It saves me hours of trawling through price books," he explains.
The system compares products across multiple suppliers before recommending the best purchasing option, allowing him to make faster decisions without sacrificing accuracy.
The real power of AI became obvious when Door Specs was presented with a particularly complicated project. Patrick needed to determine exactly how much timber to order, while minimising waste and identifying the most economical supplier. Traditionally, that process would have involved manual calculations, estimating offcuts and comparing supplier catalogues.
Instead, AI calculated the material requirements, estimated expected wastage across different stock lengths and then cross-referenced supplier pricing to recommend the most cost-effective purchasing strategy. What would previously have taken hours was completed in minutes.
One of Patrick's most successful AI projects has been creating a bespoke calculator for Door Specs' website. Builders regularly provide different measurements, sometimes door sizes, sometimes stud openings, sometimes frame dimensions. The team previously spent significant time manually converting between them.
Using AI, Patrick built an interactive calculator that automatically converts one measurement into every other dimension required by the workshop. The tool is currently used internally by the Door Specs team and has already removed countless repetitive calculations from their workflow.
Patrick didn't require specialist programming skills. "I just sat down with AI, built the webpage, uploaded it to the website and now the whole team uses it."
While AI has delivered impressive efficiencies, Patrick says it's not yet capable of handling every aspect of the business. One process he has been trying to automate is creating workshop job sheets directly from builders' plans. In theory, AI should be able to scan architectural drawings and automatically generate production instructions. In practice, it still requires too much supervision.
"It gets pretty close," Patrick says. "It's constantly asking questions or saying something isn't clear." Rather than becoming a fully autonomous process, it still requires significant human oversight to ensure nothing is missed before work reaches the workshop floor.
Patrick believes one of the biggest hidden costs of AI isn't the technology itself, it's learning how to communicate with it effectively. Developing the website calculator required multiple attempts before it behaved exactly as intended.
Even seemingly straightforward tasks, such as generating weekly cash-flow forecasts, took several iterations before the outputs became genuinely useful. He has discovered that success often comes down to writing better prompts.
Getting AI to produce consistently accurate results requires experimentation, patience and refinement. "It's not always right," he says. "Sometimes it starts doing something before you've properly explained what you want."
Perhaps the biggest shift isn't the individual tools themselves, it's the mindset. Patrick says once he began using AI regularly, he found himself constantly identifying new opportunities to improve the business.
What started with supplier pricing quickly expanded into estimating, workflow automation, website tools and financial forecasting. Today, AI is permanently open alongside his other business software. Whenever a new problem arises, his first thought is no longer "How do I solve this?" Instead, it's "I wonder if AI can help."
Alongside the practical support AI offers, Patrick has valued the guidance of his Mentor, Zach. In a demanding first year of ownership, Zach has been someone he can approach about any subject, offering an honest, impartial perspective. That steady support has helped Patrick stay positive through the challenges of building the business and make decisions with greater confidence.
Patrick believes AI will continue to become an integral part of how Door Specs operates. While today's technology still requires human oversight, he can already see enormous opportunities to automate repetitive administrative work, simplify estimating and improve operational efficiency.
For him, AI isn't replacing craftsmanship or experience. Instead, it's freeing up more time to focus on customers, production quality and growing the business. As the technology improves, Patrick expects AI to become less of a novelty and more of an everyday business companion, quietly working in the background, solving problems before they become bottlenecks.