Why now: the phone call hasn't changed, the rest has

How do trades get work in 2026?

The same way they did in 2006. Someone's boiler packs in, or a neighbour gives them your number, or they find you on a list. They ring. You're on a job, so you ring back later or text 'who's this?'. You agree a time by text. You turn up. If it goes well they keep your number and tell someone else.

Nothing about that needs changing. It's a good way to get work and it costs nothing. The weak point was always the same one: the call that rang out while your hands were full, and the text you meant to send back and didn't.

So what has changed?

Three small things. Texting is an ordinary way to deal with a business now, so a text back from a plumber isn't odd, it's expected. The software to run a fixed conversation by text, offer times from a diary and confirm a booking is cheap to build, cheap to run and, more to the point, cheap to test every sentence of. And the diary lives on your phone, so a booking made at half two can be confirmed from the van at half three.

None of that needed a breakthrough. It needed someone to sit down and write out exactly what the receptionist should say, in what order, and then refuse to let it say anything else.

Where does AI come into it, and where doesn't it?

I'll be straight: I don't want a language model writing to my customers. It'll be charming right up until the day it invents a price, or a time I haven't got, or tells someone with a gas smell to wait until Monday. The people selling those systems call that a rare edge case. For a trade, a rare edge case is a flooded kitchen.

So Mabel's words to a customer are fixed sentences. The same question in the same order, the same gas line every time, the same confirmation. A model is used for one job, checking a customer's photo before you see it, because that's a job a model is good at and a rule isn't. It never writes a word that reaches a customer. That isn't a limitation we're working to remove. It's the design.

Why is a fixed conversation better than a clever one?

Because you can read it. The texts Mabel sends are on our trade pages, word for word, and a customer in Leeds gets the same words as a customer in Lincoln. When a customer's text doesn't fit the script, Mabel hands it to you with their words rather than guessing. Boring, on purpose. The job of a receptionist is to be reliable, not interesting.

Why a text, a time and a confirmation?

Because that's what you'd do. The first text goes as soon as the call rings out:

Sorry we missed your call to Patel Plumbing. Ravi is on a job. Book in a minute here: mabelhq.co.uk/b/Ab3dE5gH7j Or just reply to this text and we'll take your details here.

Then the job, the address and a time from your diary. Then the customer's YES, and this:

Your request is in for 10am Monday 12 October. Ravi will confirm it shortly.

Then you confirm with a tap and they get the confirmation from the same number. A text, a time, a confirmation. The old-school part is the point. Mabel isn't trying to change how trades and customers deal with each other. It's trying to do the one bit you can't do with your hands in a cistern, in exactly the way you'd have done it.

Why build it now rather than wait?

Partly because the window is open. The big platforms are moving into job admin and the voice systems are getting louder, and a plain text-back booking line is a thing nobody else is selling on its own. Partly because I've gone full time on it, and there's no perfect moment for that. Mostly because the missed call is the most ordinary problem a trade has, and it's fixable.

What happens next?

Try it on your own missed calls. The trade pages show every text, word for word.

• Mabel for plumbers