We asked Pest Management Professional’s columnists and editorial advisory board members about what new technologies they have recently embraced. Here are some of their responses from our May 2025 print edition.
Dr. Faith Oi
“My new favorite technology is Microsoft’s Clipchamp, an online video editor. I pulled together pictures and fed it a prompt to develop a 60-second narration for a video, and it was completed in three minutes!”
Kurt Scherzinger
“We have created online training modules for our new hires that allow us to hire individuals for our branch location and not have them in our home office for the entire training process. This has helped with recruiting and retention.”
Michael Broder
“It’s really crazy how much technology has become such a vital part of our company. We use remote sensing stations, which have been a great success across the board. Customers love it; it lowers time on service calls, and it can give data you really can’t get from anything else — like information on rodents entering the station, even if they weren’t trapped or didn’t eat the bait. Trail cameras are our eyes 24/7 and help identify pest activity in difficult situations. Automated software simplifies the process for customers to leave online reviews and allows us to give bonuses to employees for each five-star review. Lastly, artificial intelligence note-taking and phone call transcribing ease the process for our customer service representatives to input tons of data easily.”
Doug Foster
“After several years of sitting on the fence about rodent monitoring systems, we now fully embrace their value in helping our clients and technicians. Although the initial investment can be significant, the long-term benefits of less ‘wear and tear’ on our technicians, and professional record-keeping, help set us apart from other pest control companies.”
Sheri Spencer Bachman
“My latest fun find is the PLAUD voice recorder, which attaches to your smartphone to record phone conversations, meetings, training sessions and more. Once you finish recording, it uses artificial intelligence to transcribe everything, providing nicely formatted notes with headings and bullet points. What it produces can then be shared with others. Imagine being on a sales call for a commercial prospect. Use PLAUD to record your interview with the client, the scope of work, their expectations, your inspection findings and more. When done, it creates the meeting notes for you to share within minutes with the prospect to be sure you captured and understood all their wants. I would think that would set you apart from the competition. In addition, my Pest Control Business App tracks key performance indicators by employee by department, and houses forms and documents your team needs to do their jobs. A demo of the app is on my website.”
Mark Sheperdigian
“Have we embraced technology? We’re just a bunch of technology-embracing fools! We have adapted our fleet dashcams to send data from onboard computers to alert us to any conditions pertaining to vehicle maintenance. But there’s so much more technology out there, including:
- Artificial intelligence of many different stripes has found its way into our processes. We use them to set up copy for business writing, such as memos, instead of staring at a blank computer screen. Of course, you must review this word by word and ensure it is accurate and well-written, but at least you don’t sit around wondering how to begin.
- We are moving to infrared (IR) thermography to manage heat treatments instead of the single-sensor IR guns. This isn’t new technology, but the quality is going up, and prices are coming down.
- Like so many other companies, we are continuing to work with remote sensing, looking for offerings that fit our business model. Not only does it work, we can make money using it.
- Our new corporate office uses radio frequency identification (RFID) to allow entry and track usage. No more keys.”
Desiree Straubinger
“I have embraced using artificial intelligence productivity chatbots like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to help me create content for articles, presentations and even quiz questions. It’s great that you can have AI look at a presentation document and have it generate questions for you! Of course, you always have to double-check everything, but most of the time, it is spot-on. When creating content, it provides a great launching point to get my brain thinking of topics or reminds me of points I forgot to mention. One of the hardest parts of writing content is when you have writer’s block or something you’ve written just doesn’t sound right. Now I can put that paragraph into Copilot and ask for a reworded response, which fixes it.”
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