How an Environmental Contractor Cleans Up on Efficiency Using AI

When my brother and I formed this business in 2007, it was a natural progression. Our parents had bought a country store with leaking gasoline tanks, and they hired a remediation service—technically our competition now—using the exact same state fund we work with today. My brother, who was studying geology, got an internship, and I kind of got into it backwards by just doing the field work. We grew up in the country, so I already knew how to drive big machines. Ultimately, we just decided to do this work ourselves and built a business from absolutely nothing.

Today, we're an environmental contractor specializing in petroleum remediation. We literally do it all—we will go out, run all the machines for the cleanup, and then come back to the office and write the report that gets submitted to the governing bodies in the state. The bulk of our work is residential sites—particularly connecting people with funds from the state that provide financial assistance for these cleanups—but we also do bigger projects for corporate clients like gas stations and commercial facilities.

For years, we built this business with face-to-face networking. But over time, a lot of those people moved on or retired. In 2022, we started using Google tools, and boy, Google has just stepped right in and brought us this whole other stream of clients. Just creating a Google Business Profile has connected us with some very large jobs.

Now, we’ve started using Google AI, and it’s making our process far more expeditious. As a small company, I don't have anyone to bounce creative ideas off of. Gemini is pretty useful for our social media; I’ll upload pictures of what we’re up to, and it helps me write those posts.

It’s so helpful thinking through those calculations, and I love that it even shows you the math along with a detailed explanation of how it arrived at this conclusion.

But Google NotebookLM is probably the hottest thing that we use in this office mainly because when we get a new site with regulated tanks, there is typically a lot of historical documentation from the regulatory agency that we have to sort through. It’s as if you took all of these documents and just threw them on your desk. Some are old, scanned, and barely legible.

We also use it to dig into regulatory documents, which are all provided as PDFs. We can take those documents, put them in NotebookLM, and then look specifically for regulations that we are addressing, along with the source for that information.

We're trying to stop these petroleum releases from impacting our water sources. I think of us as micro water protectors, and to me, that's a very noble career. In a perfect world, we'd go out of business. But there are so many tanks out there. In the meantime, I hope AI will help us come up with good corrective action plans in the most expeditious manner possible.