We spend most of our time on this blog talking about gravel depth, drainage and what a driveway is actually worth. This one is different. It is about who, or what, is going to be doing the shopping.
Mark Pearson of Strativa AI came on the Unscripted Small Business podcast to talk about what he calls agentic commerce: AI agents that do not just find businesses but complete the transaction. He described his work simply, as helping small businesses “get found, and get paid by AI agents.”
What caught our attention is that when he reached for an example, he reached for paving.
His example was literally a driveway
Walking through how a contractor would prepare for this, Mark said the first job is working out “what are the top five services that they do… they’re like paving driveways, but maybe they also do sidewalks and pavers.”
Then he got specific about what the machine actually wants: “for the asphalt one, you’re gonna want to make sure that it can withstand plowing in the winter. So it’s rated for a certain weight level.”
He was candid that he was guessing at the trade detail. But the shape of the point is right, and it is the part worth sitting with. An agent is not persuaded. It does not care that we have been doing this for thirty years or that Jack answers his own phone. It filters. It wants a value in a field, and if the field is empty you are not in the results at all.
Productize the thing you already sell
Mark’s prescription is not to invent new services. It is to describe the existing ones precisely enough to be machine-readable: “Productize all of that data… you’re just getting really clear on what the thing is, the product is, and then it’s just like assigning SKUs to things and different pricing, so that the agent is able to read it.”
For a driveway company that means writing down things we normally carry in our heads. What depth of base. What stone. What square footage bands. What a resurface includes and what it does not. Whether it will take a plow blade in January.
None of that is new information. It is the estimate conversation, written down once instead of repeated on the phone.
Specification is becoming the storefront
Here is the part that convinced us Mark is describing something real rather than something coming.
Look at how industrial manufacturers already organise themselves. PureAire Monitoring builds fixed gas and oxygen-deficiency monitors, and the front door of their catalogue is not a marketing category. It is a list of monitors sorted by which gas you need to detect. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, chlorine, and on down the list. You arrive knowing your problem and the site is arranged around your problem, not around theirs.
That is not a design flourish. It is the highest-traffic, highest-engagement path on their whole site, because it matches how a buyer actually thinks. And it is exactly the structure Mark is describing, already built, in an industry nobody would call cutting edge.
The same company backs it with explainers that answer the next question down, like what combustible gas detectors do and where they get installed. Specification first, then the plain-English article for the person who is not sure yet. That is a two-layer pattern any trade business can copy, and it works on humans as well as agents.
Our version is not complicated. Gravel driveways, asphalt, repair, resurfacing. Depth, area, base, drainage. Say what each one is, say what it costs to think about, and stop making people call to find out the basics.
What this means for a Cookeville driveway
We are not going to pretend a robot is going to buy a driveway from us next Tuesday. A driveway is a site visit, a soil condition and a conversation about where the water goes. That is not getting automated soon.
But the first half of the job already is. People, and increasingly the tools they ask, are deciding who to call before anyone picks up a phone. If the answer to “who resurfaces gravel driveways near Cookeville and what does that involve” is not written down somewhere legible, we are not in the shortlist that gets made before the call.
So the practical takeaway is the same one we would give a customer about their driveway: the expensive part is not the work, it is the part you skipped earlier. We have written about choosing between asphalt and concrete and the five signs a driveway needs professional repair for exactly that reason. Those pages exist so the answer is there before the question gets asked out loud.
Where we would start
- List the services properly. Not “driveway work”. Gravel delivery, resurfacing, repair, new install, each as its own thing.
- Write down the numbers you already know. Depths, coverage, typical bands. The ones you say out loud on every estimate call.
- Answer the next question on the page. Somebody reading about resurfacing wants to know how long before they can park on it.
- Put the service area in plain words. Cookeville, Putnam County, and the towns you will actually drive to.
Mark’s framing is the useful one. Getting found and getting chosen are two different problems, and the second one is decided by whether the specifics exist in writing.
If you want a driveway quoted properly, with the depth and the drainage worked out on site, give us a call. That part still takes a person.
Our thanks to Mark Pearson of Strativa AI for the conversation on Unscripted Small Business.