FieldRoutes at Ignite 2026: Live Blog & Session Recaps
Ignite 2026 is underway, and you don't need to be in Orlando to be part of it.
Thousands of pest control professionals, FieldRoutes team members, and industry partners have gathered at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., for keynotes, breakout sessions, and hands-on workshops.
Ignite the Night starts at 7 pm tonight at the Swan hotel, and there's a full lineup of breakout sessions starting at 8 am on Friday! Jesse Itzler is the keynote speaker on Friday at 10 am on the main stage.
This page is the live hub for everything happening at Ignite 2026. Check back here to watch keynote speakers and get highlights from breakout sessions and customer awards.
» The full agenda can be found here.
Command Center in Aspire protects profits that can leak before anyone notices
Tim Johnson was training a new manager when the question came up. How big was one account manager's book of business?
Johnson, president of Tim Johnson Landscaping in Statesville, N.C., and a pilot customer for Aspire's new Command Center, said the old answer meant building a list, filtering it down and sorting through the results.
This time, "it was one query in Atlas, and then we had the number within 30 seconds," he said, during a video interview shown at Ignite, ServiceTitan’s user conference for Aspire and FieldRoutes customers.
The introduction of ServiceTitan’s AI-powered Command Center, with spots opened on Thursday for 100 Ignite attendees in Orlando, highlighted the Aspire keynote address at Ignite, held at Disney’s Swan & Dolphin Resort. A broader release of Command Center is coming soon.
A harness for Aspire data
ServiceTitan Co-Founder and President Vahe Kuzoyan compared the implementation of AI in the trades to the taming of the horse. Kuzoyan pointed out that with AI, like the horse, a harness "allows you to connect the power … to a specific purpose in order to do real work."
What does that look like in the landscaping industry? Aspire VP of Engineering Kiran Palan described the problem Command Center addresses across a landscaping business.
"The answers are already in Aspire, but they are spread across reports, screens and people," Palan said.
An owner who wants to know how the business is really doing often has to ask someone, or wait for a report. Palan called Command Center "the biggest thing we are adding to help run the business."
Built into Aspire and accessed via Atlas, its conversational AI, Command Center answers plain-English questions about the business. Or, as Kuzoyan said, provides a harness for the horse to unleash the power.
The alert does the watching
Aspire General Manager Eli Zevin put a number on the problem during the Smart Estimating segment. "The average landscaper runs 12% over their estimated labor hours and usually doesn't know until the job closes," he said.
Nobody has time to check every number every day, Kuzoyan told the audience, so "Command Center watches for you." When a job runs past its estimated hours in the middle of the week, he said, the tool emails the owner "while there's still time to do something about it." Email alerts are available today, and SMS is coming.
In the demo, Kuzoyan opens an alert email on the way to his truck, pulls up Atlas on his phone and asks how September revenue compares with the year before. The answer: down 22%, about a million dollars. Atlas tied the drop to a warning already on its radar. Design and build was running almost 13% over on labor, with one branch driving most of the overrun.
Ask the question, get the why
Kuzoyan demonstrated what the result looks like in real life. A real-language question about September labor efficiency came back with an answer in two seconds, with crews 6.5% under budgeted hours. But Atlas pointed out that the rosy number didn’t present the whole picture.
In one division, actual hours were double the estimate. Pulling the tickets behind the overrun showed one property on 13 of them.
"So the crew is fine," Kuzoyan said. "The estimate is the problem."
The sequence took four questions and maybe a minute, he said, and moved him "from a nice-looking month to the exact estimate I need to fix."
Dashboards work the same way.
Kuzoyan asked Atlas for a dashboard for branch managers tracking crew productivity and job profitability in the maintenance division, and the AI Builder returned nine widgets, without anyone having to write a single line of code.
The one thing to focus on today
Kuzoyan closed the keynote where he opened it, with the mathematician Paul Erdős and the problems that sat unsolved for decades before they began to fall. Then he turned to the people in the room.
“Margin, labor, knowing which clients are slipping away—these are problems this industry has fought with forever, and they’re starting to move,” he said.
GM Zevin had described the aim earlier in the keynote. One of Aspire’s largest multi-branch customers told the company his top priority for AI is raising what every person on his team can handle.
That means more book per account manager, more selling per estimator, and a lot less time on administration, Zevin said.
Johnson has seen that already at Tim Johnson Landscaping.
He said the data now coming out of Command Center has his team asking a different kind of question: What is the one thing we can focus on to move the needle on profitability today?
What comes next, in his telling, is a change in timing.
Command Center, Johnson said, “is going to give our account managers the data in a proactive manner rather than a reactive manner to lead our teams forward.”
In other words, the ability to harness the data, in real time.
Ignite 2026 opens with a clear message: the contractors who automate will win
ServiceTitan CEO and co-founder Ara Mahdessian opened Ignite 2026 with a straightforward case for landscape, lawn, and pest contractors — the trades will not be automated away, but the businesses that automate their back office will pull ahead of the ones that don't.
In front of a packed house at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Fla., Mahdessian also announced Command Center for Aspire and FieldRoutes — and confirmed that Ignite will join Pantheon in Nashville next year.
Customers who keep showing up
Mahdessian started with four entries from a note he keeps on his phone, each one a moment a customer reminded him why ServiceTitan and Aspire exists.
Zeppa's, Louisville. In May, a fire destroyed 25,000 square feet of the family-run landscape company's office and warehouse. Brothers Antonio and Andre lost every truck key along with the building. Crews already had their schedules on their phones, so they clocked in as usual while the brothers ran the business from a kitchen table. The company started that morning only two hours late. 140 days later, revenue is up more than 30% year to date.
EnviroGuard Pest Control, Austin. Luke Carter started the company in 2015 and knocked on doors with Aspire's mobile sales app to land his first customer. EnviroGuard has opened 14 new branches this year, serves customers nationwide, and i
s building a headquarters in St. George, Utah.
Anchor Pest Services, Manchester, New Hampshire. Josh and Daniel Brady started in pest control to pay for college. Today they do $7M in revenue from a single location, and $1.4M of that was added this year.
Tim Johnson Landscaping. When Tim's son TJ needed critical surgery on both hips, Tim spent a month in Philadelphia, 400 miles from his business. "When the business lives inside the system instead of your head, your team can lead without you," Tim said. His company now earns $11M, up from $4.5M when it joined Aspire, and has added only one admin position along the way.
Nearly 600 customers had a million-dollar month this past year.
Why contractors are well positioned
Mahdessian pointed to a Microsoft study of the jobs most exposed to AI. Purely cognitive roles sit at the top of the list.
Work that demands physical dexterity in unpredictable environments sits at the bottom. That describes diagnosing a property, showing a customer what the fix takes, and doing the job.
"You're dead last on the list of jobs to be automated away," Mahdessian told the audience. "In this case, being last means being best."
The real competition comes from inside the trades. Mahdessian compared the moment to Blockbuster and Netflix, which both started as DVD companies. One adapted to streaming — and the other didn't.
Four takeaways for contractors
Automate the supporting work. The fieldwork stays human. Scheduling and routing, payments and proposals, payroll, and procurement are cognitive work, and they can — and will — be automated by someone.
Commit to AI now. Mahdessian said AI's weaknesses will close as fast as its capabilities grow. He said ServiceTitan is all-in on AI and automation, and it is building the tools to make that easier for contractors.
Pick the right platform. Contractors should expect best-in-market products without juggling multiple dashboards. Being first can be valuable — but being best is what matters.
Expect more growth and more profit. Mahdessian walked through a simplified example. Two contractors each earn $5M a year at a 10% margin, or $500K in profit. One automates, grows revenue 20%, and adds five points of margin. That contractor now earns $1.2M in profit while the other still earns $500K. The extra profit pays for more customer acquisition and better crew pay.
K&D Landscaping in Watsonville, California, shows how it works. Owner Justin White pays his newest gardener $22 an hour, with a path to $45 an hour as a crew leader and strong health benefits. He leverages the excess profit to acquire additional customers, and give better benefits to his employees.
"This is not my prediction. We’re not guessing," Mahdessian said. "We simply have data that no one else does — and we see this happening across the country."
Introducing Command Center
ServiceTitan announced Command Center for both Aspire and FieldRoutes. The new intelligence layer gives contractors a near real-time view of their operations, so they can spot issues and opportunities sooner, make better decisions, improve efficiency, and drive more profitable growth.
Aspire customers can see Command Center in this morning's product keynote with ServiceTitan’s co-founder Vahe Kuzoyan and Eli Zevin, GM of Aspire. FieldRoutes customers can see it this afternoon with Scott Traina, GM of Property Care.
What's next for Ignite
Attendees will find dozens of customer-led breakout sessions and can build their agendas in the Ignite app. Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler, who built and sold Marquis Jet and Zico Coconut Water and completed an Ultraman at age 53, will speak on the Main Stage on Friday morning.
Mahdessian also announced that Ignite will combine with ServiceTitan's Pantheon user conference in Nashville next September 13-16, 2027. Landscape, lawn, and pest contractors will get a dedicated track, plus the chance to trade ideas on leadership, scaling, and labor with contractors from other trades.
"Every dollar we invest, every product we ship, is a bet on you," Mahdessian said. "And for my money, that's the best bet one could make."
Inside Ignite 2026: Scenes from the show floor
Ignite is bringing landscaping, pest control and commercial cleaning professionals together in Orlando. Here’s a look at what’s happening across the floor.
FieldRoutes Sessions at Ignite
Over two dozen sessions at Ignite are built for pest control operators, but will not be livestreamed. Check back to get the big takeaways from these breakout sessions during the conference.
Here are just some of the topics we’ll explore during the conference:
Thursday
FieldRoutes: Fleet Intelligence From GPS Tracking to AI-Powered Operations
Speaker: Benjamin Nguyen, FieldRoutes Product Manager
Fleet Pro delivers true operational intelligence, not just basic vehicle tracking. We’ll look beyond simple coordinates to explore how AI dashcams, driver scorecards, and smart geofencing combine to protect your business and your bottom line.
FieldRoutes: Streamlining and Managing Multi-Branch Pest Operations
Speakers: Kyle Selbach, Chief Operating Officer at All U Need Pest Control, Shelly Crihfield, FieldRoutes Customer Success Manager, and Roy McLeod, FieldRoutes Senior Customer Success Manager
Adding new locations can bring serious growing pains, especially when every office operates its own way. FieldRoutes gives you total visibility into every branch, making it easy to keep standards high and protect your reputation. Hear how seasoned operators use the platform to keep their branches running as one.
The FieldRoutes Roadmap: Investing in Where You're Headed
Speakers: Rachel Kozlovich, ServiceTitan, and Scott Traina, ServiceTitan
FieldRoutes is entering its next chapter, and this session is a direct look at where it's headed. We'll cover how innovation, including AI, is shaping the platform, and what's ahead for how we support your success as a customer.
FieldRoutes: Hiring and Retaining Technicians in Today's Market
Speakers: Pam Sexton, Client Success Manager at FieldRoutes, and Kristin Smith, Customer Success Manager at ServiceTitan
Technician turnover is one of the costliest disruptions in pest control, and most of it is preventable. Join this peer roundtable to explore what's working right now in recruitment and compensation planning, and how FieldRoutes tools can help build a strong team culture.
FieldRoutes: Stories from Both Sides of the M&A Deal
Speakers: Jeremy Beaton, FieldRoutes, and Eddie Barajas, Senior Client Success Manager at FieldRoutes
Whether you're looking to acquire or preparing to sell, M&A activity in pest control is moving at record pace. In this candid panel, veteran operators who’ve navigated both sides of the deal share what actually happens after the contract is signed. Get unfiltered insights into what they wish they’d known, how FieldRoutes smoothed out the operational handoff, and the unexpected friction points that can make or break a transaction.
Friday
FieldRoutes: Reducing Churn Before It Happens
Speakers: Jeremy Beaton, FieldRoutes, and Aaron Curtis, Owner / CXO at Alta Pest Control
Every cancellation leaves a clear digital trail, and the best operators read the signs before a customer walks out the door. Learn how to use your software insights to spot at-risk accounts early and intervene before they cancel.
FieldRoutes: Scheduling at Scale - How RIDD Pest Control Maximizes Route Density Into Their Biggest Profit Lever
Speakers: Nate Katebe, Product Manager at FieldRoutes, and Daniel Farah, Chief Administrative Officer at RIDD Pest Control
A live interview with RIDD's own Daniel Farah on how his team configures FieldRoutes for maximum route density, stop-per-day benchmarks, ditching monthly plans, and staying in control as they scale.
Why Operators Show Up
The right ideas, applied at the right time, change how a business grows. Our customers prove it every day:
Adams Exterminators runs eight locations in Albany, Ga., and puts routes in technicians' hands with FieldRoutes Mobile. Technicians schedule their own appointments, and the company completes more stops per day.
Open Range Pest Control turned a seasonal termite business into a recurring revenue stream. Within weeks of going live on FieldRoutes, it generated $2,300 in new monthly recurring revenue.
Ignite is where operators swap that kind of playbook in person.
Follow Along With FieldRoutes
Bookmark this page and check back throughout Ignite for livestreams, session highlights, and takeaways built for pest control leaders. See how FieldRoutes helps you grow, scale, and run every branch with confidence.
