By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
Live load, dry run, final pull, #11 OCC, VSQG. Why general AI misbooks roll-off orders, what trade-tuned models fix, and the truck time a misread order burns.
Key takeaways
That text message arrives at 4:12pm from a superintendent who has done business with you for six years. Every dispatcher in the country reads it in two seconds: a 30-yard open top roll-off, construction and demolition debris, the driver waits while the crew loads it, seven in the morning, and do not let them put soil in it because dirt is heavy and the tonnage will bury both of you.
Now hand that same message to a general AI assistant with no training on this trade. Reasonable chance it books a 30-gallon container. Good chance "live load" becomes a note nobody codes, so no standby time is on the ticket and the driver sits forty-five minutes for free. Very good chance "no dirt" is dropped entirely, because it reads as a preference, not as the single instruction that determines whether the load comes in at three tons or eleven.
That is the whole argument for what became a distinct category in 2026: AI tuned on one industry's own language. Not because general models got worse — because a trade's shorthand is not English, and general training never saw enough of it.
Start with containers. A cart or toter is 96, 64 or 35 gallons and lives at a curb. A front load container is 2, 4, 6 or 8 cubic yards and gets tipped by a truck with forks. A roll-off is 10, 20, 30 or 40 cubic yards and rides a hook lift or a cable hoist. A 10-yard is usually a dirt box, because anything bigger full of soil is over legal weight. A general model treats "yard" as a unit of length about a third of the time, and treats an 8-yard front load and an 8-yard roll-off as the same thing — one is a weekly service, the other is not a rental size in most fleets.
Then service codes, which is where the money is. Delivery. Haul. Swap or exchange. Relocate. Live load. Final — and "final" is the one that costs you, because a general model reads "final pickup Friday" as a cancellation of the account rather than the last pull plus container removal on an active job. Dry run, sometimes called a dead run: you sent a truck and could not service, which is a billable trip charge in nearly every commercial agreement and gets recorded as a completed haul by anything that has not been taught the difference. Demurrage and standby. Overage above the included tonnage. Trip charge. Blocked container. Contaminated load.
Then the commodity side, which sounds like another language entirely because it is. OCC, which is what your broker calls #11 and what everyone else calls cardboard. ONP, old newsprint, which traders will call #8 without explaining. Natural HDPE versus mixed color HDPE, priced very differently. PET jazz for mixed-color bottle bales. UBC for used beverage cans. Baled versus loose. Mill-direct versus through a broker. A general model reading "sold two loads of natural at 34" has no idea whether that is thirty-four cents a pound or thirty-four dollars a ton, and the difference is a factor of about seventy.
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flowchart TD
A["Super texts: 30 open top, C&D, live load, 7am, no dirt"] --> B["Waste-tuned model reads the order"]
B --> C{"Size and material grade recognised?"}
C -->|No| D["Held for dispatcher, one clarifying question sent"]
C -->|Yes| E{"Live load or drop and pull?"}
E -->|"Live load"| F["Books 45-min driver wait, adds standby code"]
E -->|"Drop and pull"| G["Books delivery only, no wait time"]
F --> H["Work order written with service and material codes"]
G --> H
Subtitle D is a landfill class under the federal solid waste rules, not a subheading in a document. LQG, SQG and VSQG are hazardous waste generator sizes and they determine what paperwork rides with a load. D001 is an ignitable waste code. A universal waste load of lamps and batteries is not the same as a hazardous load, and the manifest requirement is different. In California, AB 341 is commercial recycling, AB 1826 is commercial organics, and SB 1383 is the organics law that put jurisdictional reporting obligations on everyone — a general model routinely blends the three because they arrive in the same sentences.
Add the fleet side: a DVIR is the driver's vehicle inspection report, a CSA score follows your DOT number, and IFTA is fuel tax, not a trade group. None of this is obscure inside the industry. All of it is invisible to a model trained mostly on the open internet, where "OCC" is more likely to be something in medicine.
What tuning fixes is exactly this and nothing more glamorous. A model tuned on a trade is one that has been trained on that trade's own orders, tickets, contracts and notes until its default reading of an abbreviation matches the default reading in your dispatch office. It does not make the model smarter. It makes it stop guessing wrong on the forty terms that carry all your money.
Roll-off order volume in most US markets runs flat through January and February and then climbs hard from the first dry week in March through June as the construction season opens and every homeowner in town decides to clean out a garage. That is when the misbooked order stops being an annoyance and becomes a truck problem, because in March there is no spare truck to fix it with.
Run the new way, the 4:12pm text is read on arrival. The tuned model recognizes 30 open top, tags the material as C&D clean — no soil, no concrete over the site's limit — sets the service as live load with a 45-minute standby code, and writes the work order into Trux with the job address the super used last month. It sends one message back: "30 open top, live load 7:00am Thursday, C&D no soil, standby billed after 45 minutes — confirm?" The super types yes. The dispatcher sees it on the board at 4:14 with nothing to retype.
What the dispatcher gets escalated instead: the order from a new customer who wrote "big dumpster for a house tear-down." That one has no size, no material grade, likely needs a 40, may need a heavy-debris box instead, and probably requires a conversation about whether there is asbestos in a 1962 ranch. A tuned model should recognize that it does not have enough to book and say so. That is a feature, not a failure.
Illustrative, and the shape matters more than the digits. Suppose 420 roll-off orders a month come in by text, email or voicemail. Suppose a general-purpose assistant misreads 6% of them — wrong size, missing live load, missing material restriction, "final" mistaken for a cancellation. Suppose a tuned model brings that to 1.5%, and it holds anything it is unsure of instead of guessing.
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| Assumption | Value |
|---|---|
| Roll-off orders taken by text/email/voicemail per month | 420 |
| Error rate, general assistant | 6% = 25 orders |
| Error rate, tuned on the trade | 1.5% = 6 orders |
| Cost per error (dry run or wrong box: 1.4 hr at $118/hr truck and driver) | $165 |
| Monthly cost of errors, general | $4,125 |
| Monthly cost of errors, tuned | $990 |
| Monthly difference | $3,135 |
That ignores the bigger, uncounted cost: the superintendent who waited two hours in the third week of March for a box that went to the wrong job does not file a complaint. He calls the other hauler next time, and you never see it in a report.
Weight limits on a specific road, bridge or driveway. Street-placement permits, which are a city-by-city rule and change without notice. Anything where the material description hints at what cannot go in an open top — tires, appliances with refrigerant, batteries, paint, anything a homeowner calls "just some old chemicals." A tuned model can flag those words reliably. It should never decide them.
And it does not fix pricing. Tonnage allowances, standby rates and trip charges are negotiated per account and per market, and letting any model invent a price on a job it has not seen is how you end up eating disposal on a heavy load. Have it read the order correctly and pull the rate from the customer's rate table. That is the whole job.
Start narrow on Monday: take last month's inbound orders — the actual texts and voicemails, not a cleaned-up sample — and have both a general assistant and a tuned one read fifty of them. Score them against what dispatch actually booked. You will know within an hour whether the vocabulary problem is real in your shop, and you will have the beginnings of the word list that any tuning work has to be built on.
For a shop under about twenty trucks, a well-written glossary of your own service codes, container sizes and material grades handed to a good general model gets you most of the way. Tuning in the strict sense pays off when volume is high enough that the remaining error rate costs more than the work of tuning. Try the glossary first; it is a week of effort, not a project.
Only if you write it down. If your shop says "dead run" and your software says "dry run," and your night dispatcher says "kick it," all three need to be on the list. The single most useful hour here is putting three dispatchers in a room and having them list every word they use that a new hire had to ask about.
Speech models now handle real-time speech across dozens of languages well, and a bilingual crew leader calling in a swap is a solved problem for the language part. The trade vocabulary problem is the same in both languages, though — "caja de 30" still has to map to a 30-yard open top with the right material code.
The vocabulary problem shows up hardest on the phone, because a voicemail at 4:12pm has no form fields to keep the order honest. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer your line and web chat 24/7, take the container order in the caller's own words, confirm the size, service type and job address back to them, and drop a clean lead or booking into your hands instead of a message slip. You still set the rates and your dispatcher still runs the board.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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