The CEO using AI to double revenue with 1,000 fewer hires: ‘Nobody’s going to replace the last mile’

In a $500 billion industry still dominated by clipboards and subcontractors, the most aggressive AI deployment isn’t happening in software or finance. It’s happening inside a central Pennsylvania company that helps you remodel your bathroom from your couch — and its founder is the first to admit the technology still thinks his EBITDA is measured in millimeters.

He’s still growing at 15% to 20% per year, and your remote remodeling habit has helped him build a quiet billion-dollar business. That, and it got him a seat on the board of his favorite Pennsylvania potato chip.

The engineer who turned bathrooms into an AI lab

B.J. Werzyn graduated from Penn State in 1999 aiming for a career in aerospace engineering, until upper-level calculus convinced him he wasn’t “genetically encoded” for a lifetime of abstract math. Instead, he took that engineering mindset — mapping systems, diagnosing problems, optimizing constraints — into an unglamorous corner of the real economy: home remodeling.

In 2006, after a stint helping his family’s window and door business expand into Florida during the housing boom, Werzyn moved back to Pennsylvania, walked into a Staples, and bought a phone, a desk, and a computer. That was the start of West Shore Home, a company built from day one around a simple promise: tear apart a bathroom, rebuild it in two or three days, and leave the homeowner with “fast, easy, convenient” service instead of the horror stories the industry is known for. Over time, he mapped and systematized every step — measurements, permitting, inventory, scheduling, install — and then began replacing the paper parts with software.

Twenty years later, West Shore Home has more than 3,200 employees, including roughly 1,200 installers and 650 design consultants scattered across dozens of markets. It has completed over 334,000 installs. It generated $933 million in gross revenue in 2025, according to financial records reviewed by Fortune, and is now running at roughly a $1.15 billion gross-revenue pace — close enough for Werzyn to talk about “billion-dollar scale,” but not quite enough for a full booked billion-dollar year. The company has also brought in private equity: Leonard Green & Partners bought a 20% stake in 2020, with Werzyn retaining the remaining 80%.

In other words, this is not a software company with a handful of pilots in the physical world. It is a trades-heavy, PE-backed business that quietly decided to become an AI-native operator.

Hawkeye and Felix: computer vision in every bathroom

The centerpiece of West Shore’s AI stack is Hawkeye, a proprietary application built after Werzyn acquired a software development firm that had been creating custom digital tools for big-box........

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