• 0:58 – Impacts of AI in Solar
• 3:14 – Improving Efficiency in the Wake of OBBBA
• 5:21 – Overview of SiteCaptureAI for Solar
• 8:16 – Using AI to Comply with TPO Financing
• 11:47 – The Future of AI in Solar Development
• 12:21 – The Next AI Innovation for Solar
• 13:20 – Ensuring AI Tools Are Smart Enough for Solar

Q: Can you talk about the impact AI is having on the solar industry?

Kamal Shah: I think about that in two ways — there’s the external, macro impact AI is having, and then what’s happening inside the industry itself. From the outside, AI’s rapid growth is consuming huge amounts of electricity, which is pushing up both demand and prices, and solar is the fastest way to help meet that demand.

Internally, I think the bigger opportunity is using AI to bring down the overall cost of selling, installing, and maintaining solar — and honestly, we’re still just scratching the surface. A lot of the conversation in this industry right now is about soft costs, all the manual steps and processes outside of equipment and hardware, and that’s exactly where AI can have the biggest impact. We’re already seeing AI-based sales and proposal tools, AI tools for solar design and plan sets that speed up permitting, and then the space we operate in — AI for field operations, covering site surveys, installs, and O&M. Early adopters are already lowering costs and shortening timelines without sacrificing quality, and I’d bet 2026 is the year this shifts from early experimentation to a competitive necessity.

Q: Why is efficiency and quality control so important in the wake of the One Big Beautiful Bill and the 2026 tax credit changes?

Kamal Shah: The bill really has three impacts on solar. First, removing the residential tax credit effectively raised the cost of going solar by about 30% for homeowners paying cash or financing with a loan. So solar companies need to find ways to operate more efficiently and pass some of those savings back to the customer — turning that 30% increase into something closer to 15%. That’s going to matter a lot for keeping demand and installation volume up.

Second, the bill added a lot of new compliance requirements around domestic content and related rules that both residential and commercial solar companies now have to manage. And third, incentives for third-party ownership weren’t touched, so I expect TPO to make up roughly two-thirds of residential installs this year — and TPO comes with its own extra documentation and quality-control requirements. Put it all together, and installers are dealing with more process overhead while still needing to move faster, spend less, and deliver a high-quality product. That’s hard to do the old way. Adopting software and AI tools is really the path to solving that.

Q: Can you walk us through what SiteCaptureAI for Solar is and how it helps with both project development and O&M?

Kamal Shah: SiteCaptureAI is an AI platform that instantly analyzes jobsite photos and other field data and reports findings back to field teams. We call it a context-aware AI agent, meaning it actually understands solar. We also built a workflow builder so customers can configure the workflows they want the agent to run — we provide standard workflows out of the box, but customers can customize from there.

So say a crew is submitting photos at an install milestone — SiteCaptureAI instantly analyzes them and does a few things. It detects key objects and conditions, like inverters, modules, racking, and conduit, and can catch things like roof or rafter damage. It can also extract text straight out of a photo, like the make, model, and serial number off an inverter label, which cuts down on manual entry and the errors that come with it. The really interesting part is it can check whether the photos actually meet a finance partner’s documentation requirements — because today, if installers don’t get those photos right, they have to roll another truck, and that’s expensive. SiteCapture and SiteCaptureAI are built to cut down on those extra truck rolls and make sure crews get the right photos the first time. It can also evaluate photos against the plan set to catch quality and install issues — confirming the right equipment was installed, checking panel tilt matches the roof angle, that kind of thing. And it all happens in minutes instead of the hours or days it used to take an office reviewer, so issues can get flagged to field teams before they even leave the site.

Q: How does SiteCaptureAI for Solar help companies meet requirements for TPO financing?

Kamal Shah: TPO means third-party owned — a third party installs, owns, and maintains the system and leases it to the customer. The advantage for customers is a fixed price that’s a big reduction from their current energy bill, plus the TPO company handles maintenance and keeps the system running well. It’s a model that’s been around for a while, with companies like Sunrun and Palmetto among the major players, but with the bill passing, I expect it to be two-thirds of installs this year.

– Learn more about how TPO financing fits into the broader solar financing landscape.

For installers, that’s a real shift, because TPO owners require very specific documentation and quality-control checkpoints at different project milestones. That’s where SiteCapture comes in — making it easy to get the right documentation captured the first time, avoid that extra truck roll, and then have SiteCaptureAI make sure everything is complete, accurate, and compliant with the financing requirements. It really cuts down the friction and overhead that builds up between installers and these third-party owners.

Q: SiteCapture has partnered with LightReach to streamline TPO financing. How does that partnership optimize the process?

Kamal Shah: There are three parts to it. First, we built a specific template for capturing the photos and documentation LightReach requires — that’s what an installer or field team fills out on their phone, with clear instructions and example photos so everything matches LightReach’s requirements from the start. Second, our AI agent runs a validation step to confirm all of that documentation is actually correct. Third, we have a direct integration with LightReach, so installers can submit everything with a single click instead of downloading photos, finding the right ones, and uploading them manually.

We’ve seen great results from this. Installers are seeing extra truck rolls drop by 80%, first-time finance approvals go from around 20% up to 90% — which means they get paid faster and get recognized as a top-tier LightReach partner — and the time it takes to manage the whole submission process cut by about two-thirds. We’ve partnered with them for about a year now and seen a lot of benefit for installers, and we have similar partnerships with other solar financing companies, with more coming this year.

Q: Looking ahead, what do you see as the future of AI in solar — particularly around operations, field reporting, and photo/video analysis?

Kamal Shah: I think we’re going to see AI get embedded more and more into every step of the lifecycle, moving toward more proactive, real-time guidance that’s deeply built into the workflows people already use — automating reporting and QC processes as work happens. I also think photos and video are going to become an even bigger primary mechanism for documenting and reporting, where structured information gets pulled straight out of that visual content, so field teams aren’t clicking through screens and entering everything manually.

On the O&M side, I think it’s really about getting predictive insights into existing installations — identifying failures before they happen, flagging equipment that’s ready to be refurbished or replaced. We’re moving toward a fully AI-assisted workflow, not fully autonomous, but with human oversight built in around a lot of these cumbersome manual processes.

Q: How do you make sure these AI tools are actually smart enough to handle the unique requirements of solar, rather than being a generic, cookie-cutter product?

Kamal Shah: I think it starts with really understanding solar and the problems that exist in it. We’ve been fortunate to be in this industry for 10 years, working closely with some of the best solar companies out there, really understanding their key problems and what AI can solve. From there, it’s about building a product dedicated to solving those specific solar problems — it has to be context-aware, meaning it understands the things a solar installer or installation company actually cares about.

It also has to be configurable and tunable to a company’s specific needs, whether that’s site surveys, installs, financing milestones, or O&M — letting a company take the standard operating procedures they already use and automate or optimize pieces of them. And the final piece is making sure it’s intuitively integrated into existing workflows, so it’s not a heavy lift for people to adopt. Put those together — understanding solar, being configurable, and fitting naturally into how the industry already works — and I think it just keeps getting better and faster as we go, especially as we get feedback loops from all the companies using it.

Q: Where do you see the next big innovation in AI and solar coming from?

Kamal Shah: It’s a great question, and honestly some of it is hard to predict — there are innovations coming in AI in ways people don’t even expect yet. But when I think about innovation, it always comes back to solving problems, so it starts with identifying the biggest ones. We talked earlier about soft costs and the pain points across selling, designing, permitting, installing, and doing O&M — I think that’s where the next wave of innovation comes from: bringing end-to-end visibility into each of those steps, and then using that visibility to automate what happens next.

I also think we’ll see more standardization as these tools learn from how everyone is doing things and find the most optimized approaches, which can then be shared for the benefit of the whole industry. And ultimately, this ties back to scaling solar — the demand for and cost of electricity are only going to keep rising, and solar has proven to be the fastest way to meet that demand. It’s going to take technology, AI included, along with the people and companies in this industry, to scale it over the next three, five, and ten years.

Final thoughts

SiteCaptureAI for Solar is designed to automate jobsite documentation, quality control, and reporting across the full project lifecycle — from site surveys and installations to TPO financing and O&M. As AI continues to reshape how solar companies manage soft costs and compliance, SiteCapture is positioning itself at the center of that shift.

If you’re ready to see how SiteCaptureAI can help your team cut costs and streamline documentation, schedule a demo today.

Watch the full interview on YouTube.