Ellie, Molly, Sally, Andy, and Rosie: How Advanced Air Runs Its Austin Front Desk on AI

This is the fourth installment of our Home Services Leaders in AI series. We sit down with operators who are actually using AI and automation to run their companies — no theory, no hype. (Catch up on the first interview with Sarah at Golden Rule Cleaning, the second with Dave at Glass Therapy Clarksville, and the third with Adam at Blanton & Sons.)

Advanced Air Conditioning and Heating is a family-owned HVAC company serving the Austin metro from Cedar Park, Texas. Bekka Martel co-owns it with her husband Joe — four service technicians and a comfort advisor today, a fifth tech being hired for summer, and a goal to double the field roster next year. Joe runs the technical side. Bekka runs the operating system. And the operating system, increasingly, is a roster of named AI agents doing the jobs that used to fall on a phone.

The Five Agents on the Calendar

Ask Bekka what's actually running her front desk on a Tuesday morning and she'll list five names: Ellie, Molly, Sally, Andy, and Rosie. None of them are humans. They are five AI agents from a platform called UpSmith, and each one has a job.

Ellie is the estimator follow-up — she chases customers after a quote. Molly manages the Advanced Club membership: she watches ServiceTitan for members with recurring services due and reaches back out to them. "She'll let them know, hey, you're part of our Advanced Club, we have a recurring service due for you, I have these dates available — and it books directly into ServiceTitan." Sally sells new memberships. Andy confirms appointments. Rosie is re-engagement — she goes back after the dormant customers nobody had time to call.

Each agent watches a different signal inside ServiceTitan. Each one books into the calendar. The result, Bekka says, is a calendar that has been booked every month since she switched UpSmith on — including in the shoulder seasons when she could previously never get hold of her maintenance members.

Before UpSmith, Advanced Air had a basic automated drip inside ServiceTitan's field service manager that told customers to "give us a call or book online." It wasn't personalized. It wasn't getting responses. So the team had to make outbound maintenance calls to recall their own members — which meant they were missing the inbound calls on actual new leads. The math was bad and Bekka knew it.

The lead to fix it came from a friend at Rescue Air in Dallas, a shop in Certain Path's coaching network. They spent a day there picking the owner's brain on operations, and he introduced Bekka and Joe to Wyatt — the founder of UpSmith. Advanced Air went live shortly after. The booked calendar followed.

"I Throw It in a Claude"

Bekka and Joe have a running negotiation about AI. Joe was, in her words, the skeptic. Now he's the one asking her how to fix his email.

He's like, what do you do to fix your email? I was like, I throw it in a Claude.

— Bekka Martel, Advanced Air Conditioning and Heating

That phrase — throw it in a Claude — is a pretty good summary of the Bekka half of the company's operating philosophy. If a task involves typing, paste it into the model. If it can be templated, template it. If it can be agentized, agentize it. The friction in adopting AI inside the company comes mostly from her trying to convince Joe — and the techs — that what they are already doing the slow way could be the fast way. "I try to give him a task and he's like, I just want to do it. I'm like, that's great. But there's so many more efficient ways you can do this."

The Stack: ServiceTitan, UpSmith, Avoca, Claude

Advanced Air's core platform is ServiceTitan. Everything orbits it. UpSmith's five agents read and write into ServiceTitan. The technicians lean on Atlas, ServiceTitan's built-in AI, on jobs. Avoca — a separate AI voice product whose founders Bekka knows personally — sits on the inbound call side. Different shape than Dave Scribani's two-CRM stack at Glass Therapy Clarksville, where HouseCall Pro and GoHighLevel split the field-ops and automation work. At Advanced Air, ServiceTitan is the hub and a layer of specialized AI vendors snaps on around it.

On top of that, Bekka herself lives in Claude and ChatGPT. She uses them to draft emails, work through operating questions, and prototype things she eventually wants in production. The most interesting of those prototypes is her trust map.

What Bekka Is Building Herself

A trust map is a marketing artifact: a real map of the company's service area, with pinpoints on every house Advanced Air has been inside in the last 90 days. The pitch is in the picture. "Your neighbors are calling us. We've done a hundred jobs in this neighborhood. Let us make your comfort better." Other companies post them on their websites. Some put them in blog posts. Some run them on social.

Bekka has been trying to generate hers with Claude and ChatGPT for weeks. It's not quite working. The models can get close — they can pull addresses, plot points, render the image — but the consistency falls apart at the edges. An answer eventually came back from Stephanie Allen at Just Start AI explaining exactly where today's models hit a wall on this kind of task and what to use instead. Bekka hasn't shipped it yet. She's also not done trying.

Where She Finds the Next Tool

For an operator running a family HVAC shop in Austin, the question isn't whether to adopt AI — it's where to hear about the next tool before everyone else does. Bekka's answer is two communities.

The first is Just Start AI, a free community founded by Jennifer Bagley and Stephanie Allen (who also owns a cleaning company called Airworks in California). It runs as a Circle community plus a Facebook group. Members post playbooks, AI updates, SEO updates, and mini-lessons on prompting and terminology. The second is the ServiceTitan Mastermind Group — Bekka watches it for AI products she's never heard of being mentioned by other operators.

AI, for so long, you'd think — yeah, white-collar corporate world, perfect place for it. But people don't typically think about it for blue collar. And really, it's a great place for blue collar. It gets information at the guy's fingertips when they're in the field.

— Bekka Martel, Advanced Air Conditioning and Heating

The Gap She'd Build Next

Asked where the biggest unbuilt opportunity is in HVAC AI, Bekka has a precise answer. It is not a chatbot. It is a vision-model integration.

"There's no integration between an AI product and ServiceTitan that reads data tag photos and uploads the equipment model and serial number into the location profile." That's the gap. Every truck snaps photos of the metal data plate on every furnace and condenser they touch. Those photos sit in ServiceTitan as image attachments, doing nothing. If an AI could OCR them — extract the model and serial — and write them into the equipment record, Advanced Air would suddenly know the age of every system its team has ever touched. They could then promote intelligently: a customer with a 15-year-old condenser is a replacement candidate; one with a five-year-old system is a great membership candidate.

"I need to call somebody and trademark it now," Bekka says. Image models are already good enough to do this. Nobody has shipped it into ServiceTitan yet. Different lever than the install-coordinator role Adam Grubb eliminated at Blanton & Sons — same instinct: find the data the company is already collecting and stop letting it sit.

Where AI Doesn't Belong

Bekka's view of the limits is unambiguous. "There's nothing AI that's going to clear your drain line. There's nothing AI that's going to wash your condenser coil. There's nothing AI that's going to change the filter. Will there be AI that says, hey, it's been a while since you changed your filter? Absolutely. But the actual diagnostics and getting somebody in there — AI is not going to be able to replace that."

Everyone's like, oh, AI is coming for your jobs. And I'm like, no, because there always has to be a human behind AI. AI makes mistakes. Humans make mistakes.

— Bekka Martel, Advanced Air Conditioning and Heating

The other limit is customer experience. Asked whether an HVAC shop could run on just the owners and a roster of techs — with AI standing in for every office function — Bekka pushes back. "Possible? Yes. Sustainable for customer experience? No. People understand using AI to bridge the gap, but if you use AI for everything, you lose that touch and you increase frustration. They don't want to call the doctor's office and it's always AI. They don't want to call the home services company and it's AI every time."

That's why Advanced Air's setup is layered, not total. UpSmith's agents handle the routine recall-and-confirm work. A human picks up when a customer actually wants to talk to someone. Education at the kitchen table — what's high priority, what can wait, how to change the filter yourself — is done by the technician, in person. "We want the guys to break it down into easy-to-understand language and get the client involved so they know where their filter is, where their drain line is, how to do something."

Bekka's Framework

1. Bring the customer into the diagnosis. Show them where the filter is, where the drain line is, what every part does in plain language. Customers who understand their system trust the company that taught them.
2. Use AI for the touches that lose money when missed, not the ones that matter most. Membership recalls, appointment confirmations, estimate follow-ups — automate those. A nervous customer at the kitchen table is still a human conversation.
3. Educate, don't push. The market is tight; not every repair is feasible today. Frame the conversation as high priority versus can-wait so the customer can decide, and they'll call you in July when their system actually fails.
4. Find your community before you find your tools. Just Start AI, ServiceTitan Mastermind, Certain Path. Most of the tools you'll end up using were a friend's recommendation first.
5. Run the experiments yourself. The trust map isn't built yet — but the only way to know what Claude and ChatGPT can actually do for the business is to keep banging on them until they break.
6. If your spouse hates the AI stuff, throw it in a Claude until they ask you for help with their email.

The Bottom Line

Advanced Air Conditioning and Heating isn't the biggest HVAC shop in Austin, and Bekka isn't trying to be. She's trying to be the operator who knows which lever to pull next. Today that lever is UpSmith's five-agent calendar. Tomorrow it's a vision model reading data tags off equipment photos. The throughline is that Bekka herself sits in the seat between the field and the software, and she's willing to do the slow work of testing tools until they actually land.

The bot army on the calendar isn't replacing the techs. It's protecting them. Every recall Molly handles is one Joe doesn't have to chase between service calls. Every appointment Andy confirms is a call a human in the office can answer the first time. That's how a four-truck family business in Cedar Park keeps its calendar full through shoulder season while the rest of the market is sitting on its hands.

Ready to Automate Your Home Services Business?

If Bekka's setup — UpSmith agents wired into ServiceTitan, Claude in the operator's pocket, an actual human picking up the phone — sounds like the way you want to run your shop, that's where Robby comes in. We help HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies wire up AI-powered documentation, automated job tracking, and integrations across ServiceTitan, HouseCall Pro, and the rest of your stack.

Book a free demo and we'll walk through your specific workflow and show you where the biggest wins are.