Five Vendors Later: How Air Repair Pros Found an AI CSR Its Callers Can't Tell From a Human

This is the fifth 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, the third with Adam at Blanton & Sons, and the fourth with Bekka at Advanced Air Conditioning + Heating.)

Air Repair Pros is a family-owned and operated HVAC business serving North Texas since 1998. Kara Kohlschmidt joined in 2016 — close to her ten-year anniversary now — and runs the operating side of the company. The shop has 32 technicians, focuses on residential with light commercial, and recently launched a plumbing division. Kara is the rare operator who is both first-generation-on-tech and the buyer who burned through five AI vendors before one finally stuck.

Five Vendors, One Bot

Kara is, by her own admission, a skeptic. "I'm a big hit for human people answering the phones," she says. The HVAC operator's instinct on AI agents is the right one: every vendor sells you the moon, none of them are cheap, onboarding eats your team's time, and the wrong choice can break a first impression with a customer at the worst possible moment. "And we are home service. It's 24/7. Those are leads, and leads are expensive."

She tried five different AI CSR companies before one of them worked. The one that finally did is called Broccoli. It takes Air Repair Pros' daytime overflow plus every evening and night call. It books directly into ServiceTitan. And the most surprising thing about it, Kara says, is that callers don't notice.

There's people that talk to our AI agent as if it is a human. They don't tell the difference. And sometimes I'm like, man, I wish our AI agent could train some of our people.

— Kara Kohlschmidt, Air Repair Pros

Before Broccoli, Air Repair Pros had been using outsourced human call centers for overflow and after-hours. The math wasn't working. "Outrageous talk times. Customer complaints. Customers receiving wrong information. Calls being booked incorrectly." Worse, those services would simply pass a message — meaning the next morning the office still had to call the customer back, re-book the job into ServiceTitan, and dispatch a tech. Broccoli skips all of that. It books the call into ServiceTitan directly. The office just assigns the technician.

Pen and Paper to iPads — and Then to AI

Kara is the next generation at a business her family has run since 1998. When she came on in 2016, the shop was running on pen and paper. Her first big push was ServiceTitan, which meant moving the techs onto iPads. "It completely rocked their world," she says. The paper-to-electronic transition was the hardest change she's had to drive at the company. AI, by comparison, has been smooth.

Average age of an Air Repair Pros tech is late 20s to early 30s. "They're using Google Gemini, ChatGPT. That's just something they use in their personal lives. When they come to work, it's just second nature." Different shape than Adam Grubb's older field crew at Blanton & Sons, where every new process meant convincing someone who remembered carbon paper. Air Repair Pros' constraint is different: the tools have to make a tech's day easier, period. "If it made it harder, that'd be a different story."

The Stack: ServiceTitan, Broccoli, Bluon, Google Chat

Air Repair Pros' system of record is ServiceTitan. Around it: Broccoli on inbound overflow, Bluon's Master Mechanic in every tech's pocket, a call-grading AI for the CSR team, and a Google Chat trick worth stealing for operations.

Bluon: From Phone-a-Friend to AI Diagnostic

Bluon used to be the phone-a-friend app for HVAC techs — a number you'd call to get a seasoned voice talking you through a diagnostic in the field. Now it's an AI product called Master Mechanic. A tech opens the app, enters the make and model (or just photographs the data tag), describes the symptoms, and Bluon walks them through the first diagnostic step. Once a problem is identified, the app suggests the repair steps. "That's a great tool — especially for our younger technicians who need a little more assistance with diagnosing," Kara says.

The other half of Bluon is Parts Connect, which the warehouse lives in. A tech sends the model and serial; Parts Connect returns pricing and availability for the exact part. If the part is unavailable or discontinued, it surfaces compatible substitutions. Techs can order parts directly through the app. It also generates detailed invoice summaries — based on the diagnostic and repair work — that techs paste straight into ServiceTitan invoices. "It's crazy how an app that was originally techs calling for help has progressed so quickly. Very sophisticated."

CSR Call-Grading, Not Tech Call-Listening

On the CSR side, Kara likes an AI that listens to recorded inbound calls, grades them against a rubric, and surfaces strengths, weaknesses, and coaching opportunities. "It cuts down so much of our customer service manager's time. Especially for newer CSRs, we can see exactly where they're struggling." The manager used to physically sit with the new CSR, or listen to recordings later. The AI does the listening and surfaces what matters.

What she explicitly does not want is the version of that product that lives on the technician's iPad in the customer's home. Same conceptual tool — different surface, different verdict. "There's software you can download onto the iPad where it can be listening to the technician and the homeowner. It grades the interaction, coaches on better interactions, increases conversion rates. I think that makes technicians nervous. Not comfortable." The CSR grading is welcome because it's after-the-fact, supports a manager doing their job, and the call is happening over a phone line that's already being recorded. The kitchen-table version of it is something else.

The Google Chat Trick

Air Repair Pros runs all internal job communication through Google Chat with a specific convention: every job gets its own thread, named with the customer's name and address. Parts ordered on a Monday surface in that exact thread on Thursday when they arrive. "You can go back and be like, oh, that compressor we ordered last week for 1234 Main Street just arrived — and customer service can schedule the job, book the technician in ServiceTitan, and close the thread." Kara has tried multiple platforms over the years. This is the one that stuck. "I always tell someone — if you can come up with something better, let me know. Because Google Chat is the one that streamlines and keeps everything organized for us."

Where AI Stops

Kara's view on the limits is short and unequivocal. The first answer to what AI will never replace is the repairs themselves. The second answer is the back office.

I just think there's limitations as to what an AI agent can do. There still needs to be that human touch. We are a service business, and part of service is community. We're locally owned and operated, very involved in local organizations, the retirement community up the road, the local church. That's something an AI bot cannot take over.

— Kara Kohlschmidt, Air Repair Pros

She also doesn't think a full virtual call center is the right move for her business, even though she knows it's technically possible. "I do feel like AI has the ability if a company wanted to have a completely virtual call center — it could." Broccoli's capacity planning can even auto-assign technicians. Air Repair Pros has that feature available; they haven't turned it on. "We're just not that comfortable yet." Same logic Bekka Martel applied at Advanced Air Conditioning + Heating: AI bridges the gap, but you don't put AI on every interaction or you lose customers to the shop down the street that still has someone in the office.

Where Kara Finds New Tools

Kara's discovery loop is multi-source: Certain Path, ServiceTitan Mastery, social-media groups posting about new vendors and tool experiments, vendor emails, and — surprisingly — TikTok. "A lot of home service companies have a TikTok page. I definitely use it for more than just personal doomscrolling." Most tool decisions come from seeing what shops in adjacent markets are doing, asking for demos, running trials, and then either implementing or moving on.

Kara's Framework

1. Budget for failed AI vendor trials, not just one. Air Repair Pros tried five virtual CSR vendors before Broccoli stuck. Each evaluation costs your team time and your customers a missed-booking risk. Plan to lose a few before you win.
2. Pick the human-replacement surface carefully. AI on overflow and after-hours: yes. AI auto-assigning techs to jobs: not yet. AI listening to a tech inside a customer's home: no. Choose your surface, not just your vendor.
3. Train the AI like you'd train a human. The rules are the part of an AI CSR that an outsourced call center could never deliver consistently. Build the rules tight and the agent mirrors what your best CSR would do.
4. Hire young techs and tech adoption stops being a fight. When the average tech is in their late 20s or early 30s and already uses Gemini in their personal life, AI tools don't get the eye-roll older teams give them. The hard transition was paper-to-iPad. AI is the easy one.
5. Use threaded chat with a strict naming convention. Customer name and address per thread. Every parts update, every callback note, every dispatch coordination lives inside the thread. No new software needed — a year from now anyone can search by address and pull the full operational history.
6. Hold integrity above the spiff. Flips and turnovers are great when they're real opportunities. They're a problem when techs are inventing them. Train the repair-to-replacement model and the cross-sell takes care of itself.

The Bottom Line

Air Repair Pros isn't a shop that bought into AI on the first pitch. Kara tried five vendors before one worked, and she's still drawing crisp lines about which surfaces she'll let AI touch and which she won't. The result is a 32-tech HVAC and plumbing operation that handles its overflow with Broccoli, its in-field diagnostics with Bluon, its CSR coaching with a call-grader, and its internal coordination with Google Chat threads anyone can search by address. The fancy tools sit on top of a system of record (ServiceTitan) that the techs run from iPads — which, ten years ago, was the hard transition. AI has been the easy one.

Most operators looking at AI agents have one question: will it sound like us? Air Repair Pros' answer, after five misses and one hit, is yes — but only if you're willing to put in the rule-writing work, and only if you're honest about which part of the customer relationship still has to belong to a human. The bot can book the call. The repair, the kitchen-table conversation, and the retirement-community sponsorship don't move.

Ready to Automate Your Home Services Business?

If Kara's setup — Broccoli on overflow, Bluon in the field, ServiceTitan as the spine, Google Chat keeping operations tight — sounds like the kind of stack you'd want for 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. We've ridden along with operators across the country and seen what works at 32 techs and what works at three.

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