The Efficiency Is in Your Role, Not Your Vertical

So Avoca raised $125 million at a billion-dollar valuation back in April. If you haven't seen it, it's voice AI for the trades, so HVAC, plumbing, auto shops, moving companies. It answers the phone when nobody in the office can, it books the job into the CRM, it follows up on the estimates that nobody got back to. They partner with ServiceTitan, and they're saying they're on track to book a billion dollars of jobs this year.

And yeah, that's a real product. I mean, if you run a plumbing company and missed calls are what's killing you, I'd tell you to go look at it. I'm not going to sit here and say it doesn't work.

And it's not just them. The software you already pay for is growing its own agents now, one product update at a time, and it lands one industry at a time, because the software that's growing the agent is already industry software, right? Your dental software grows a dental agent, your field-service software grows one for the trades. We wrote about this in July, how these things show up in an update nobody on your team approved. So if you're in an industry, there's AI for your industry now, and some of it's pretty good.

So then what's the problem? The problem is that's not your job.

Your job isn't the industry you're in

So I founded a finance company back in 2016. We did consumer auto loans, we originated them and then sold the paper to hedge funds and family offices. And what I learned running that thing had almost nothing to do with lending. It was that as the owner you're handling your employees, your HR, your marketing dollars, you're handling all of it, every single day, and the lending itself was just one piece of that.

And that's true for anybody who owns something, right? Your role isn't "HVAC" or "dental" or "auto finance." Your role is the business context across every function the business touches, so sales, the books, payroll, hiring, the vendor who overbilled you, the customer who went quiet on you. The industry is just where you happen to be doing it, and the job is all of it at once.

And that's exactly where the vertical AI money doesn't go. It goes to the one function a vendor can see from the outside, so the phone for the trades, the chart for the clinic, the intake for the law firm, because you can build that once and sell it to ten thousand shops. Nobody's building AI for what the owner does on a Tuesday, because what the owner does on a Tuesday isn't a vertical, right?

So the efficiency lands in one department. Your missed calls get answered, and that's real, I'm not taking that away from anybody. But your role, which is the thing that's actually making you the bottleneck in your own company, that doesn't change. You're still doing the books Sunday night. You're still finding out a customer left when the renewal doesn't show up. You still can't answer "can we make payroll Friday" without opening four tabs.

The numbers already look like that

So Bluevine surveyed 942 owners back in April. Almost half of the ones using AI are getting four or more hours a week back, so the upside is there and it's not small. But over 80% of them say they've hit a roadblock that keeps it from going any deeper, and the top two things they name are data security and accuracy. And the way I read that is, it works on the piece I gave it, and I don't trust it with the rest.

Which is exactly what you'd expect when every AI you own knows one function, right? The phone bot knows the calls and the bookkeeping bot knows the ledger, and nobody knows the whole thing, so nobody can be trusted with the whole thing, so the whole thing stays with you. We wrote in March about every platform shipping an agent that only sees its own data, and about how the next hire you're about to make probably exists because your tools don't talk to each other. This is that same problem, just from the owner's chair.

What we built

So what we did with Liaison is we started from the job instead of the industry.

It connects to whatever your business actually runs on. So in a plumbing shop that's the job system, QuickBooks and the inbox. In a clinic it's the practice system and the books. In my old shop it would have been the loan system, the bank and payroll. We build direct connectors, we plug in middleware when the stack calls for it, and when a tool has no API at all, Liaison signs in and works it the way a person would. Whatever's there, it all normalizes into one place.

And then it works the owner's role across all of it, around the clock. So overnight it's going through what came in, what went out, who still owes you, who went quiet. It drafts the follow-ups. In the morning you've got the list, and every number on that list traces back to the record it came from. You can ask it if payroll clears Friday and it'll tell you, and it'll show you where that answer came from.

So keep Avoca on the phone if you love it. Keep the agent your dental software shipped. Liaison's not replacing those, the vertical tool is just one of the places it works. What Liaison covers is the part none of them were built for, which is the whole business, from the seat of the person who owns it.

The efficiency you're after isn't in your industry, it's in your role. So the one question I'd ask anybody pitching you AI is, does this change my Tuesday, or does it change one department's? If you want to see what the first one looks like, give me thirty minutes on your own business and I'll show you rather than tell you.