A 10-truck HVAC shop misses 3 calls per day. Average ticket runs $1,205. Industry close rate on inbound sits around 60 percent. Run the math across 30 days and you land at $65,070 of lost revenue every month. Call it $65K for clean accounting. Not because the work was bad. Not because the price was wrong. The phone just rang and nobody picked up.
That number does not show up on your P&L. It does not get tracked in the AR aging report. It does not get tracked anywhere. The leads call the next company on Google and you never know they existed.
Every AI tool getting marketed to HVAC right now claims to solve some version of this problem. Most of them are generic SMB software with an HVAC sticker on the box. A few are built for the trade. A smaller number actually move money. Here is the breakdown.
What we filtered out and why
We tested every AI tool targeting HVAC contractors over the last 12 months. Some on production calls. Some by demo. Some by talking to operators who paid the bill and have receipts.
This is not a sponsored list. NeverMiss is mine. I will tell you what it does well and where it falls down against the alternatives. The goal is not to sell you. The goal is to save you 40 hours of demo calls and 6 months of bad procurement decisions.
Tools are organized by what they actually do, not alphabetically.
Category 1. AI Receptionists
Answering inbound calls is the single highest-leverage place to put AI in an HVAC shop. Every other system downstream feeds off captured calls. If you only do one thing on this list, it lives in this category.
NeverMiss
Built specifically for HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical contractors. Over 10,000 inbound calls handled in production across home service shops. Pricing is flat-rate per location starting at $500 per month, no per-minute charges, no overage surprises. Native integrations with ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, and GoHighLevel through Make and Zapier. The trial loop is unusual. Visit nevermisshq.com/demo, enter your number, and the AI calls your phone in under 60 seconds for a live conversation. You hear it work before you book a sales call with anyone.
Pros
Trade-specific scripts that handle the questions that actually come in for HVAC. Capacitor versus contactor versus refrigerant leak language baked in.
After-hours emergency triage with rule-based escalation to your on-call tech.
Books appointments directly into your CRM dispatch board with caller details, address, and system type attached.
Real customer support staffed by operators who have run service businesses. Not a chatbot, not an offshore desk.
Flat-rate billing. No per-minute surprises when call volume spikes during a heat wave.
Cons
No native scheduling for jobs longer than 4 hours yet. Long installs still route to a human callback.
The voice catalog is solid but not unlimited. If you want a specific voice clone we will need a custom path.
Two-day build cycle from signed agreement to live. Faster than the 1 to 2 weeks the rest of the category quotes, but you do need to block the calendar for the calibration calls.
For most HVAC shops under 25 trucks, this is the most aligned option in the market. The deeper write-up sits at our AI receptionist page, and there is a side-by-side pricing comparison at ai-receptionist-pricing-comparison-2026.
Smith.ai
A general-purpose receptionist that started in legal and expanded into trades. Per-minute pricing model.
Pros. Long-established. Polished call handling. Decent transcription quality on summary reports.
Cons. Not trade-built. Scripts read generic. Per-minute pricing punishes shops with longer triage calls or volume spikes. No real CRM dispatch integration for HVAC platforms. Expensive at scale.
Avoca
AI receptionist focused on home service.
Pros. Solid product for larger operations. Strong back-end reporting and call review.
Cons. Enterprise pricing. Longer sales cycle. Less flexible if your workflows are not vanilla. Probably overkill for shops under $3M.
Goodcall
SMB AI receptionist.
Pros. Cheap entry tier. Easy to spin up.
Cons. Not trade-specific. Weak CRM integration. Closer to a smart voicemail than a real receptionist. Customers who hit it during after-hours often hang up.
Hear NeverMiss before you buy
Visit the demo page, enter your phone number, and the AI calls you in under 60 seconds. Same agent that handles production calls for HVAC shops in 4 states.
Try the demo
Category 2. AI Consulting and Custom Builds
Vaught AI
Custom operational software and private AI infrastructure for HVAC contractors doing $1M to $10M in revenue. Founded by Joey Vaught, who has spent years building bespoke automation for trade and industrial operators.
This is the tier above off-the-shelf. You pick this when your workflows are weird, when you have integrations between 5 or more tools, or when you want to own the AI stack rather than rent it from a vendor.
Pros. Bespoke builds, you own the IP, fast iteration cycles, private infrastructure means your data and prompts stay yours.
Cons. Real investment. Custom pricing, engagements typically $15K to $50K. You need internal ops capacity to feed the build process. Not the answer if you have not maxed out off-the-shelf tools first.
Worth reading the trade-specific breakdown at Vaught AI for HVAC and electrical contractors if you are above $1M and feel boxed in by your current stack.
Category 3. FSM Platform AI Features
ServiceTitan Atlas
The AI suite layered onto ServiceTitan. Call summarization, AI-assisted dispatching, and a few other features that ride on top of the core ST account.
Pros. Deep integration with your existing data. No extra system to manage. If you already pay ST, marginal cost is low.
Cons. Only useful if you are on ServiceTitan. Locked behind ST pricing and release cycles. Slower to ship new AI features than focused vendors.
Housecall Pro CSR AI
Voice agent inside the HCP platform.
Pros. Free or low cost if you already run HCP. Zero setup friction.
Cons. Limited customization. Generic call handling. No flexibility for shops with unusual call types like commercial maintenance contracts or new construction.
Jobber Receptionist
Jobber-native receptionist offering.
Pros. Zero setup if you live in Jobber. Fine for small operations.
Cons. Basic feature set. Hard to extend or customize.
When FSM-native AI makes sense versus a custom layer on top. If you run on one platform exclusively and your call volume is under 200 per month, the FSM-native option is usually fine. Once you push above that, run multiple platforms, or have customers who need long emergency triage conversations, you need something built outside the FSM. See the full integration landscape at our integrations page.
Category 4. Quoting and Estimate Tools
The quoting space is younger than the receptionist space. Most of what gets marketed as AI quoting today is templated estimate generation with a chatbot bolted on the front. The genuinely useful tools work at the photo-and-spec stage in the field.
Mobile estimate platforms with AI assist
Most of the FSM platforms now include some flavor of AI-assisted quote generation in their mobile app. ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and Jobber all have a version. They speed up techs on close but they still depend on the inputs the tech provides.
Pros. Faster quotes in the truck. Fewer arithmetic mistakes.
Cons. Garbage in, garbage out. The AI does not improve a tech who skips system inspection. Field training matters more than the tool.
Category 5. Follow-up and Marketing AI
GoHighLevel
All-in-one marketing and follow-up automation platform.
Pros. Huge feature set. Decent AI automation built in. Agency-friendly white label.
Cons. Bloated. Steep learning curve. If you buy through a reseller you pay an agency tax. Setting it up properly is a project, not a weekend job.
Hatch
Lead nurture for home services.
Pros. Built for trades. Easier setup than GoHighLevel.
Cons. Another seat license to manage. Limited compared to a fully integrated stack.
The thing most shops get wrong with follow-up AI is plugging it in before the call capture problem is solved. If 35 percent of your inbound never gets answered, automated follow-up to nothing is still nothing. See the breakdowns at lead follow-up and missed call text-back.
Comparison table
The five tools most worth considering for HVAC contractors, side by side.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing model | HVAC-specific | FSM integrations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NeverMiss | Trade shops under 25 trucks | Flat-rate from $500/mo per location | Yes, built for the trade | ServiceTitan, HCP, Jobber, GoHighLevel |
| Smith.ai | Mixed legal and SMB use cases | Per-minute | No, generic | Limited |
| Avoca | Larger home service operations | Enterprise tier | Yes, home service focus | ServiceTitan |
| Vaught AI | $1M to $10M custom builds | Custom, $15K to $50K engagement | Yes, HVAC and electrical | Bespoke per project |
| ServiceTitan Atlas | Existing ST customers | Included in ST plan | Indirectly | ServiceTitan only |
What to measure once you have a tool installed
The mistake operators make after installing an AI receptionist is treating it as set-and-forget. The numbers move week to week and you need to know which ones to watch.
Answer rate. Percent of inbound that gets answered. Pre-AI this is often 60 to 70 percent for HVAC shops. With a proper receptionist this should sit at 98 percent or better. If you are below 95, something is misconfigured.
Booking rate on AI-handled calls. The AI does not just answer. It books. Track what percent of AI-handled calls end with an appointment on the calendar. 40 to 55 percent is a healthy band depending on call type mix. Lower than 35 means your scripts need work.
Average handle time. AI calls should run between 90 seconds and 4 minutes. If they are dragging past 5 minutes regularly, the agent is fumbling intent recognition and needs tuning.
Escalation accuracy. When the AI routes a call to your on-call tech, did the call actually need a human. Aim for 90 percent precision. Too many escalations and your tech burns out. Too few and emergencies get missed.
How to choose, by shop size
Frame the decision by revenue, not feature count.
Under $1M revenue. Start with an AI receptionist. Your bottleneck is missed calls, not capacity. Solve the call leak first and the rest follows. NeverMiss at $500 per month pays for itself the first week you book one extra job.
$1M to $5M. Receptionist plus quoting plus follow-up. Your office staff becomes the bottleneck around this stage. Layer the AI to handle the volume so your people focus on the high-value conversations. This is where the lead follow-up automation starts to compound.
$5M to $10M. Add the FSM-native AI features if you are on ServiceTitan or HCP. You are paying for the platform anyway. Stack the trade-built receptionist on top for the layer the FSM cannot do well. This is also Vaught AI tier, custom infrastructure that fits your specific workflows.
$10M and up. Custom build territory. You have unique workflows, multi-location complexity, and probably your own internal systems. Own your stack instead of renting it.
The most common mistake. Buying tools out of order. Receptionist first. Always. The leak in front of every other system is the unanswered call. Plug that. Then move to the next.
More on the trade-built receptionist setup at https://nevermisshq.com/contractors/
