Why Legacy FSMs Can't Keep Up With Podium's AI Operating System

Who is Jim Christian and what does he do at Podium?

Kyle Gargaro: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Newsmakers podcast. AI is changing the way the world does things, and HVAC is no different. That's why I'm excited to welcome Jim Christian to the podcast. He is the head of product HVAC for Podium. Thanks for joining us, Jim.

Jim Christian: Hey Kyle, thanks for having me here today. Super excited to chat with you about everything going on at Podium.

Kyle: Let's just start with an introduction – you gave your name and title there, but sometimes that doesn't tell the whole story. So who are you, and what do you do at Podium?

Jim: Happy to answer that. So my name is Jim. I'm a product director here at Podium. I oversee a couple areas of our product – number one being our HVAC operating system that we're building. I also handle a handful of things around integrations and our full ecosystem, payments, and things like that. I've been at Podium for about five years, based in Utah, and I've absolutely loved what we're doing here, especially in the last couple years as we've been going extremely deep in home services – understanding exactly how these businesses run and building a full system to ultimately help them win and make more money.

Why is AI an inevitable shift for HVAC contractors right now?

Kyle: Okay, I wanted to start maybe big picture: why do you think AI is such an inevitable shift for HVAC contractors right now, and not just a trend or a flavor of the week?

Jim: That's a great question, Kyle. I think there's a couple parts to this, mostly centered around the idea that when a new technology comes out, I'd consider this a technology push. AI was invented, and then people like our team and many others started figuring out how we could apply it in valuable ways. Early on, we were unsure if AI could be useful in valuable ways. The reason I think it's hyper-relevant today is that we've found ways that really do help home services businesses – HVAC specifically – get more work done more efficiently. I think where AI models and agents excel is in their ability to handle long-running, complex tasks that require a lot of decision-making and logic. For example, when it comes to handling inbound leads and getting them booked on the calendar, there's a million little decisions that have to be made when evaluating a lead and deciding how to book it: where are they located, do we have someone available who has the right skills, does it fit on the schedule today or is it better tomorrow, is it an emergency, who is the person having this problem right now, and how much of an emergency is it? When AI agents are trained properly, they can handle all of that. Other technologies and other ways of handling this were a lot more rough – you'd have to figure out how to distill all that human knowledge into code. With AI and these LLMs, we can build systems where the agent has intelligent reasoning and can make human-like decisions when built properly.

What is Podium's AI Operating System?

Kyle: That makes complete sense. I want to drill down a little bit on Podium specifically, if you don't mind. I know you have an AI operating system – tell our audience what that is, and what it means to the contractor on a day-to-day basis.

Jim: So Podium's AI operating system is a complete, end-to-end software stack that solves everything for your business with the exception of accounting software – we integrate with accounting software. That means not only the Podium that many people listening probably know – reviews, communication, and lead management – but also an entire field service management software built into it. So that's technician booking, a technician mobile app, your membership program, job checklists, your price book, invoices, estimates, payments, workflows – everything all in one system. That's kind of the core of the software, all of those features and capabilities. And then the way we build this software is thinking agent-first. We have multiple different AI employees that do different jobs. We started with our AI CSR, which works over both text and voice as an agent that can handle inbound calls – especially valuable when you're dealing with call overflow scenarios or after-hours calls when someone isn't available. Then we expanded and built an AI Membership Coordinator, which I'm happy to go into. And then our Operator, which is an internal agent – imagine you had another intern or assistant in the office who could go do work for you simply by telling it what you needed done. So to recap, it's a group of AI employees, a system of agents sitting on top of an entire full-stack front-office and back-office software.

Kyle: Was this something new for Podium? I didn't realize you were so expansive in everything you offer the contractor – I was thinking of you guys a little more narrowly.

How did Podium evolve from a reviews platform into a full AI operating system?

Jim: That's a great question. A little bit about the history of Podium, to give you an idea of where we're at: when we got started, back about twelve to fourteen years ago, our founders got started with review solicitation – making it really easy for local businesses to capture reviews, build an online reputation, and get more leads. That was a super valuable core that expanded into full communication software, everything from text messaging and emails to phones and social media channels. From there, we really realized what we had become was a lead management software for HVAC businesses. The full journey was: a lead comes into Podium, it's consolidated into a single inbox so you never miss it, you respond as quickly as possible, and once the job gets done, you send out that review to create a virtuous loop of growth.

About 24 months ago, we started having a real conversation about how to take our AI employees to the next level. We had these AI employees integrating with other field service management software, but the challenge with integrations is that data access is always limited – no matter how great the integration, something is going to be restricted in what we can access. The best AI employees are the ones who can see everything going on in your back office: who your technicians are, when they're available, what skills they have so they can book with accuracy, and what you already know about your customers – information from prior job notes and history of work done with them.

The way I like to put it, Kyle, is that the first version of our AI employees could basically say, "Hey Kyle, thanks so much for reaching out, I understand the problem with your furnace not turning on, I'm going to get this over to a human immediately who will follow up with you to see if we can get out and help you tonight." The better AI employee, the one we offer now because we have this full field service management software, is one that can say, "Hey Kyle, totally understand the issue – Jim is on call tonight, he could be to your house in 30 minutes, do you want me to send him to you?" That's all predicated on our ability to have that data about what's going on in the back office, and that's what we decided to build. We started that journey about 24 months ago, and we've built an incredible system at this point that has the majority of what everybody needs in a field service management software.

The greatest thing – at the risk of going too long here – is that while it might seem like Podium is relatively new in this journey compared to some of the other players in the space, we don't only build and deploy AI products and agents to our customers. From the ground up, our culture and engineering here is AI-first. That means we actually have coding agents who go off and build things, and what that really does is let us build things that used to take years in months or weeks, or sometimes even days, depending on what we're building. So we're able to accelerate extremely fast into the space, build out the full system, and get everything working – and it's going really well.

Kyle: Sounds great. I want to talk a little bit more about Podium's Operator, because honestly, that's the thing that interests me the most – I really do find that fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is exactly, and for a contractor listening in, how is that going to help them in their day-to-day?

What is Podium's Operator agent?

Jim: That's a really good point, Kyle. I'd agree that Podium Operator is the most interesting and valuable AI agent that we've built, and the reason for that is our other agents, like the AI CSR and the Membership Coordinator, are hyper-specific – they have a certain job to be done. Our AI CSR is there to handle leads and customers who call in. Of course, you can program that agent with a ton of different playbooks based on a scenario, everything from what happens if one of my technicians calls in and how I route that, to what happens when an existing or new customer calls in and articulates an issue. We can do all that, but it's still an agent built for that one specific use case.

Operator is a different type of agent – it's an internal agent. The way to think about it is imagine you had one more employee in your office who could do work for you as the business owner. What's cool about Operator, the way we built it, is pretty simple: it has access to all of your data in Podium. It's natural-language prompting, meaning you just send it messages – you can send it over text message literally, or open up a web page in Podium and talk to it right there, very similar to using ChatGPT or Claude. It can go reason and do work on whatever you've asked it to do. The thing that really makes it wild is the use cases are effectively unlimited – as long as it has access to the data, you can get it to do the thing.

Kyle: Gotcha. You alluded to it earlier – there are a lot of folks going into this market because of the trend, and it's hard for contractors to decipher who they should go with. Maybe a general question: what should a contractor ask an AI vendor before they sign anything? What should someone who wants to get into AI but isn't that comfortable with it be looking for?

What should a contractor ask an AI vendor before signing?

Jim: That's a great question. We all know this because we're seeing it every day – especially contractor business owners are probably getting pitched every week by some sort of AI vendor or AI tool. I think the important questions to ask are: number one, show me the actual return on investment other customers are seeing. If I'm going to pay you some amount of money, what are other businesses actually seeing? Are you helping them generate more revenue, are you helping them save time? That's important for two reasons. One, there is still a decent amount of snake oil out there – some things sound great on the surface but lean too heavily on the AI hype train, and you have to make sure there's actually real value there. Number two, and probably more important, is you need to make sure that the problems this AI vendor is solving are actually relevant to your business. Everyone has a different set of problems. A smaller HVAC business with three technicians and one office person might not have a lead volume problem, so something like an AI CSR might not actually be that helpful – a human could do this, and you're not going to let that human go anyway. Whereas a bigger business might find an AI CSR really important because they're having challenges hiring and retaining good talent in their call center, or picking up the phone during the business day. It really comes down to whether the problem that vendor is specifically solving is one that aligns to you, and whether you believe in the ROI on that.

The other thing I'd say is that when it comes to evaluating AI vendors, you really have to understand how they go about integrating with all the data that's relevant to do the job. An obvious example: if someone's pitching a voice AI CSR that can pick up the phone, but they don't have a robust integration with your field service management software and your scheduling tools, it becomes pretty obvious right away that they aren't going to be able to figure out how to schedule. All they're going to be doing is basically acting like a glorified voicemail.

Kyle: That's real interesting, Jim. I love that first part because it seems so simple – make sure it's solving the problems you have. But when we're talking about AI, maybe that's not what contractors are thinking about; they can't see the forest for the trees. I think that's a good takeaway for contractors. Now, obviously this is changing very quickly – where do you see AI going in the next 12 months? I know from talking to AI folks that 12 months might as well be 20 years away given how fast you all are working. Can you get that crystal ball out a little bit?

Where is voice AI headed over the next 12 months?

Jim: I think there's a couple areas. Number one, voice AI is at a very interesting place right now. When many players, including Podium, were building voice AI agents, there was a general belief in the industry that the quality of the voice and the conversational interaction would get so good so quickly that people wouldn't be able to distinguish an AI agent from a human. I think there's been a bit of a change there – across the entire industry, we've realized it's very hard to get to that point. I've actually talked to multiple of our customers who say they're very happy with Podium, and especially love Podium Operator, but say that voice AI isn't quite right for them because they have a client base who knows it's AI, and their competitor differentiation is actually making sure a real human picks up the phone. And that's great. I do think that over the next 12 months we'll continue to see incredible strides in how high-quality these voice agents are and how convincing they are. Ultimately what matters is whether the agent can get the job done and be comfortable enough that the human on the other end is willing to talk to it.

If it's not clear already, I believe Operator, or any equivalent of that, is really the future of what's going on. What I've learned working closely with HVAC businesses over the last two years is that these businesses have a million little tedious things, complex workflows, that they have to do every day. The old way of doing things is going through a piece of software and clicking a million buttons, which also involves training people in place to do that. Tools like Operator can provide extremely valuable insights about your business and actually take action on them. I think we'll see 2026 and into 2027 as the time of agents, where products like Podium are building agents that help humans do the tasks they actually need to do day to day – definitely not replacing humans on the call side, maybe in some examples like replacing call centers, but supporting humans and turning them into superhumans, allowing them to do a lot more in the day.

Kyle: And to that point, you see more acceptance too from the homeowner's perspective – they're open to it, they know it's AI, like you said, you're not trying to trick anyone here, and there's acceptance of it because they'd rather deal with that at eight o'clock than just get a voicemail. I assume it's going to keep progressing that way.

How are homeowners responding to AI agents?

Jim: Exactly, right. There are plenty of homeowners who, at nine o'clock at night, if they realize they're talking to an AI agent, would say they'd rather talk to a human and might call somebody else. If it's over text, that's much less of a problem – generally the AI agents are good enough, or sometimes even better than humans, at responding quickly and accurately. Some people will have a rejection to the voice, but for the most part we're seeing that an HVAC business owner is saying: what are my options? I either miss that call, or hope somebody wakes up and takes it, or I can guarantee that an AI agent will at least attempt to capture that call.

Kyle: So if an HVAC contractor listening to this likes the idea of AI and wants to get involved, but hasn't done any research or planning for it, what's their first move?

What's the first move for a contractor considering AI?

Jim: I think their first move is, going back to the ROI thing, to take a moment, step back, look at your business, and say: what are the real problems I need to solve? Then start exploring what other people are doing to solve those problems, what tools are out there, and go take demos – go learn how those things work and dig into the details of how you'd actually solve these problems. The other framing I really like is: talking to HVAC business owners, what would you do if you had an extra free person working for you every day? What problems would you have them tackle, where would they sit in your system, what would they go do? That can really quickly frame up what products might make sense to buy.

Kyle: Well, if that's their first move, I'm guessing their second move would be to reach out to Podium and find out what you guys have to offer. So if people are doing that, where should we be sending them to learn more?

Jim: A hundred percent. The first place to start is homeservices.podium.com. There you can learn all about what we're doing with our AI operating system, and we'd absolutely love to get on a call with everyone who's interested and get going from there. What Podium has built is blowing customers away – we've brought on hundreds of customers to our AI operating system, having only officially launched it about six months ago, and it's rapidly accelerating. Customers are extremely happy with the results they're getting from it. There are so many different tools to solve different types of business problems: whether it's internal issues or organizing data – getting insights and taking action, Operator is there; whether you're running a really big membership program and dealing with the burden of operating it and reaching out to customers to get them booked, our AI Membership Coordinator is there; and if you're dealing with call volume issues, overflows, and after-hours challenges, our AI CSR is there, working over both text and voice, to help capture more of those leads and generate more revenue.

Does Podium's AI operating system work beyond HVAC?

Kyle: It's important to point out, our audience is HVAC contractors, but a lot of our folks are doing plumbing and electrical too. So this isn't just an HVAC thing – this is a home services thing that works for everyone, right, Jim?

Jim: That's correct. Our target is HVAC, plumbing, and electrical – that's where we've focused first. We've found that garage door companies absolutely love what we're building too, that works really well, and we're starting to dabble in pest control companies – a lot of good there as well. It really comes down to: are you doing work in the field, sending out technicians to do work in the field? Are you handling a decent number of leads? And are you looking to grow your business and operate more efficiently?

Kyle: Well Jim, I always find this topic fascinating, so I really appreciate you carving out a few minutes to talk to us about everything you've got going on in the technology in general. Really appreciate it.

Jim: Thanks a lot, Kyle. Thanks for having me here.