‘With an agent over the phone, it removes the need for the text-based chat of interacting with an AI. It makes it so any business can get started using AI without huge infrastructure or process changes,’ says Jimmy Hatzell, co-founder and CEO of Hatz AI.

Startup AI-as-a-Service company Hatz AI has launched its Adel AI phone agent and appointed a new sales leader to help further grow the business.

With Adel, MSPs can internally adopt advanced AI technology through the phone agent without the need for significant infrastructure changes. It gives MSPs and their customers a customizable and intelligent AI tool that is accessible over the phone with prebuilt templates, orchestration, more than 40 humanlike voices and 10 large language models to handle routine inquiries and manage high-volume customer interactions.

“I get countless missed calls every day from unknown numbers,” Jimmy Hatzell (pictured), co-founder and CEO of New York-based Hatz AI, told CRN in an exclusive interview. “It was either no message or some vague voicemail or something like that. Now all of my unanswered calls get forwarded to my AI assistant. She asks the follow-up questions that I want to know, does an analysis of the conversation and sends me an update within a couple of seconds. It’s being able to account for a situation where there’s maybe an internet outage or a mass configuration where there’s hundreds of people calling at once.”

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Adel can escalate calls when needed, send follow-ups and notifications via email faster than humans, speak with multiple callers at the same time and complete multistep tasks, he said. It also easily integrates with existing phone systems, acts as an executive assistant and can end or transfer calls, according to Hatzell.

“It’s like a custom GPT but accessed over the phone. It can hold a natural conversation like a human would while allowing for much easier of a call flow,” he said.

“AI historically has been mostly chat-driven,” Hatzell added. “With an agent over the phone, it removes the need for the text-based chat of interacting with an AI. It makes it so any business can get started using AI without huge infrastructure or process changes. It makes access to AI accessible through traditional communication mediums that small businesses are still using today.”

Timothy Guim, president and CEO of Sewell, N.J.-based MSP PCH Technologies, said Adel’s ability to be trained around client-specific information to provide a customized 24×7 AI-based conversational phone agent is crucial.

“For MSPs in the near future, I see Adel having the capacity to handle level-one help desk tickets without human interaction,” he told CRN. “Adel would answer the help desk line, have a conversation about the issue at hand, verify a user using an identity management tool, open a ticket in PSA [professional services automation], resolve an issue making RPA [robotic process automation] calls, then close the ticket automatically.”

Adel is Hatz AI’s third product launch in six months alongside its secure AI chat product and its AI application builder product.

The company currently has more than 60 MSP partners and expects to hit more than 100 MSPs in the next two months.

“There’s a lot of momentum,” Hatzell said. “In the beginning it was a lot of MSPs trying to figure out what AI is and how to use it. Now we’re spending a lot of time with partners, meeting with their end customers, figuring out how it works inside their business, packaging it and pricing it.”

With that momentum comes the hiring of JP Kehoe as head of sales. Kehoe, who took the role in early July, will be responsible for partner recruitment and partner growth.

Kehoe was the vice president of international sales and marketing at Skout before it was acquired by Barracuda Networks in 2021, spending a total of 11 years with the company heading up sales for extended detection and response (XDR).

“My primary focus will be on activating our current partners and establishing a repeatable process for MSPs to integrate AI into their service offerings,” Kehoe told CRN. “Right now, we are opening up our program to other MSPs that are interested.”

Hatzell believes Kehoe’s background in sales strategy and business development is a perfect fit to elevate Hatz AI’s market presence and foster deeper connections with MSP partners.

“AI is a very new thing,” Hatzell said. “So far there’s been a lot of help on how to productize it, how to price it and how to grow the market. He was helping MSPs sell cybersecurity well before cybersecurity is what we know today. The reason why I’m excited about JP is because he has so much experience helping MSPs adapt to new technology and integrating it into their business.”