Meet the Humans Behind the Agents
It turns out there's a lot of interesting technical work to be done when you focus on real operational problems and build with customers you care about.
When we first started Elyos, we found a pretty obvious disconnect. We were in Silicon Valley, where you can build AI for anything, and no one was focused on real industries, industries that actually fix things.
If field services businesses can run amazingly large operations while using terrible technology, imagine what they can do with AI?
Our team
We spent the first year based in San Francisco before moving back to London to launch. In SF, we spent time surrounding ourselves with those most advanced in the AI space, learning from the best machine learning engineers, the early roots of Elyos AI were starting to grow.
The technical challenges in the field services space are genuinely interesting and we need the best people to solve them. Our team is a mix of pretty intense engineers, AI experts, and operations managers who have led field services teams of more than 1,000 engineers.
We're not just building another generic chatbot. We are building voice AI agents from scratch, learning how automate intelligent routing based on engineer skills and locations, integration with job management systems that weren't designed for AI. It's complex engineering applied to real problems.
Our team don’t just excel at solving these problems, they love it.
Our customers
We knew we couldn't build this from San Francisco, we had to be where our customers were. So we came back to the UK and built here, surrounding ourselves with the businesses we wanted to serve. That meant job sites, service calls, and a lot of time in various plumbers offices listening to frustrations about customer calls and scheduling chaos.
To learn about the industry quickly, we started hosting dinners. This was mainly for customer research, but they have ended up being a pretty core part of our team culture and the way we work.
Our community
What surprised us was how quickly our customer strategy became a community rather than just a customer base. The businesses working with us are genuinely invested in making the technology better - not just for themselves, but for their entire industry. These dinner conversations drive everything we build. We talk about what's working for our customers, and more importantly, what's not working.
They give us pretty direct feedback; Gas Care pushes us on (basically everything). Amax helps us understand Fire and Security requirements. Aquila tells us how to make our Sales Agent even better. Every customer makes the product better for everyone else.
What's next
The companies we serve are handling thousands more calls with the same sized team, they are signing more commercial contracts without scaling their cost base to bring on this new work. They are prepared to double down on winter call-outs, rather than bracing for impact and hoping for the best.
But the bigger picture for us is about changing how this industry operates.
Our team is bringing AI to an industry that's been ignored by most tech development.
and it turns out there's a lot of interesting technical work to be done when you focus on real operational problems and build with the customers you care about.