Artificial intelligence has reached the lower-middle-market, as seen in the case study of Haley, an AI agent deployed by Entrepreneur-Through-Acquisition (ETA) Tyrel Sulzer to win customers for his commercial driving school, TransTech.

In a fascinating conversation with Search Party, TransTech co-CEO Sulzer and his investment partner, Dustin Sellers, Managing Partner of ETA private equity firm Next Coast Legacy, share details of Haley's rapid implementation, and how the AI agent has transformed the sales function of North Carolina-based TransTech.

In a recent week, Haley, programmed with a slight southern drawl and "aw shucks" charm, exchanged 16,000 text messages with potential customers, as well as 300 voice calls. Over that time, Haley's lead outreach enjoyed a staggering 66% response rate.

Most real people to have interacted with Haley, including Sellers, couldn't tell she was an AI agent. "It's working. . . it's not clunky," says Sellers.

Among the episode highlights:

Having developed a reputation as a technology laggard, the lower-middle-market is now rapidly adopting AI-powered tools to transform business functions, including sales-qualification outreach. " If you're not using technology in the lower middle market, um, you're likely gonna get left behind," says Sellers, who estimates that platforms like Haley may add 100 to 200 basis points to a company's bottom line.

Sulzer set up Haley in a single afternoon after learning from a friend that the same technology had outperformed a human sales team.

As TransTech grows and scales, Haley is facilitating greater revenue-per-internal employee, and important metric of success.

Haley has exhibited great ingenuity in responding to customer requests, but at one point had to be programmed to not surreptitiously change identities as a sales tactic.

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