July 8, 2025

Meet Joe - The Guy Who Replaced Himself With AI

It started with a phone ringing at 6:45 p.m. on a Friday.

Joe Todd, then a frontline solar-sales rep, planned to pack up for the weekend - but customers had other ideas: an inverter error, a battery not discharging, a last-minute quote request. His company answered calls only 9 to 6, so every after-hours ring felt like revenue - and reputation - evaporating.

He crunched the numbers and they were brutal:

• SMEs miss ~62% of their inbound calls (yes, six-two!) because nobody’s available to pick up. numa.com
• 42% of small businesses reckon each missed call costs them at least £500 a month in lost revenue - yet barely one-in-five have adopted AI to plug the gap. Entrepreneur
• When callers are forced to wait, 60% hang up after one minute and 90 % bail by the five-minute mark.

He saw the same pattern everywhere: tech-help queues backing up till Monday, surveys never booked because prospects called on Saturday, teams firefighting instead of growing.

So Joe did something most people only joke about: he made himself obsolete.

Building a Voice AI with Renewables DNA

Joe teamed up with his brother Harry (CTO - a top QA & automations dev) and partner Phoebe (CMO - digital-marketing wizard). Together they trained a large-language-model Voice Assistant on:

• Thousands of pages from inverter, battery, and heat-pump manuals.
• CRM logs from multiple installers - so the bot understands real-world language like “my inverter’s showing error 24” or “heat pump’s blowing cold.”
• Dynamic escalation rules that can: pass urgent calls to on-call engineers, book surveys straight into a calendar, or open tickets directly in a help desk.

The result is S4W Voice AI - a 24/7 receptionist, tech-support agent and lead-qualifier rolled into one. It never sleeps, never forgets, and speaks naturally in English (or Arabic, Tagalog - whatever the caller prefers).

Early Wins

Across our pilot group of UK and UAE installers, the Assistant delivered in its first 90 days:

• After-hours missed calls dropped from hundreds to zero.
• Average time-to-answer fell from two minutes to instant.
• Human tech teams now handle 70% fewer calls.
• Lead-to-survey conversions jumped by 31%.

Installers reclaimed their evenings, customers got real-time fixes, and sales teams spoke only to pre-qualified prospects.

The Human Bit

Joe hasn’t “left” solar; he simply stepped off the call-handling hamster wheel to focus on strategy and growth. S4W - now a Dubai-based AI consultancy for renewables - has one mission: let humans tackle high-value work and let AI handle the repetitive stuff.

See It in Action

Watch our short YouTube demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92nujOUKF9E to hear the Assistant in action.

Ready to reclaim your evenings? Book a live demo here → https://www.s4w.com/contact