Episode Overview
Most contractors know they're leaving calls unanswered — the harder problem is building the operational foundation that lets AI actually handle those calls correctly. In this episode of Mastering ServiceTitan, host Josh Lu sits down withShelby Breger, Head of Conduit Success at ServiceTitan, andChristine Yang, Senior Product Manager at ServiceTitan, to unpack how Virtual Agents and Adaptive Capacity work together — and why getting the scheduling engine right is what makes everything else possible.
The conversation covers both the voice and newly launched SMS agent capabilities, what Adaptive Capacity actually does under the hood, and how to build toward full AI-powered call handling one step at a time.
What ServiceTitan Virtual Agents Actually Do
Virtual Agents aren't just an inbound answering tool. Breger describes them as a range of agentic capabilities — voice and SMS — that can answer calls, initiate outbound calls, respond to texts, and carry on full conversations with customers.
The SMS piece is where a lot of ears will perk up. When a lead form submission comes in, most businesses can't respond within the hour. An SMS agent changes that math entirely — it can reach out within seconds, in whatever tone and format the business configures, and then continue the conversation based on how the customer responds.
"This is what we call speed to lead," Breger says. "It's about getting to that lead as soon as possible because most customers will go with the business that can respond the fastest."
Voice and SMS aren't a pick-one situation. Some customers want a call; others will only respond to a text. Virtual Agents let you meet customers where they are, and the customizations you've already built into your voice agent — knowledge base, job types, after-hours fees, voice settings — carry over automatically to the SMS agent. You're not starting from scratch.
What Adaptive Capacity Does and Why It's a Prerequisite
Before Virtual Agents can book jobs accurately, ServiceTitan needs to know when a technician can actually show up. That's what Adaptive Capacity does.
Yang describes it as the brain behind availability — a scheduling engine that takes all the variables that a top CSR would normally hold in their head and codifies them into a single source of truth. Those variables include:
Technician shifts (who's working, when, and for how long)
Jobs already on the board, assigned or unassigned
Non-job events like meetings or shop runs
Technician skills and which job types they're eligible for
Business units and zones that determine dispatch eligibility
"AppCap is the brain that figures out when are you truly available for a job, taking all of these different variables into consideration," Yang says, "so that you are no longer relying on a CSR with amazing tribal knowledge to keep track of everything and magically put things on the board accurately."
Before Adaptive Capacity, Yang saw what that tribal knowledge dependency looked like in real call centers: CSRs with sticky notes, a shared Teams chat, TV monitors on the wall, and a manually maintained red/green/yellow spreadsheet just to know which job types were still open for the day. That's the overhead Adaptive Capacity eliminates — and it has to be eliminated before a virtual agent can do the same job.
Setting Up Adaptive Capacity and Virtual Agents
Setup difficulty depends almost entirely on the state of your core ServiceTitan configuration. If your business units, skills, and zones are already accurate and maintained, Yang says Adaptive Capacity can be functional very quickly — potentially within an hour for a smaller business. Larger operations with blended technician roles may need more planning to map how they actually dispatch before locking in capacity rules.
For Virtual Agents, Breger says that once AdCap and technician shifts are in place, a full setup can take 30 to 45 minutes. The bigger lift isn't configuration — it's deciding where to start.
Her advice: go where the pain is most acute. For most businesses, that's one of two places:
After hours: calls routing to an owner's cell or a voicemail-only answering service, with nothing getting booked
Overflow: calls going unanswered during busy periods because every CSR is already on a line
Starting with one of these creates a clean baseline. You can see exactly which jobs the agent booked that would have otherwise been lost, and the ROI is immediate. From there, layering in SMS for speed-to-lead follow-up, outbound notifications, or other use cases becomes a natural next step.
What's Coming Next for Both Products
On the Virtual Agents side, outbound voice calling is the next capability going live, followed by expanded agent "goals" — the specific purposes an agent is configured to achieve. Parts arrival follow-up is in beta now. Dispatched technician notifications and missed call follow-up are coming soon after. Breger also notes that SMS agent functionality is launching in June and will be available to all existing Virtual Agents customers through their account team.
For Adaptive Capacity, Yang highlights two near-term additions: multiple report templates tailored to different roles within the business, and an AI-powered onboarding assistant that can review a business's existing ServiceTitan setup and recommend the right AdCap configuration — no need to manually work through documentation or field multiple support calls to get it right.
Christine Yang andShelby Breger recently joined Josh Lu on the "Mastering ServiceTitan" podcast to discuss:
[1:24] Where contractors should start with virtual agents
[10:00] Common scheduling challenges Adaptive Capacity solves
[22:38] A practical roadmap for implementing AI tools
Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:
You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.
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