In a conversation with Digital Tool Bag, Payaca CEO Matt Franklin demos Agent Dave, the AI assistant built into Payaca that can set up automations, analyse pipelines, create templates, and configure accounts through simple chat.
Matt Franklin
Most AI in business software right now is a chatbot bolted onto the side. You ask it a question, it gives you an answer, and then you still have to go and do the work yourself. Agent Dave is different. It lives inside Payaca, has access to your data and your tools, and can take action on your behalf.
I recently sat down with Digital Tool Bag to walk through what Agent Dave can actually do in practice. If you have 20 minutes, the full conversation is worth a watch.
The distinction matters. Tools like ChatGPT are useful for answering questions and drafting text, but they have no idea what your business looks like. Agent Dave sits inside Payaca where all your data lives: your customers, your projects, your pipelines, your automations, your templates. It can read that data and it can write to it.
In the demo, I asked Dave to recommend an automation. Rather than giving me a generic suggestion, it went and looked at my actual account. It found 86 existing automations across 10 pipelines, identified gaps, and came back with specific recommendations. My battery storage pipeline had no automations at all. I didn't have customer-facing event reminders. Dave spotted all of that and offered to fix it.
During the conversation, we walked through several real examples:
Automations from scratch. I asked Dave to set up a customer appointment reminder. It worked out the trigger (one day before the event starts), figured out the right variables to include (appointment details: what, when, where), checked with me that it looked right, and then built it. The whole thing took about a minute.
Pipeline analysis. Dave can look across all your proposals and figure out which ones you should be following up on. It will assess the value, how long they have been outstanding, whether the customer has viewed them, and rank them for you. No spreadsheets, no manual sorting.
Document templates. Some of our more technical users have been getting Dave to create branded document templates, complete with customer fields, signature blocks, and photos. What used to require careful manual setup is now a conversation.
Context awareness. Dave knows who you are and what page you are on. Open a specific project and ask a question, and it pulls information from that project's activity feed, custom fields, tasks, and financials. You don't have to explain the context.
One of the things I find most interesting about where this is heading is the intersection of traditional automation and AI. Payaca has had automations for a long time: "when this happens, do this." Those are deterministic. They follow exact rules.
What Agent Dave enables is adding probabilistic steps into those flows. Run a rule-based automation up to a point, then hand it to Dave to figure something out, then continue the sequence. It is like giving your automations a brain at the points where they need one, while keeping the guardrails everywhere else.
We started rolling Agent Dave out to customers in early February 2026. Honestly, we expected it would mainly appeal to power users and technical staff. We were wrong.
The technical users jumped straight into building templates, configuring automations, and querying data. But the less technical users found just as much value. They were asking Dave about their accounts, getting help with configuration, looking up project details. It is solving different problems for different people, but everyone is finding it useful.
That has actually created a good challenge for us: working out how to roll it out to everyone efficiently, because the demand is there across every type of user.
The conversation turned to the bigger picture of AI in the trades and renewable energy. There is a lot of noise about AI replacing jobs, but the reality for this industry is more practical.
The businesses we work with are not struggling because they have too many staff. They are struggling because they cannot find enough. AI like Agent Dave is not replacing Sue in the office. It is making Sue more productive so she can spend time on the things that actually need a human touch: customer service, follow-ups, the work that makes money.
Businesses that are set up to use these tools are the ones that will scale. The ones still running on spreadsheets and manual processes will get left behind. It is not about being a tech company. It is about being a forward-thinking company that uses the tools available to them.
Agent Dave is rolling out to Payaca customers now. If you want to see it in action for your business, book a demo and tell us what you would like to see.
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