Switchboard - Multi-Tenant AI Receptionist for Contractors

What it is

Switchboard is a multi-tenant AI receptionist and speed-to-lead system for trade contractors. It answers the calls the office misses, qualifies the caller, books or escalates, and texts back every missed call within seconds. Each contractor is a tenant with their own assistant, their own hours, and their own transfer rules.

The part nobody demos

Everyone demos the conversation. The conversation is the easy part. What decides whether a contractor keeps the thing is the operating rules around it — what counts as an emergency worth waking somebody for, what waits until morning, what the bot is allowed to promise about price, and what happens at 11pm on a Sunday when the answer is genuinely I do not know.

So Switchboard separates office hours from quiet hours as a first-class concept rather than a setting buried in a prompt. Different transfer rules, different tone, different escalation path, per tenant. A bot that transfers everything is a worse answering service. A bot that transfers nothing loses somebody their water heater.

Two engines, one spine

The phone system and the office-manager system stay deliberately separate, joined by a shared event spine rather than merged into one application. Two reasons, both practical. A voice agent has a latency budget measured in hundreds of milliseconds and an office assistant does not. And the blast radius of the tools each one can reach is completely different — you do not want the thing answering a stranger's phone call holding the same permissions as the thing that edits invoices.

Separate engines, one event log, data joins up at the spine. It costs a little more to build and it is the reason one bad prompt cannot reach the billing system.

Carrier registration, the unglamorous gate

Business texting in the US requires A2P 10DLC registration, and it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with your code. The business record has to match across the filing, the website, and the carrier's view of you — exactly, not approximately. I have been rejected and resubmitted enough times to have a checklist instead of a theory, including the one people miss, which is that the landing page has to say what it says with JavaScript turned off.

Nobody puts this on a feature list. It is usually the thing standing between a working build and a launch date.

Stack

AI voice agents, telephony and SMS, A2P 10DLC registration, n8n, PostgreSQL, Node.js, GoHighLevel, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, Railway.

What this means if you are hiring

If you are building or buying an AI phone agent, the demo will be fine. Ask instead what happens on the call it cannot handle, who gets woken up, and how long carrier approval takes. I can answer all three from having been wrong about them first.