How we started
In 2025, two of our founders were consulting for a national home-improvement chain. The company had just spent fourteen months and a considerable sum rolling out a conversational AI for its website. On paper, it was working. Deflection rates were up. Support tickets were down. The board was happy.
Then someone pulled the store-level numbers. The locations with the highest online conversion rates weren't the ones closest to the AI rollout. They were the ones with the longest-tenured associates, the ones where a customer could call the store, get transferred to someone in Lighting, and hear: "Yeah, that fixture won't work with your ceiling height. Let me show you what will."
The AI wasn't losing to better AI. It was losing to a fifty-three-year-old named Diane who had worked the electrical aisle for eleven years.
That was the moment. Not a whiteboard insight. Not a market analysis. Just the realization that the most effective sales technology in retail was already on the payroll, and nobody had figured out how to scale it past the store door.
We started Hvman to build that bridge.
