Learn more and connect with Evan Gouzie:

• Evan’s LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangouzie/
• HiFi Vents - https://hifivent.com/ 
• HIFI VENT AI Assisted Guide - https://hifivent.com/pages/buying-guide 

FIFI Vent YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@HIFIVent

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“We wear a lot of hats here… sometimes it could take a day before we can get back to people. And this really helps streamline the decision-making.” – Evan Gouzie, Hi-Fi Vents

When you’re running a lean startup, time is your scarcest resource. For Evan Gouzie and his team at Hi-Fi Vents, juggling product design, customer service, and operations meant customer questions often had to wait. In the HVAC world, where projects involve architects, contractors, and homeowners, delays can quickly stall momentum.

That’s where bringing agentic technology into the mix made all the difference.

Hi-Fi Vents built an AI-powered buying guide agent trained on their catalog of 100+ 3D-printed parts. Instead of sifting through PDFs or waiting on email replies, customers now get tailored recommendations in real time:

“Just go look at these… here’s a link, this one is your best bet, but you might also consider this.”

For builders, the takeaway is clear:

• Complex product catalogs (especially technical or customizable ones) are perfect candidates for agent deployment.
• Multi-stakeholder decisions benefit from agents that translate expertise across roles such as designer, installer, and homeowner.
• Startup constraints such as limited staff and long response times can be offset by an agent that works around the clock.

What’s especially interesting here is the industry: HVAC. A space not traditionally associated with cutting-edge AI now has an agent sitting at the heart of the customer journey. It’s a reminder that the best agent use cases are often hiding in plain sight, inside workflows that look “old school” on the surface.

For builders in the community: where else are you seeing “hidden agent opportunities” in industries that aren’t usually first-movers on tech?

Welcome, welcome everybody to another prompted builder stories by agent AI. And today I have a really interesting story to tell you that's gonna connect HFAC with AI. And the person that's gonna be doing with me is Evan Goosie here. welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks so much.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you and I would just get a chance to kind of connect before we hit play. And this is gonna be really interesting conversation. We're gonna try a couple of new things today of actually showing this agent on the screen and kind of walk you through some of it, which we haven't tried to do on one of these today or so far. So I'm excited to do that. But, you know, talking about HVAC, right? You know, heating, ventilation, air conditioning. One of the, and it's kind of timely too, right? Here we are in August ⁓ when everything's at the absolute hottest in the Northern Hemisphere.

and we're tying these two things together. So let me shut up a little bit here and Evan, just like always like to start out a little bit with these things, give us your background, give us your origin story, talk about your tech, technical engineering aspect and how that led you into starting kind of a company that 3D prints ⁓ HVAC events.

Yeah, absolutely. So my personal background is in ⁓ engineering, R &D, mechanical engineering, ⁓ and product design. I'd ⁓ say five years ago, my wife and I bought a 1950s era house that had been completely untouched since the 50s. So we kind of, as a lot of people do, embarked on renovating it. And one of the things that we wanted to do to it was ⁓ get a good ventilation system and air conditioning. And

We talked to a lot of different people. didn't know a whole lot about outside of my education, a whole lot of about the practical home HVAC systems ⁓ at that point. And we were introduced to a system called high velocity HVAC, which is really great for ⁓ renovations of older homes because it's much smaller ducting. So it'll fit into like two by four walls and doesn't require you to build like big, big boxes through the ceilings of your.

Yeah.

your home. And we said, that's awesome. We have, it's not a big house and we've got tiny walls. We don't want to, you know, take up a ton of space in the hallways or whatever with ducting. So we went ahead and had that installed and we were looking, you know, we're trying to modernize the house and modernize the look. And ⁓ we were looking and looking for kind of a clean outlet, is, the portion of the system where the air comes out.

And in a high velocity system, there's a lot of these outlets. There's, think in our kitchen, we've got 10 of them. They're not very big. They're, they're about two inches in diameter, but you start adding, adding them up and you can see all these holes in the ceiling and they had big, the traditional ones have big vessels around them and we're like, well, you know, that's not ideal. Um, you know, it starts to get, sound like it's getting nitpicky, but you know, you live in this house every day and you see this stuff and you kind of.

Wow.

you're spending all this money, you want it how you want it. And nothing existed that we could find on the market. So we installed what was there. And then a few years later, you I learned more about it. And I kind of was like, you I think, you know, with my background in engineering and kind of my work in manufacturing and additive manufacturing, 3D printing, that we could actually design a product here that would have been what we wanted to install in our house.

Yeah.

Wow, such a traditional entrepreneurial engineering story, right? Like you got this thing, you ran into a problem, could not find a solution out in the marketplace. You know what? I'll just go solve this myself and build a company around it, right? No big deal.

Yeah.

Ha

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's, you know, it kind of real dawned on me that this style of manufacturing was perfect for this space because there are so many nuances and different parts. You know, you need ones that go off at a 45 degree angle or a 90 degree angle. And it had, they have different connections on the back depending on your system. And there's a whole range of sizes. So what you end up with is a huge catalog of parts just for the same style.

visual style then and that's expensive for the traditional manufacturing. ⁓ So this additive manufacturing allowed us to have a wide part catalog and be able to ⁓ offer a lot more styles than traditionally you could at a lower price point.

Nice, that's so cool. So let's connect the two dots for everybody, right? All right, we're talking about HVAC and ventilation. How the heck does this have anything to do with AI, right? So talk to, like, what you ended up building is kind of an AI-assisted guide, an agent, right, to help people make decisions. All right, I want to get ventilation. I've got this kind of unique system in place. What are my options and why do I choose what? you know, talk to us a little bit through, like, the process of how you came up, like, I need to solve this.

Yeah.

Like, clearly it was an issue in the business, but like, why did you build it? ⁓ And I'd love to get to the point where like, let's show people what it is.

Yeah, absolutely. kind of the biggest strength, what I was just saying about ⁓ the ability for us to have all different styles and connection types and work with different HVAC systems, not just the high velocity systems, ⁓ resulted in us having, right now we've got about a hundred different individual parts and that's growing week on week as we come up with new styles. Yeah, that's right. It's all 3D printed. So we can...

And it's all 3D printed, right? So it's, you can kind of design

whatever else you want printed on demand as, you know, demand comes in for it, which is super cool.

Yeah, exactly.

And custom ones. We've had ⁓ HVAC professionals come to us and say, hey, I love this one, but I need it to come off at this particular angle or have this kind of sweep. And we're like, no problem. It doesn't change the cost for us, ⁓ or maybe marginally, but we can do that. We can do it very quickly. ⁓ But that presented a problem, which is when customers come to the site, they're presented with...

a huge amount of product and some of them are very technical, the options that you're choosing. And, you know, we, about 80 % of our customers are professionals. 20 % are homeowners or DIY people who are kind of the homeowners or DIY, they're doing the full stack of jobs. They're either choosing the style, they're probably going to be installing it. So they, they kind of need to figure out every kind of nuance of it, which is its own.

Yeah.

challenge when presented with that many options. But then the professional stack, you're usually in these projects, you have an architect or a designer, you have an HVAC installer, you have a general contractor, you might have a plasterer, and they all kind of are stakeholders in the selection of the products going into a particular project. And any one of those people could be on our site shopping and trying to find the best thing for

Hmm.

their particular project. And they all kind of have their own knowledge about what needs to happen with the system. The architect or the designer is really focused on performance and visual result, whereas the HVAC installer is really concerned with, how does it actually, the vents actually tie into the system? How many do I need? Does it need to come off at a right angle? So what we needed to do, and we found this with

Yeah.

a lot of the incoming questions via email, which was, you know, they know their section or maybe a little bit into the other disciplines, but they don't know the full story. So we need to kind of fill that gap so that we can support them quickly in getting the information they need so they can, you know, either make the decision right there or go back to their team fully loaded with the information they need so they can come up with the plan and then come back to us and execute the order.

Yeah, yeah, and I think

the agent really shows that, right? Like there's a whole lot of technical questions that me just trying to play with and just making stuff up, but it shows to your point, all right, buyer, you need to understand all of these things before you make a decision and buy something because I imagine making them think and answer all these also probably greatly reduces returns, right?

yeah,

absolutely. And that's the other problem that we had. It wasn't a huge problem. Generally, I think we answered the questions pretty well, but not everybody was going to, or they think they know the answer and they don't take the time to email. So then we do get the returns. ⁓ And that's not great for anybody. wastes everybody's time. ⁓ So we did create initially kind of a text-based guide with kind of the key questions, but

Right, right.

It's a lot of text, you know, it's a few pages worth and that's a lot to read. So AI kind of exactly. Yeah. So that presents us a great opportunity to help guide the user in more of a freeform way ⁓ where they can answer what they know. Maybe they don't know all the answers and that's fine. So we can help educate ⁓ and direct them as fast as possible to the right answer.

Build an agent out of it. Got all the content.

Yeah.

I love it, I love it. So first time on the show, do you wanna share your screen and pull this up and we can show everybody what we're talking about here? And I guess Evan, while you're doing that, I'd love you to talk a little bit more about, you had to train this agent to all the complexities and intricacies of HVAC. Was it straightforward as, right, you wrote this whole document out that had all that, and that was the training depth for it, or was there more work that you needed to specialize for it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. ⁓

That was effectively it. The only additional work that we really did was ⁓ we wanted, something we didn't have before was ⁓ a direct product recommendation. The guide was really like, make this choice if you need this or that choice if you need that. ⁓ But what we, it provided us with the opportunity to say, ⁓ just go look at these. You know, here's a link, go look at this section or look at these two sections or this one is your best bet, but you might also consider this.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it drives you directly to products.

So

right, exactly, which is really an extension, a better customer service experience.

Absolutely.

All right. So here's our... Yeah, we actually put it up there with both the traditional one, the one that had existed, and then the AI version here. ⁓

Cool, I can see it.

And anybody that's listened,

I'll make sure that all of this gets linked in the show notes. So if you want to go around and play with this thing, or I'll even link the part catalog so you can kind of see the exhaustive list of products. And really the cool looking products. If you want some cool looking vents, let Evan help you out with high-fi vents. Little plug there, right?

Absolutely. appreciate it. ⁓

Yeah, so mean, the biggest thing for us has always been the traditional HVAC, which is what kind of most people know about is the bigger register types that have been around forever, and then the high velocity, like I had installed in my house. And not many people know about high velocity. It's kind of a newer, well-known thing. So that's a big kind of ⁓ decision driver here right at the start.

⁓ And we kind of kind of look down the list, you know, what kind of project type do you have? Are you building a new house or you ripping the walls out or you just looking for, you know, a refresh on your interior, not tearing down walls or things like that. ⁓ We have products that are meant for installing it in all different methods. And we have ones meant for ceiling walls, floors, ⁓ wherever, wherever you're, you're

vent systems currently are or you want them to be. ⁓ You know, we kind of drive now, start driving towards some more technical ⁓ pieces. Like how is this actually going to be installed inside the wall? Do you have a limited amount of space inside the wall or the ceiling? So it has to come off inside the cavity at a tight angle. ⁓ And we have...

different types of connections here. And you might not know in every situation what the correct answer is, and that's fine. ⁓

I think I put a whole lot of on shares when I was playing with it.

Yeah.

That's totally fine. And at the bottom here, just have like, can just describe exactly maybe some challenges that you have ⁓ in your space that maybe is unique to your situation that we haven't addressed above. ⁓ And that, you know.

Yeah.

Give it a minute.

will let us generate

some customized results for you. And it takes 30 seconds or so here, but.

Yeah.

Well,

and what I love about this example too is this is another Agent AI app or agent working, but you've branded it and put it inside your website. A lot of people don't even know that that's possible to do that sort of stuff. So just calling that out too, that all of this is running on the Agent AI platform, accessing the relevant LLMs that you need and want to build to make this thing work. it looks like it's totally your own thing, which it's white labeled, right? People don't even need to know what's happening on the backend as long as it works.

lot

of time in setting this sort of stuff up because you've got the workflow built, ⁓ the data that it's trained on, and get it looking how you want it on your own website.

And I'll say that was super easy to do. In fact, we used an agent to help us generate the code to integrate with the store here. yeah, agents within agents. So that was super helpful ⁓ and a pretty easy process. And one of the things we did do ⁓ in addition to that is we connected it so we can capture the results here.

⁓

You're a little bit of five aging.

in our back end and we can see what people are asking and what are the results. So we can gauge the efficacy of the agent itself. So here's, yeah exactly, so we can continue to make improvements which is something we really want to do. You know, we may change the questions or the prompting. It's a little bit of a delicate balance I think between prompting, over prompting or over asking too many questions, getting too specific.

Very cool. Customer feedback.

Yeah.

and letting the user provide or the customer provide ⁓ a free-form description of what their issue is. So I think that's going to be an ongoing effort to optimize.

Sure.

But from a user perspective, like end user perspective, we're kind of saying like, all right, here's a buying guide. Why don't you get the specific buying guide designed and customized and stripped down to just the things that you care about or just relevant and, you know, beautiful example of what it's done here.

Right. Yeah. I mean, this, does a great job of, really taking our content and customizing it based on what the, what the customer is asking for. Um, and

and you've got

links directly to ⁓ catalog pages.

Yeah, exactly. this is recommended the ⁓ high velocity outlets for ceilings and it will take us to that collection. ⁓ Just as easy as that. that, you we're a small company, we're a startup. So ⁓ it's really important for us to maximize our time and getting the user their responses as quickly as possible. ⁓

Mm.

We wear a lot of hats here and sometimes, you we don't have a dedicated person sitting at the computer answering questions. So it could take, you know, so if we're right there, maybe it takes 10 minutes, but sometimes it could take a day before we can get back to people. And this really helps streamline the decision-making and particularly for this market where it's, don't, at least we don't think we sell a lot on impulse buy.

This isn't the type of thing where you see it, you're scrolling through Instagram, you see the ad or whatever, and you go to the site say, that's awesome. Let me order 10 of these. It's people doing research about their projects and exactly. Yeah. Or, you know, seeing, that's really cool. I don't have a use for it now. I'm going to put it in my toolkit for later. So when we do have a project that needs it, I'll go back and look at it. So ⁓ getting answers quickly so they can go back and keep it.

Right.

Very methodical.

in their mind and have the information so that they know what they can come here and get is really important.

So let's talk about that a little bit. What has been the customer response that you've gotten? I I know this probably, you very recently released this, launched this, but is it too early to tell? Or what are you getting back from people?

Yeah, it's pretty early to tell right now. think we only launched it ⁓ a week and a half ago ⁓ at this point. So ⁓ we don't have a ton of feedback on it yet, but ⁓ a few utilizations of it. like I was just saying, it's actually going to be hard for us to measure its direct efficacy because

It's not necessarily that they're going to do it and go through and buy directly from the guide We don't think that that's going to be the case We have the Google Analytics in there so we can tell when people do that, ⁓ but it's more I think helping the conversation continue the conversation so At currently I think if we see a decrease in the number of questions we're getting in our email inbox I think that's going to be a win assuming that the sales don't drop off to but

Right.

Sure.

You

Yeah, keeping the sales up and decreasing the questions that we get. Not that we're unwilling to answer the questions, but it's much faster for the agent to respond to these questions than ⁓ us humans. So yeah.

Yeah, that's still a pretty

powerful way to measure success, right? If we're seeing, we double our sales and we're getting no more email inquiries, like, okay, we have a good idea of what's happening here, why? ⁓

Right. think there's a

reasonable inference that we could make. So, and you know, that's, that's the other thing, reason we really wanted to capture the inputs and the outputs of it was so that we can see directly. Um, you know, we can also gauge, it sending them to the right product? You know, are they in that free form box? Are they typing in things that is getting adequately answered? Um, and even more than that, that could potentially be a way for us to learn about maybe products that people are asking about or, situations that they have that we

don't currently offer solutions for. So potentially it's a ⁓ help for our ongoing R &D.

Yeah, free market research. Well, you're not free, but they're giving it to you, and you said I had to go ask for it. So let's talk about that a little bit. Do you have plans to iterate on this? you trying to automate, build AI agents to solve other parts of the sales process, or your whole intake in general? Or where do you see this going from here, now that you've built this, seen how easy and straightforward it is? What's next?

Yeah.

yeah, absolutely. mean, I think we continue to improve this one. And there's some, we batted around some thoughts about adding some more visualizations to it, know, diagrams or different pieces like that, that to improve this one. But the other one that I think is going to be big, the other, actually the other volume of questions we get in to the email inbox is, ⁓ it's about installation. So install questions and.

Yeah.

You know, we've got videos and we've got guides, you PDF guides and things. And sometimes those only go so far because those are showing you kind of like the best case scenario. But when you're renovating a house, particularly an old house, oftentimes the best case scenario doesn't work. So ⁓ I think we're looking at doing a similar agent that has some prompting for questions, but can maybe pull from our kind of internal knowledge on the best methods to.

Yeah.

to install these ⁓ and hopefully again with some visualization.

That's cool.

Well, and I think it goes to the fact, right?

just because you have the answer to something, somebody has to be able to find it, right? And if these agents can make it, a chat agent makes it really easy to get people to the right answer in an autonomous way that's scalable, saves you a ton of time. But also it can help identify, hey, you know what, we've had three people ask this question the last two weeks, we probably should write a help article or film a video on it. It's done, then you never have to answer that again. So it kind of does both. It gets people answer solved faster, but also helps you identify

yeah.

the future gaps to kind of go sell for. ⁓

Right, right.

And hopefully, you know, the agent can start, you know, if we have definitive points in which we're, either, either helping guide the user towards a product or helping them install it, you know, based on common problems, hopefully the agent can start to fill in the gaps between those points. So we're not having to iterate or retrain all kinds of information on, on maybe one or one off ⁓ situations that people encounter, but it can still help them.

get to the correct answer.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and Evan, you and I were joking about with this before we hit play, but like you're an engineer, but you're not like a software engineer, right? Which is interesting here because, you know, this is, I'm assuming probably your first time building an agentic model or agentic agent like this. I'd love to like walk us through what are some of the biggest surprises you found kind of building these or doing this and like, how has that changed your perception or what have you learned as you think about how you go forward building more of

Please.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was unbelievably easy. As a startup, as you know, there's only a few of us and I'm really the only full-time person right now ⁓ as we're growing. So anything that, any tool that I can get my hands on that saves me time, both from a execution standpoint and from like kind of the end result standpoint is awesome. you know, agent AI, was, I mean, I think we were able to build the

the agent itself and get it deployed on the site in maybe four or five hours in total. It was really fast. it was, I mean, I would, it's probably saved us at least that at this point, even a week or two in. So.

Wow,

well I guess it should be carative for everybody out there. It probably took you a lot longer than that to write the health article, right? And that is the key important thing. You cannot skip that step. You still have to write your buying catalog in this case. ⁓ But once you have that built, how you make it that much more accessible to users through these kind of technologies, that's the real eye-opening event.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the buying guide itself probably took us quite a bit longer than that. And a lot of it was earned through various email communications with customers. So having that knowledge base already ⁓ was the vast majority of the time in the totality of the project.

Mm.

Yeah.

But being able to take that learned knowledge, that document, just boom. Now it's super simple for anybody to kind of get it here. And not have to flip pages, not have to do a control F search. It's like, tell us what you want to learn. Boom, here's the things you need to read. Here's things you need to know.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And that's wonderful. It's great to be able to provide something that helps anticipate a little bit better than just text and help speed up the process for everybody. everybody's short on time. We're short on time running the company, and the people coming on our site are short on time. They're trying to finance us to their problems. So ⁓ saving time is massive.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, one of the things I'm thinking about too is I'm really curious knowing the HVAC landscape. ⁓

very much not tech savvy people. It's a different kind of tech. It's mechanical tech, not a software tech. I'm really curious as you get more more into this, what is their reaction to like, ⁓ they can actually say in their world, honey, they come home, honey, I used AI in my job today. ⁓ But it's just such an interesting example about how this is getting out there and impacting all aspects of life just in little ways and finding little niche case use cases

Right. Yeah.

Hahaha

solve it really, really well. I'm really curious as you get more and more like, you know, have to come back and tell me in a couple weeks, in a couple months, like how have they responded to it? Because I could see a lot of them get excited, but it does a very niche thing for them and it does it in really well, powerful way.

Ha ha.

Yeah, I think so. mean, our whole kind of emphasis as a company is kind of forward in the tech space. Between the rapid manufacturing, 3D printing, we're going to 100 % recycled materials coming up soon. And involving AI in this, that's like kind of a push for the company and for ourselves.

Bye.

I think that's, I think it's powerful. And I think that, that particularly in the professional, ⁓ the, our professional customers, that's becoming a bigger thing in the construction industry in general. ⁓ and the other thing I'll mention is the vast majority, I think the people coming on the site that, that our professionals are coming on, on, on mobile, ⁓ because they're always on the go, you know, from the installers to the GCs, they're working out of their trucks, ⁓ they're working from the job sites. So.

Yeah.

⁓ But actually, particularly when you're like have a massive product catalog, you can only show so much of it on a mobile screen. So having a text, a more chat interface to the information from a mobile perspective, ⁓ I think is super helpful to that particular segment.

That's cool. Well talk about being tech forward. I mean, I'm counting three now, 3D printing, obviously AI, but also sustainability and issues with recycling the materials you're using. I think you're pretty forward facing here and I'm assuming, well all of this is printed in America too, so there's a lot to kind of get excited about. I think you're onto something really, really, really, really good here and really excited to see kind of where you take it as you kind of really stand this thing up.

Cool. Yeah,

thanks.

So let me kind of ask you this, Evan, like how can the H &AI community help and support you? Obviously, you know, if you're going through an HVAC and you need some more events, I'll make sure that the link to the website, Hi5 Events, is in the show notes, but are you looking for testers, feedback, collaborators? How could people help you?

⁓

Yeah, mean anybody that's got great ideas on this type of agent, there's different types of agents that do different things, different inputs and different outputs, ⁓ any ideas that they think might help answer ⁓ some of these more technical questions, and particularly as we're getting involved with the installation, something if people have great ideas about visualizations that these things can do. ⁓

that could help our customers get to the answers faster. That's what we're looking for. That would be awesome.

Very cool.

I think I'm lagging out a little bit. Can you hear me?

yep, I got you a cell.

Ryan, make sure you cut that piece. ⁓ Well, Evan, let me ask you kind of in closing, what is the best way for people to connect with you? What's your Latin long? Are you on LinkedIn, TwitterX, ⁓ obviously the company website, but share all those ways that people can connect with you if they have ideas and wanna collaborate.

bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

LinkedIn's a great one. We're on LinkedIn. ⁓ Instagram, we're on Instagram. That's ⁓ a good way to connect with us. And because that's so visual, you can see kind of what we've got. We're on YouTube too. That's where all of our install videos are. And then the website. Those are our major platforms.

Awesome, awesome, I will make sure all those are in the show notes. I guess a kind of closing, like any final bit of advice, encouragement, tip, whatever you've kind of learned going through this that you just want to share with everybody, ⁓ or something that I didn't ask that you feel is important, any kind of thing closing, feel free to kind of take us home.

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I think the biggest piece of advice I would have would be, really focus your, it's so easy to build. Don't get overwhelmed with any technical. It's not, it's really not technical to build these things. It's more, you focus your efforts on your own content and what you're going to be putting into the thing. ⁓ Cause that's where your value add is for people building these.

types of things, particularly the ones that are giving advice or information kind of like ours are. That's the human IP that goes into it.

Yeah, very good, timely advice. And for everybody out there, take that back to the shop with you. Make sure your content, make sure your framework's in order, and building and standing up these things is super easy. And Evan, thank you for joining us, and to everybody out there, keep playing, keep building, and until next time, everybody keep doing it. Take care, everybody. ⁓