Invoca today released a home services product that combines AI voice and messaging agents with appointment booking in ServiceTitan and Salesforce Field Service, five days after Google began charging Local Services Ads advertisers for certain unanswered phone calls, according to the company.

In Short

Invoca, a software company, has released a tool that uses AI to answer phone calls and texts for businesses such as plumbers and heating and cooling firms. It matters because Google started charging advertisers on October 1 for some calls that nobody picks up, so a missed call can now cost money as well as a customer. The tool is meant to catch those calls and book the job, but no pricing or real-world results have been published, so how well it works is still unproven.

What Invoca is offering

According to Invoca, the product is a "data + AI solution for home services" aimed at brands in plumbing, HVAC, pest control, kitchen and bath, and restoration. The company, based in Santa Barbara, California, describes itself as "the AI-powered leader in revenue execution." Its website navigation still lists call tracking among its products, alongside AI voice and messaging agents, marketing attribution, IVR and call routing software.

The release names five functions. First, AI voice and messaging agents respond around the clock to calls, texts and digital leads, validate whether a job falls within a service area, qualify intent, book appointments and route higher-value prospects to a human customer service representative. Second, through integrations with ServiceTitan and Salesforce Field Service, the agents book, reschedule and cancel appointments and update field teams. Third, the agents update CRMrecords, logging conversations and lead qualification criteria in ServiceTitan, Salesforce and HubSpot. Fourth, the product offers message, call and booking actions inside Google Local Services Ads (LSA) campaigns. Fifth, Invoca says it ties impression and click data from connected TV, AI discovery, search and social campaigns to leads, booked jobs and revenue.

Gregg Johnson, Invoca's chief executive, framed the pitch around what follows the ring of the phone. "Home services brands invest heavily to acquire digital leads and make the phone ring, and growth depends on what happens next," Johnson said in the release.

Invoca lists Orkin, Renewal by Andersen, Servpro and Vivint as home services customers of its platform. The release does not say whether any of them has deployed the new agents. A customer quote from Alex Balasis, a retail transformation team business analyst at Renewal by Andersen, concerns the wider platform rather than the new product. "The more of the Invoca platform you use, the more you can compound your return," Balasis said, adding that the platform has "helped us drive more phone leads at a lower cost."

The solution is available today, according to Invoca, which also plans a presence at ServiceTitan Pantheon (October 5 to 7) and Service World Expo (November 9 to 11). A blog post by Samantha Sowinski, dated today, accompanies the release.

The billing rule behind the timing

The release leans on a Google policy that took effect on October 1, 2026. Under the change, business-hours calls to Local Services Ads advertisers become billable leads when they go unanswered and the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. PPC Land reported in August that the exact starting point of the 20-second timer was not specified, whether from connection, first ring or answer. Calls routed through a menu do not start the clock until the caller presses a key.

Follow-up calls are covered too. Google's Ads Liaison said that an advertiser is charged only once for follow-up calls from the same person within 15 days of the first interaction, according to PPC Land's September coverage. Answered calls and voicemail messages were already valid leads before the change. Google has not detailed how voicemail handling, disputes or its spam safeguards will operate.

Invoca's text links the two developments directly. "With Google's new 20-second billable call rules, voice AI agents answer instantly, so brands aren't billed for callers who hang up before ever making it off hold," the release states. The sentence rests on an assumption the release does not examine: how Google classifies a call picked up by an AI agent. An answered call was already a billable lead before October 1. Answering more calls would therefore reduce charges for missed calls, but it would not by itself reduce the number of leads an advertiser pays for.

A migration under way

The billing change coincides with a structural one. Google is moving Local Services Ads accounts into Performance Maxcampaigns. The first phase began in August 2026 for selected US categories, among them plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing and pest control, and access to the original dashboard ends on each account's migration date. Manual bidding and vertical-level target cost-per-acquisition settings are being retired, and historical performance reports do not carry over. Each advertiser receives 14 days of notice and a 7-day reminder, per PPC Land. Broader groups follow in late 2026, with non-US markets and the remaining categories in 2027.

Separately, in April 2026 Google began using AI analysis of call recordings as the primary phone conversion signal in Google Ads, with call duration as a fallback. Call recording became enabled by default for most accounts in the United States and Canada, with healthcare and financial services excluded. The release does not address how conversations handled by a third-party AI agent interact with that measurement.

What the benchmark report shows

Invoca ties the product to its Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report, published in July 2026. The report draws on anonymized data from calls tracked and analyzed by the Invoca platform across nine sub-industries: carpeting, construction, doors and windows, home security, HVAC, lawn and trees, pest control, plumbing and restoration. That sits within a broader dataset of more than 70 million calls and 600 million minutes of conversation across 10 industries and seven marketing channels. All figures, according to the report, are "averages across the Invoca customer base." The size of the home services subset is not disclosed.

Answer rates

Across home services, 52% of inbound calls are answered by a person. Filtering out misdials and quick hang-ups lifts the figure to 65% for calls longer than 15 seconds and 73% for calls longer than 30 seconds. PPC Land reported in September that Invoca's cross-industry data from July showed 56% of business calls answered by a person, rising to 71% for calls exceeding 30 seconds, which places home services below the all-industry average on the headline figure and slightly above it on the 30-second measure.

The spread between sub-industries is wide. Plumbing leads at 74%, followed by pest control at 73% and carpeting at 65%. Home security sits at 57%, lawn and trees at 54%, doors and windows at 53% and restoration at 51%. HVAC records 34% and construction 32%. A plumbing business and a construction firm, in other words, occupy opposite ends of the same table.

Leads, conversion and call handling

Of calls answered by a person, 38% are leads, and 45% of those leads convert on the call, according to the report. Paid search records a 40% lead rate and a 48% conversion rate. Calls referred by ChatGPT show the highest lead rate of any channel at 45% but a lower conversion rate of 41%. The report says this is the first year with enough data to measure generative AI search, and it adds a caveat: "the total volume of calls attributable to generative AI is still very low, with no measurable volume from LLMs other than ChatGPT."

Call handling data points to a human-side gap. The report finds that 81% of calls received a proper greeting and 72% a proper closing, while 62% captured caller information and 58% were scored as excellent. Only 45% of leads were converted to a booked job or appointment, and 45% of calls included a request for the sale or appointment. The at-a-glance panel puts the inverse figure plainly: 55% of home services businesses do not ask leads to buy or book.

The report is a vendor document, and its recommendations point toward the vendor's own product category. Under its section on answer rates, it describes deploying AI agents around the clock as "the single biggest lever for improving answer rates and speed-to-lead."

The 38% figure

Invoca's headline claim is that raising answer, lead and conversion rates by five percentage points each would produce roughly 38% more conversions. The arithmetic holds as a model. Moving from 52% to 57%, from 38% to 43% and from 45% to 50% multiplies out to about 1.38. The inputs, however, are averages, and the output is a calculation, not an observed result from any customer.

The wording also differs between documents. The benchmark report states the gain as 38% more conversions "from the same call volume." Johnson's quote in the release says "nearly 40% more conversions from the same ad spend." The two framings are not interchangeable. Holding call volume constant isolates what happens after the phone rings. Holding ad spend constant implies that the same budget yields the same number of calls, an assumption that sits further from the data.

Claims that remain untested

Several points in the release rest on Invoca's own statements, with no independent corroboration in the materials provided. The company says that offering message, call and booking actions in LSA campaigns, and responding quickly, "increases rankings in LSA results." No Google documentation is cited for that. Likewise the ServiceTitan and Salesforce Field Service booking functions are described only by Invoca.

The release also omits pricing, the number of businesses using the agents, and any performance data such as booking rates, call containment or customer satisfaction for AI-handled calls. The benchmark figures describe how human-answered calls perform today, not how the agents perform. Whether an AI agent converts a lead at the 45% rate seen on human-answered calls, or at a different one, is not addressed.

A crowded field

Invoca is entering an area where several companies already sell AI agents to service businesses. ServiceTitan publishes documentation for configuring its own Voice Agent inside its platform, a point relevant to a product that books jobs into that same system. Yelp agreed in January 2026 to acquire Hatch, paying $270 million in cash plus $30 million in employee retention payments, for an AI communication platform that runs across SMS, email and voice and integrates with ServiceTitan, Jobber and JobNimbus. In August, Pie received an undisclosed investment from American Express Ventures for a platform that includes Front Desk, a voice agent that answers inbound calls and manages bookings.

What distinguishes Invoca's position, based on the release, is the attempt to place the agents next to call data and attribution, so that marketing sources can be linked to booked jobs. Invoca says this removes the need for brands "to bolt operational AI agents onto other front office systems."

Why it matters for the marketing community

For advertisers using Local Services Ads, the cost of an unanswered call has moved from zero to something that depends on a 20-second threshold and a set of Google rules still lacking detail. That turns call handling from an operations matter into a media cost variable. A plumbing firm with a 74% answer rate and a construction firm with a 32% rate face different exposure under the same rule, if the report's averages hold for their own accounts.

For agencies and in-house teams managing ROAS on phone-driven campaigns, the report's recommendation to feed call outcomes back into Smart Bidding and Performance Max reflects a wider direction in Google's own tooling, where recorded-call analysis already stands in for call duration. How a call handled by an AI agent is recorded, classified and billed has not been spelled out by Google in the material reviewed here. Until it is, any claim that automated answering lowers lead charges remains a hypothesis.

The benchmark report also doubles as product marketing, and its home services sample size is undisclosed. Both points qualify the use of its figures as industry baselines.

Timeline

Summary

  • Who: Invoca, a Santa Barbara-based data and AI company whose customers include Orkin, Renewal by Andersen, Servpro and Vivint, and Google, whose Local Services Ads billing rule frames the release.
  • What: A data + AI solution for home services with AI voice and messaging agents, booking in ServiceTitan and Salesforce Field Service, CRM logging, Local Services Ads actions and funnel attribution.
  • When: Released today, five days after Google's missed-call billing rule took effect on October 1, 2026.
  • Where: Available through Invoca (homeservices.invoca.com) to home services brands, with the Google rule and migration applying to US advertisers in the first phases.
  • Why: Google now charges for some business-hours calls that go unanswered for more than 20 seconds, and Invoca's July benchmarks show 52% of home services calls reaching a person; the company argues that higher answer, lead and conversion rates would raise conversions by roughly 38%, a modeled figure not yet backed by published agent results.