Effiqo AI, a Bellevue, Washington-based company building voice agents for home service businesses, announced on November 11, 2026, that Antonio Akins has joined as Fractional Chief Technology Officer. Akins will oversee how the company’s two agents, Elise and Xavier, are built, how they keep customer details safe, and what they improve on next. His mandate is to ensure the agents keep working right: answering right, booking right, and following up right.
Akins brings nearly 16 years at Salesforce, most recently as Senior Vice President of Engineering, where he led work on software used by millions of people daily. Before Salesforce, he spent nearly 14 years at Microsoft, including leading quality for Bing Mobile and MSN Mobile. He is a Vanderbilt University computer science graduate, class of 1996. In a statement, Akins said, “I have spent my career building software people can count on without having to think about it. A small shop should get that same peace of mind.”
The appointment matters because Effiqo is targeting a persistent operational pain point for small service businesses: missed calls and unfinished office work. Elise answers calls around the clock, listens to caller needs, and books jobs directly onto the schedule. Xavier handles the “second shift” by following up on open estimates and calling past customers to bring them back. If a caller asks for a person, either agent connects them to a human in the shop’s own office, keeping the business in control of its customer relationships.
Effiqo founder Barbara Saunders said she knows the problem from the inside. “Owners did not start their shops to live on the phone, or to carry the office home in their heads every night,” she said. The company serves HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, and auto repair shops, sectors where a missed call often means a lost job and where after-hours follow-up frequently goes undone. By automating routine phone work and follow-up, Effiqo aims to convert more of the work owners have already earned into booked jobs and to give owners back personal time.
The fractional CTO role is a signal that Effiqo intends to professionalize its engineering and security practices as it scales. Akins’s background in large-scale, consumer-facing software at Microsoft and Salesforce is directly relevant to the reliability demands of voice agents that must perform consistently at any hour. His oversight of data protection also addresses a key concern for small businesses handling customer information. For the broader service-industry software market, the hire suggests that AI phone agents are moving from novelty to production-grade infrastructure, where uptime, accuracy, and trustworthiness are competitive differentiators. Business owners evaluating such tools may increasingly expect enterprise-level engineering behind them. More information is available at www.effiqo.ai.
