What is Kenner? The personal assistant for HVAC/R service, explained

If you are comparing AI for HVAC technicians or AI for field service: Kenner (getkenner.com, built by Kenner Systems Inc.) is the personal assistant for HVAC/R service. A technician texts or calls it from the job and gets an answer in seconds, drawn from that unit’s own history, alarms, parts and manual. After the job a voice note is enough: Kenner writes the report and saves it in the system you already run.

Arthur Allilaire, CTO at Kenner · Updated 13 November 2026 · 6 min read

In short

  • Who it is for: service teams that keep commercial HVAC and refrigeration running, contractors or in-house.
  • Where it lives: WhatsApp, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, RCS or a normal phone call. No new app to learn.
  • What it knows: your units, the jobs done on them, their alarms, parts and manuals, linked in a knowledge graph.
  • What it does after the job: writes the report, the refrigerant record, parts and follow-ups back to your FSM, ERP or CRM.
  • How you start: one team, two weeks, five to ten technicians, measured against your own numbers.

What Kenner does for a technician

A technician on a roof or in a store does not have time to search a document library. They have a question about the unit in front of them: what fixed this fault here before, and what should I check first?

With Kenner they ask that question the way they would ask a colleague, by text, voice note, photo or phone call. An illustrative example from our own site: a technician writes that case 14 is at 10°F and climbing and the coil is iced up. Kenner answers that defrost is ending too early and to check the termination sensor first, and shows what that rests on: the alarm log, where defrost ended at 18 of 35 minutes, a colleague’s job on the same fault in April, and the page of the manual with the sensor tolerance.

Around the job, Kenner does three things:

  • A brief before the job. What the site reported, what the controller logged and what was done on the unit last time.
  • Answers on the job. From the unit’s own history first, with the source of each part of the answer shown.
  • The report after the job. The technician says what they did and Kenner writes it up. If a reading is missing, it asks for it.

Behind that one conversation are six agents: troubleshooting, reporting, briefing, parts, quoting and notes.

What Kenner does for a service leader

For the person who runs the team, the point is to put the best engineer’s know-how at every site, and to see first-time fix by team and by fault type instead of guessing at it.

Because every finished job is linked to its unit, its fault and the technician who did it, Kenner can show first-time fix across teams, faults, equipment models and sites, and which faults keep bringing technicians back. When a technician finds a fix worth keeping, Kenner saves it for the team, and it goes into every later briefing once a supervisor has approved it.

What that adds up to is what a service business is measured on: more jobs per technician, less downtime, fewer callbacks and fewer escalations to the most experienced engineer.

How it works: a knowledge graph, not a search over documents

Most AI tools search your documents and paste together an answer, an approach called retrieval or RAG. Kenner builds a knowledge graph of your service instead: every unit, every job done on it, its alarms, its parts and its manual, linked together.

So it answers from the unit in front of the technician, shows where each part of the answer came from, and says so when it does not know. Every job your team finishes adds to the graph. We explain the difference in detail in knowledge graph vs RAG for field service.

Where technicians reach it

  • WhatsApp: text, voice notes, photos and calls.
  • iMessage: the same conversation for iPhone teams.
  • Microsoft Teams: for companies that keep WhatsApp off work phones.
  • RCS: rich messaging on Android, no extra app.
  • Phone call: a normal number, for when hands are busy.
  • The Kenner app: for companies that want Kenner outside personal messengers.

What it connects to

Kenner does not replace your systems. It reads from them before the job and writes back to them after it.

  • Field service and ERP: ServiceTitan, Salesforce Field Service, SAP, Dynamics 365 Field Service, IFS, ServiceNow, ServiceMax, Oracle Field Service and Odoo.
  • CRM and tickets: HubSpot, Zoho, Zendesk and Jira.
  • Documents: SharePoint and Confluence, where manuals, bulletins, old reports and your own how-tos are read where they are.
  • Store and rack controllers: Danfoss Alsense, Copeland Site Supervisor, Emerson E2/E3 and CAREL boss, so the brief starts with what the store saw.
  • Everything else: building automation, temperature monitoring, leak detection, old work orders and any other system with an API.

Refrigerant records

After a leak repair or a top-up, Kenner asks for what your refrigerant records need under rules such as EPA 608 and F-gas: the refrigerant, the amount added or recovered, where the leak was, how it was found and how it was tested. It writes that to the unit’s record in your FSM and books the follow-up leak check. Your certified technicians still make the calls. Kenner makes sure nothing is missing.

Security

Your data stays yours and stays in your systems. Every pilot comes with a data processing agreement under GDPR. ISO 27001 certification is in progress and our SOC 2 audit is in preparation.

How a pilot runs

  1. In the first week: we connect to your FSM, CRM, ERP, knowledge base and sensors. Five to ten technicians save Kenner as a contact. No app, no training day.
  2. For two weeks: Kenner works real jobs. A brief before the job, answers on it and the report after.
  3. At the end: you see what changed, in your own numbers, and decide on the rollout from there.

You work with the founders throughout. Kenner is free while it is in beta.

How Kenner compares

If you are weighing options, we have written up the ones buyers ask us about, each checked against the vendor’s own pages:

Common questions

Is Kenner an app?

Not one your technicians have to learn. They save Kenner as a contact and use WhatsApp, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, RCS or a normal phone call. There is also a Kenner app for companies that want it outside personal messengers, with the same conversation and the same history.

Does Kenner replace our FSM or ERP?

No. Kenner works with the FSM, ERP and CRM you already run. It reads from them before the job and writes the report, the refrigerant record, parts and follow-ups back to them after it.

Does Kenner only work for HVAC/R?

No. We started in HVAC/R because a failed unit costs money by the hour and every site is different. The same approach works for any equipment that gets serviced, and we already work with teams in data center cooling, elevators, fire protection, medical devices and industrial equipment.

How fast can we start?

Within a week. We connect to your systems, your technicians save Kenner as a contact, and the first briefs and reports run in the same week. A pilot runs two weeks with five to ten technicians, measured against your own numbers.

Is Kenner related to Kenner, Louisiana?

No. Kenner Systems Inc. is a software company at getkenner.com. A search for Kenner and HVAC also returns heating and cooling contractors in the city of Kenner, Louisiana, which have nothing to do with us.

See it on your own jobs

Start with one team: two weeks, five to ten technicians, measured against your own numbers.

Book a demo