No Priors

Melisa Tokmak on automating everything except the labor

Melisa Tokmak· Founder and CEO of Netic at Netic
·~34 min·English·No Priors
AgentsAI CompanyBusiness Strategy
TL;DR

Netic founder Melisa Tokmak is building an autonomous enterprise for essential-services businesses — HVAC, roofing, pet care — where over 70% of the businesses it serves now go 'Netic-first,' betting that the moat is the last-mile orchestration and proven ROI that raw models skip.

01Core Mental Model

The Intelligence Layer Between a Business and Its Customers

Netic slots between an essential-services company and its end customers, understanding each need, matching it to the operating rules of the business, and deploying the right service or labor.

netic exists between the company and its customers.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
By owning the layer between the business and its customers, Netic captures the operational context — records, urgency, lifetime value — that decides what gets done, not just the conversation that starts it.
02The Inversion

“Netic-First” — Over 70% of Customers Now Go N1

What began as agents catching overflow calls has flipped: over 70% of the businesses Netic serves now go 'Netic-first,' or N1, making an AI agent their customers' first point of contact.

But today actually over 70% of our customers are AI first. We call it netic first. They go N1.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
The 70% figure marks a threshold: once the agent is the default first contact rather than a spillover buffer, the human team's attention can shift toward the physical service the AI can't perform.
03Key Decision

Build a Product, Not a Roll-Up

Rather than buy and optimize businesses like an AI roll-up, Tokmak built a product because a roll-up's software only ever serves the companies you purchased, while Netic can run any real-world business.

all the products you're building are for the company you just bought. it can't really be actually applied to any other company.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
Coming off four years building real-world business units at Scale AI, she chose the path that matched her edge — builder and product person, not M&A operator — turning a personal fit into a strategic moat.
04The Moat

The Last Mile Isn't in the Model

Serving millions of customers with different worries, accents, and contexts takes harnesses, orchestration, and product on top of the model, so a company like Netic has to be good at all three layers.

So if anything actually companies like us and Netic have to be good at all three layers.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
This reframes the “can the labs just do this?” question: frontier models hand you raw capability, but the value in essential services lives in the orchestration and product that turn capability into a reliable service.
05Where the Frontier Isn't

Robotics Is a Different Chapter

Full robotic service to these homes is real but decades out, because dexterity and the variety of real buildings aren't there and the human element of a customer's worst day still matters.

it's almost you're looking at the same book maybe but different chapters.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
Placing robotics in a far-off chapter is a focus decision: it lets Netic win the software-and-orchestration layer today instead of waiting on a physical-world timeline it can't control.
06Customer Reality

Prove ROI, Not Vaporware

These value-focused enterprises don't buy AI like software on a one-week trial; they test for true ROI, which is why Netic sells net-new revenue and live deployments over demos and cost-cutting.

It would be pretty sad if we used AI only for cost cutting.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
Framing AI as a revenue engine rather than a cost-cutter reframes the whole sale: instead of competing on the lowest bottom line, Netic expands what the customer believes is possible — a harder pitch that lands with tech-forward operators.
07North Star

The Autonomous Enterprise

Netic's vision is to run every function of these companies autonomously — inbound, outbound, scheduling, analytics, context — leaving only the actual service and the human labor to people.

We want every single thing in these companies to be handled autonomously with netic except the actual services and the labor itself that human component

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
Drawing the autonomy line precisely at physical labor is the whole strategy: automate the operational surface so completely that the business can pour all of its human effort into the one thing customers actually feel.
08People & Values

Craftsmanship Over the Exit

Tokmak hires for sustained agency and follow-through rather than exit-chasing, invoking the craftsman who honors the work by building the best shoe, not by stamping crosses on it.

It really is about building the best product that are solving the problems of the people you care about.

— Melisa Tokmak, No Priors
Key Insight
Her screen for agency — not one story but a lifetime of following through — is the hiring analog of her build-vs-buy bet: durable value in unglamorous work comes from patience and craft, not from optimizing for the quick outcome.