19 August 2026

Why I Joined Hamish: Putting the Soul Back into AI-Driven Support

Neal Boxall, Head of Support and Customer Success

After 25+ years on the front lines of Customer Support and Customer Success, you tend to see patterns repeat themselves.

I've watched this industry evolve through every major tech wave. Every single day, I see companies falling over themselves to implement generative AI tools, totally relying on algorithms, and completely stripping human interaction out of the customer experience. They are using AI as a digital brick wall to hide behind, bragging about "ticket deflection" while leaving their users stranded in automated frustration loops.

When I was looking at the landscape, I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to prove that you can scale with cutting-edge tech without losing your soul.

That's exactly why I joined Hamish.

From my very first conversation here, it was clear we shared the same conviction: we needed to be completely different. We needed to put the customer firmly back at the heart of everything we do.

My mission at Hamish is to lead that exact journey: building a support engine where AI handles the friction of immediacy, so our humans can handle the depth of relationship.

Here is our blueprint for doing AI right.

Moving from "Go Away" to "Done"

Let's be honest: nobody wants to be "deflected." When a customer reaches out, they want an answer, a fix, or a path forward.

If your AI support setup just shoves a generic FAQ link in a user's face and makes them fight a bot for ten minutes just to speak to a person, you haven't solved a problem. You've just shifted the friction.

At Hamish, we believe an AI assistant shouldn't be a surface-level chatbot. Hamish Assist is on every account, free, around the clock, and it answers with context: it knows the platform because it is part of the platform, and behind it sits a human support function whose job is to keep your app working. And we're building towards more: an assistant with deep, native integrations that can act on a problem right there in the chat, not just describe the fix.

Driving Proactive Resolution

With a quarter-century of support data in my head, I know that the best support interaction is the one the customer never even had to start.

That's where we're heading: a platform that notices the patterns that matter, like a customer hitting the same error loop, or hesitating on a critical setup step late at night, and steps in with the exact contextual answer they need before frustration sets in and a ticket gets written.

We want to resolve the issue before it becomes a burden on the customer or our team.

Elevating the Human Element

Let's clear one thing up: at Hamish, AI isn't replacing our human team. It's liberating them.

By letting AI crush the repetitive, high-volume tasks, we clear out the digital noise. This means our human support experts can do what they do best: build real relationships, dig into the complex cases, and handle the high-empathy scenarios that a machine shouldn't touch anyway.

And because we're building this from day one, we've never had rigid, robotic support "tiers" to unlearn. Our support function is built around the customer's problem, not around a queue.

The Big Picture

The future of support isn't human versus machine. It's a unified experience where AI handles the speed, and humans handle the depth.

Twenty-five years in this game taught me that companies who sacrifice the human element for a cheap shortcut always lose in the long run. At Hamish, we're drawing a line in the sand. We are scaling with intelligence, but we are leading with heart.

The journey is just beginning, and I couldn't be more excited to drive it.

AI that builds. Support that stays.