Alec Strout did not come to artificial intelligence through code. His background is sales, and for years that meant enterprise software deals with large organizations. The corporate track was lucrative, but Strout walked away from it to build something of his own. As co-founder and chief operating officer of Leep AI, he has turned a career spent understanding how businesses buy into a product that answers their phones.
Leep AI develops voice agents that answer, qualify, and book customer calls for service businesses. The company works with plumbers, HVAC contractors, roofers, auto detailers, and med spas — the kinds of operators who lose work every time a call goes to voicemail. Founded in Los Angeles, Leep AI is now expanding east, with Strout leading that growth from Atlanta.
Photo Courtesy: Alec Strout
The problem Leep AI addresses is familiar to anyone who has run a small service operation. The owner is often the technician, the dispatcher, and the salesperson at once. A call that comes in while someone is under a sink or on a roof tends to go unanswered — and an unanswered call is frequently a customer who simply dials the next name on the list. An AI receptionist that picks up every time, asks the right questions, and puts an appointment on the calendar closes that gap without asking the owner to be in two places at once.
From Enterprise Sales to Product Architecture
The move from selling software to shaping it might look like a leap, but for Strout the two are connected. Enterprise sales taught him to listen closely to what a business actually needs, then match a solution to it. But his role went beyond the pitch — it included hands-on implementation and project management, standing software up inside client organizations and steering it through to adoption, the operational side most salespeople never touch. Selling taught him how buyers decide and what makes them hesitate; running the implementations taught him what it takes to make software actually work in the field. When the AI era arrived, both instincts became the foundation for a product rather than a pitch.
Walking away was not an obvious choice. The role paid well and sat on a clear upward path. Strout traded that certainty for the harder work of building a company from scratch — a decision that says something about how he weighs security against the chance to own what he builds.
Strout personally architected Leep’s voice agents and the standard behind them — work that draws on training most people do not know he has. He studied industrial and systems engineering at Auburn University before sales pulled him into the workforce, and that discipline shows in how he builds. Central to that standard is a testing system he designed, built on a simple rule: no agent takes a live customer call until it has survived thousands of test scenarios — simulated and on real phones — first. The idea is that a business owner should never be the one to discover a flaw in the middle of a real conversation with a customer.
That rule shapes how the agents are prepared before they ever go to work. Simulated scenarios let the team push an agent through the awkward, unusual, and difficult calls that any phone line eventually receives, from a caller who talks over the agent to a request that falls outside the script. Real-phone testing then checks how the agent holds up under the messiness of an actual call. Only after clearing both does an agent get put in front of a paying client’s customers. For a service business whose reputation lives on the phone, that sequence is the difference between a tool it can trust and one it has to babysit.
His prospecting methodology from his enterprise sales days did not get left behind either. The same approach he once used to work his way into large accounts now drives how Leep AI finds and wins its own clients. The growth engine of the company runs on the discipline he built in those years
Building People, Not Just Technology
Strout’s focus extends past the product itself. A large part of his work involves developing young talent, taking people early in their careers and shaping them into capable salespeople and operators. For a company betting on human judgment to guide an AI product, that investment in people is part of the strategy rather than a side project.
That priority reflects how Strout thinks about the business. The technology handles the calls, but the team decides how the technology behaves, how it is sold, and how clients are served. Strengthening the people around him is how he intends to keep those decisions sound as the company grows.
Life in Atlanta
Strout lives in Buckhead, one of Atlanta’s central neighborhoods, and has made the city his base for Leep AI’s East Coast expansion. When he is not working, he is usually on a golf course. The setting suits the role. Atlanta gives him a foothold in a fast-growing Southern market, and the pace of building a company from a new region matches the drive that pushed him to leave a comfortable corporate job in the first place.
Leep AI is still early in its story, but the shape of it is clear. A sales leader who decided to build rather than sell someone else’s product, a testing standard meant to earn a business owner’s trust before the first live call, and a team being developed to carry the company forward. For the service operators who sign on, the result is a phone that gets answered and a lead that gets booked, even when no one is free to pick up.
