deBanked sat in on live calls with Ava. Then they wrote about it.

If you work in business lending, you know deBanked. It's the publication the MCA and business-loan world actually reads — which is why we were glad to sit down with Sean Murray and do the one thing we ask of every skeptic: don't take our word for it, listen to a call.

Sean heard Ava live. Not a highlight reel — real training calls, where Ava plays the merchant on the other end of the phone. She stalls, she pushes back on cost, she brings up the last rep who promised to send something and never did. The rep works the call, and the moment it ends, Ava scores it out loud.

“Getting Your Reps to Perform at the Ultimate Level? This ISO Is Using AI to Train Them”

— deBanked, February 2026

Read the full deBanked feature here →

What he actually heard

The core idea behind Ava is simple: your reps are practicing either way. The only question is whether they practice on live leads — expensive, unrepeatable, and unforgiving — or on an AI merchant who pushes back like the real thing and never gets tired of repetition.

A rep picks a scenario and a difficulty, gets a live conversation with a merchant who behaves like the ones in your CRM, and finishes with a spoken score across communication, objection handling, qualification, and rapport. Managers see every rep, every call, and every score on one dashboard — so coaching stops being a gut feeling and starts being a number that moves week over week.

Why we asked press to listen instead of watch slides

Voice AI demos are easy to fake with a script and a good edit. A live call isn't. Ava has to handle whatever the rep says next — the hesitation, the garbled numbers, the interruption — the same way a real merchant would. That's the bar we hold ourselves to, and it's the same live-call demo we run for every team that requests early access.