The digital pivot: How HSS transformed hire with agentic AI

HSS, a UK equipment rental firm founded in 1947, just completed one of the more dramatic digital pivots on the enterprise radar: shedding its 130 physical depots to become a pure-play digital marketplace that brokers construction tools, fuel, training, and materials between customers and suppliers. The story, told by CEO Tom Shorten to Computer Weekly, isn't a generic "we adopted cloud" tale. It's a candid look at what it takes to rewire a 78-year-old hire business around a single algorithmic hub the team calls "Brenda" — and how the company is now layering agentic AI on top of that foundation to handle customer queries at scale.

The Brenda backbone

Every order at HSS ProService — whether it arrives via the.com portal, a phone call, WhatsApp, or email — funnels into one routing layer. Shorten describes Brenda as a Rubik's Cube sitting in the middle of the business, with five distinct interfaces: supplier, colleague, customer, admin, and tech. The algorithm matches the right product and customer to the right supplier and pushes it into a supplier portal for acceptance. It's effectively a marketplace engine, and the shift paid off quickly. Five years ago, only about 5% of orders went through the website. Today, that figure sits between 40% and 45%, with the rest still arriving through traditional channels that Brenda absorbs.

For architects evaluating this model, the takeaway is the consolidation pattern: instead of building point-to-point integrations for every channel, you centralize the order graph in a single orchestration layer. That's what made the eventual AI agent deployment tractable — the agents don't need to know about WhatsApp, phone, or web; they just need to plug into Brenda and read state.

From asset-heavy to asset-light

The most underappreciated move is the corporate restructuring. Last October, HSS sold its physical rental operations to a private equity firm and rebranded as HSS ProService, exiting the asset-heavy model entirely. The company now owns no kit. It owns the customer relationship, the supplier network, and the algorithm that connects them. Shorten calls this a Tower One to Tower Two migration: legacy green-screen systems with F-key navigation to a modern orchestration platform.

For practitioners, this is a useful counter-narrative to the "AI will save your business" hype cycle. The agentic layer at HSS is the visible feature, but the work underneath — getting 40% of orders onto a digital channel first — is the actual prerequisite. Drop AI agents into a business where the order graph is still paper-based, and you're automating chaos rather than resolving it.

What to watch next

The agentic AI rollout is the part still in motion. Shorten frames it as agents resolving customer queries, which suggests a tier-one deflection play rather than full autonomous orchestration. For anyone scoping similar deployments, the practical questions are obvious: where does the agent hand off to Brenda versus a human? What's the supplier-side acceptance latency once an agent is in the loop? And how do you instrument the marketplace algorithm so the agent has trustworthy state to act on? HSS isn't publishing those answers yet, but the architectural pattern is unambiguous — centralize the routing, then automate the edges.