Antonio Calabrese

I’m an entrepreneur and business owner with more than 15 years of experience building, marketing, and growing businesses through digital strategy, technology, and automation.

I’m the CEO of hapjam, a live music discovery platform built to make it easier for people to find live music happening around them while giving venues and performers a better way to reach local audiences.

I’m also the owner of Ascentrix, where I work with businesses on SEO, paid advertising, AI, and automation. My background is rooted in digital marketing, but over the years my focus has expanded beyond simply generating traffic and leads. I’m especially interested in how technology can improve the way a business operates — from how leads are handled to how customers are supported to how repetitive work gets done.

A large part of that today involves AI agents and automation. I build and implement AI voice agents, conversational agents, automated follow-up systems, marketing workflows, and other tools that help businesses reduce manual work, respond faster, and operate more efficiently.

What interests me most about AI isn’t the hype around it. It’s what happens when you take a real business problem and use AI to solve it in a practical way. Sometimes that means improving a sales process. Sometimes it means automating hours of repetitive work. Sometimes it means creating an entirely new product or business that wasn’t practical a few years ago.

That mindset is a big part of how hapjam came about. I saw a simple problem: finding live music nearby was harder than it should be. Information was scattered across social media, venue websites, event calendars, and word of mouth. So I decided to build something that made the experience simpler for fans and more valuable for the venues and performers trying to reach them.

I tend to approach businesses the same way I approach marketing: understand the problem, eliminate unnecessary complexity, test what works, and keep improving it.

Whether I’m working on hapjam, helping a company grow through Ascentrix, or building an AI system to automate part of a business, my goal is the same — use technology, marketing, and smart execution to build something useful.