IRONPROS caught up with Kojo Founder and CEO Maria Davidson at Procore Groundbreak. We started off by getting Davidson to give a quick elevator speech on the product before we brain dumped her on new AI developments in the product, announced in the runup to Groundbreak.
DAVIDSON: Kojo is a materials management platform. We work with trade contractors all across the US and now in Canada, as well as self-perform GCs to help them do everything from automating how requisitions are created, all the way through to managing POs, managing deliveries, reconciling invoices, managing inventory, tracking tools, and handling all aspects of materials management on one streamlined platform.
IRONPROS: So right now, you have a new announcement recently of some artificial intelligence functionality. What can you tell us about that?
DAVIDSON: The really exciting thing for us about AI is that AI can give us a level of intelligence, about materials that hasn't ever existed before. And what that specifically means for us is we are now going to be able to show customers substitute goods a lot more easily using things like open API's, Chat, GPT, to other large language models. We're going to be able to show people much more clearly what materials for example were made and manufactured in America and what materials were not. We're going to be able to show people much more clearly, who has what in stock and what they've ordered in the past while making this really intuitive and quick. That is where we're going to use AI to make that experience so much easier for our customers
IRONPROS: So is that something released to market now, is that something that's kind of being trained on a body of data, or what's going on with that?
DAVIDSON: So we've been training that body of data for many years, and we've now worked with about 500 customers all across the country. And that's smaller customers in this $5 million to $10 million range all the way through to large customers, with billions of dollars a year of revenue.
