John Davie wanted Buyers Edge Platform, the hospitality procurement enterprise he founded and still leads, to benefit from the AI wave. When he looked around, the CEO wasn’t satisfied with the options.
The answer was CollectivIQ, a Boston-based company incubated at Buyers Edge Platform that gives users more accurate answers to their AI queries by showing them responses that pull information from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok — and up to 10 other models — all at the same time.
When new AI tools began hitting the market a few years ago, Davie told TechCrunch he was excited about the potential and encouraged his employees to try them out. His optimism was short-lived.
“We had a bit of a wake-up call about a year ago when we learned that if our employees are just using any various AI tools, or even their own license, it could be training on our company information,” Davie said. “We could be essentially edging our competitor.”
Davie looked into more secure enterprise AI contracts and discovered expensive long-term contracts for large language models that produced inaccurate information and hallucinations.
“We hated having to decide which employees deserved AI,” he said. “What really made it worse, employees were complaining about hallucinated, biased answers. Sometimes it was really giving us flat, incorrect answers that made their way into PowerPoint presentations and cover presentations.”
He challenged his chief technology officer to build something better.
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