By Steve Bornhoft
A do-it-yourselfer isn’t sure whether he needs to register the 15-foot canoe that he just finished building in his garage.
He jumps on his computer and visits the website for the Santa Rosa County (FL) Tax Collector’s Office. Inclined initially to get a phone number at the site and make a call, he encounters a “Start a Chat” button and decides to give it a whirl.
He encounters Dela, a youthful, redhaired CogBot, who invites him to ask a question. The canoeist types in his query and is presented instantaneously with an answer: Yes, you need to register a homemade vessel. You can find more information on how to title a homemade vessel here (link).
Hmmm. The man isn’t satisfied that his question has been answered. Dela has not been specific as to a non-motorized watercraft. But he notices a “Search More” button that Dela has served up, and he clicks on it and then on “Vessel Titling & Registration.”
Bingo! He finds the definitive answer without spending any time on hold: Non-motorized vessels less than 16 feet in length do not need to be registered.
Dela and other CogBots are graduates of CogUniversity, a virtual software environment developed by CogAbility, a full-spectrum AI provider headed by president/founder Jim Hoskins and chief operating officer Vernon Niven. Both men live near Pensacola in Santa Rosa County, Florida.
Client employees serve as university faculty members who furnish “students” with the information they need to go to work as customer service specialists at a tax collector’s office, for example. The relationship between CogAbility and county offices works well. Most of the questions received by such offices are frequently asked, making it possible to curate a reasonably comprehensive corpus — the body of information that Dela et al draw answers from.
Stan Nichols of Santa Rosa County was the first tax collector to adopt CogAbility technology and put a CogBot to work.
“We were just coming out of COVID, and our phones were getting pounded,” Nichols recalled. “I met Jim after our public information officer made me aware of him, and he explained how we could use AI to face the public. We rolled out Dela after loading her with the 20 questions that we most commonly get, and our average hold time went from 20 minutes down to about five.”
The corpus has been expanded and improved ever since.
Said Nichols: “I have told my fellow tax collectors that CogAbility has been the best decision I’ve made in my 16 years on the job. And we’re just scratching the surface of what we will be able to do with AI.”
In Santa Rosa County, the clerk of court and the property appraiser’s office also have signed on.
“It’s the wave of the future,” Nichols said. “We’ve got to learn to do more with less.”
Hoskins studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida and was hired by IBM following his graduation. He was assigned to NASA’s space shuttle program where he worked on onboard avionics systems and early AI for the shuttle’s cockpit. Later, he joined IBM’s personal computer development team and worked with AI labs around the world.
Drawing upon his experience and expertise, Hoskins began to publish technology books and to wean himself off IBM. He started his own business, and the ink-on-paper books performed well “until people stopped reading books and started doing everything online.”
Hoskins adapted, migrating from printed books with companion websites to e-books to mobile apps and eventually AI applications.
As of 2015, he was all in with AI. In 2017, he founded CogAbility.
Niven has 25 years of experience building and leading SaaS, enterprise software and AI-driven businesses. He spent 10 years in Silicon Valley where he worked with venture capital firms. He joined Hoskins first as a member of his advisory board and then, after CogAbility began to catch on with local governments, he became the COO, responsible for financing, marketing and sales. Like Hoskins, he is an engineer and likes solving problems.
Hoskins has a close relationship with his Gainesville alma mater. Education, along with government and healthcare, is an area that CogAbility, a business with both moneymaking and philanthropic aims, focuses on.
“I contacted the University of Florida Foundation,” Hoskins said. “We donated a CogUniversity to UF for free and they jumped all over that.”
Via the CogUniversity, students become student-professors. Among other projects, they have trained a CogBot to identify sea turtles based on images and to calculate their weight based on carapace length and width.
CogAbility has helped UF achieve its goal of infusing all 16 colleges of the university with AI content. Today, according to a university news release, UF students from any major can pursue an AI Fundamentals and Applications Certificate whereby they “learn fundamentals of artificial intelligence, its applications to real-world problems in various disciplines, and ethical and professional responsibilities of these technologies.”
“We’re working on vision with UF right now,” Hoskins said. “What tax collector wouldn’t want their lobby to be watched so they can get a real-time count of how many people are coming and going and gauge how many employees they will need on a given day. I’ve been invited to join UF’s engineering education advisory board. It’s a wonderful relationship.”
CogAbility was still very young when it experienced rapid growth owing to pandemic-related funding that flowed to local governments. The market for CogAbility’s services was growing faster than the business was. The time was right to raise money, and TechFarms Capital stroked CogAbility a check.
“At CogAbility, we’re still growing, but not beyond our means,” said Niven, who at one point joined with TechFarms Capital founder Steve Millaway in vetting the commercialization potential for R & D product coming out of the Department of Defense. That activity was coordinated by the Doolittle Institute, an Air Force Research Lab Innovation Institute located in Niceville, Florida.
In addition, CogAbility earned second-place honors in an ITEN Wired Pitch Competition, which TechFarms Capital hosted.
“It was the most money per hour I have ever made in my life,” Hoskins said, referring to his competition pitch. “Five minutes, $25,000.”
