Startup Taps Crowdsourced Chatbots to Deliver More Reliable AI Responses

When John Davie, the founder and CEO of hospitality procurement firm Buyers Edge Platform, sought to harness the AI wave for his company, he found the available solutions lacking.

The solution emerged as CollectivIQ, a Boston-based venture incubated within Buyers Edge Platform. This tool provides more accurate AI responses by simultaneously querying a suite of models—including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, alongside up to ten others—and synthesizing the information.

Davie initially encouraged his team to experiment with the new AI tools hitting the market a few years ago. However, his enthusiasm soon turned to caution.

"We experienced a wake-up call about a year ago," Davie explained. "We realized that if employees used various public AI tools, even under personal licenses, our proprietary company data could be used to train those models. We were essentially providing an edge to our competitors."

His search for more secure enterprise AI options revealed another issue: expensive, long-term contracts for large language models that often produced inaccurate or hallucinated information.

"We disliked having to decide which employees 'deserved' access to AI," Davie said. "To make matters worse, staff complained about biased or factually incorrect answers from these tools. Sometimes, flatly wrong information even made its way into client presentations."

Determined to find a better way, he tasked his chief technology officer with building an in-house solution.

CollectivIQ was the result. This spinout developed software that queries multiple leading LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI concurrently. It analyzes the overlapping and divergent outputs to generate a single, fused response designed to be more accurate than any single model could provide alone.

The company states that all prompt data processed by CollectivIQ is encrypted and deleted after use, ensuring enterprise-grade data privacy.

"As a technology enthusiast, you always want the best tools available," Davie remarked. "I wanted to give my team the absolute best in AI, but nothing on the market brought all these powerful models together into one cohesive, reliable platform."

After a successful internal rollout to employees at the start of 2026, Davie recognized that many of Buyers Edge Platform's clients faced similar AI adoption challenges. This led to the decision to launch CollectivIQ publicly.

The platform is built using enterprise APIs from various AI model providers. CollectivIQ manages the underlying token costs, offering customers a flexible pay-per-use model—a strategy Davie believes will differentiate the company in a crowded market.

"I hope this offers a breath of fresh air for companies," Davie added. "They won't be locked into long-term commitments; they'll only pay for the tangible value they receive."

To date, CollectivIQ has been fully funded by Davie himself, though he plans to seek external investment later this year. For Davie, building a new startup nearly three decades after founding his main company has been a thrilling return to his roots.

"It feels like the early days all over again—we're being scrappy and diving deep into the technical weeds of LLMs and post-training, areas I wasn't formally trained in," he shared. "It's incredibly fun and exciting. I'm back working hand-in-hand with software developers to build the product, much like how I started my first company. It's a lot of fun."