John Davie, founder and CEO of hospitality procurement enterprise Buyers Edge Platform, was eager to integrate AI into his company’s operations. After evaluating available options, he found them lacking. This led to the creation of CollectivIQ, a Boston-based firm incubated within Buyers Edge Platform, which provides users with more precise AI responses by simultaneously pulling information from models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok—and up to ten others.

His initial enthusiasm soon faced a reality check. “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 explained. “We could be essentially edging our competitor.”

Exploring more secure enterprise AI solutions revealed costly long-term contracts for large language models that often produced inaccurate or hallucinated content. “We hated having to decide which employees deserved AI,” he noted. “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.”

Davie tasked his chief technology officer with developing a superior alternative. The outcome was CollectivIQ, a tool that queries multiple leading large language models—including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI—at once. It analyzes overlapping and divergent information to generate a fused response designed to be more accurate than any single model could provide. According to the company, all data involved in CollectivIQ prompts is encrypted and deleted after use to ensure enterprise-grade privacy.

“As somebody who just loves technology, you’re always looking for the best of the best, right,” Davie said. “You always want to have the latest, greatest iPhone or laptop or tool and I wanted to give my employees the best of the best of AI, but there was really nothing out there that you know would bring them all together into one.”

CollectivIQ began internal rollout to employees at the start of 2026, receiving strong initial feedback. After learning that many Buyers Edge Platform customers faced similar confusion or hesitation about adopting AI, the company decided to launch the software publicly. Built using AI model enterprise APIs, CollectivIQ covers token costs while customers pay based on usage—a model Davie believes will differentiate it in the competitive enterprise AI market.

“I’m hoping that this is a breath of fresh air for companies that see that they are not going to have to be committed,” Davie remarked. “They’re only going to pay for the value they get out of it.”

For Davie, launching a new startup nearly 28 years after founding his current company has been an energizing experience. “It does feel like way back in the day and we are doing it all over again and being scrappy and being very in the weeds on LLMs and post training and all sorts of things I was not trained in,” he shared. “It’s fun and exciting. I go sit hand and hand with the software developers building the product, that’s how I got my main company, it’s a lot of fun.”