Nicholas Mohnacky, BundleIQ - Simplify Climate Research Through AI

In this insightful episode of the "Be Better Podcast," host Bobby Hite engages with Nicholas Mohnacky, the innovative founder of BundleIQ, an AI-driven platform transforming the way we access and utilize information. Nicholas delves into his journey from the early days of BundleIQ, initially conceived as B notes, to its evolution into a powerful tool that harnesses the advancements in AI to tackle the complex challenges of information overload.

The conversation navigates through the distinct functionalities and advantages of BundleIQ, particularly in comparison to other AI tools like ChatGPT. Nicholas shares compelling use cases of BundleIQ, illustrating its impact in various professional fields, including legal work and non-profit initiatives. He emphasizes BundleIQ's unique ability to manage industry-specific knowledge, offering insights into content that's often beyond the reach of conventional internet searches.

A significant portion of the discussion is dedicated to Nicholas's involvement in climate science and sustainability efforts. He discusses how BundleIQ supports critical tasks such as carbon accounting and ESG reporting, highlighting the creation of an ESG bundle that includes reports from Fortune 500 companies.

Nicholas also shares his perspective on the future of data management and AI, in light of changing regulations like the phase-out of third-party cookies by Google Chrome. He contemplates the evolving landscape of online information consumption and its implications for advertising and AI development.

Wrapping up, Nicholas reflects on the importance of individual responsibility and mindfulness, offering personal insights on growth and introspection. This episode not only provides a deep dive into the technological advancements of AI but also touches upon the personal and societal impacts of innovation in the digital age. Join us for this engaging and thought-provoking conversation with Nicholas Mohnacky on the "Be Better Podcast."

Transcript

Bobby Hite
Nick, thanks so much for joining the be better podcast today. I really appreciate it.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (00:58.946)
Thanks for having me, Bobby. It's exciting, excited to be here.

Bobby Hite (01:03.019)
Yeah. And, you know, I think back to when you and I first met about five years ago at that, uh, that tech conference and over in clear water and you had a booth set up and talking about your, your AI assistance, uh, you know, kind of tech. And I thought it was super interesting back then. Uh, what was the, what was the name of it again?

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (01:25.954)
So originally started out as B notes and that was probably 2019, like sometime in 2019.

Bobby Hite (01:28.739)
B notes, yeah. Yeah. And then just to see everything that you've been able to accomplish from a bundle IQ user perspective and myself just seeing the iteration and advancement of the product and just seeing your business take off has been absolutely awesome. Can you talk through those early days to where the product is today?

and maybe how advancements in AI have impacted the product itself.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (02:03.87)
Yeah, so, you know, this is sort of like the entrepreneurial still entrepreneurs dilemma is like, how do you approach solving a problem that is maybe just building a better mousetrap? But, you know, in this day and age, it can look a lot different than that. But it's really sort of defining like what is that pain point? How do we tackle that for our customers? And the early days of B notes, you know, basically,

in 2019, that was kind of when Notion was starting to get popular. And the initial kind of idea was like, how can I help people tap into information when they need it most? And, you know, it was sort of like a building a better bookshelf. You know, instead of a mousetrap, it was like building better bookshelf. So it was like, okay, well, when you have a bookshelf, you can color coordinate your books, you can maybe put them in alphabetical order, you can do things to kind of help you access the

you know, the books a lot easier. But ultimately what I realized is that, man, that's still not really like addressing the kind of the core pain that people really, you know, are up against in this like information overload scenario. And so I said, what if we could tell Bobby based on what he's reading or writing that he needs to potentially reference paragraph number three on book number 12 and page number 37.

Bobby Hite (03:13.74)
Right.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (03:32.35)
of that book. And so like, how do I connect you to the most relevant pieces of information as you work? And that was essentially kind of the real core of the issue that we were like, all right, that that's the real pain that we're we need to solve, because people don't have time to stop what they're doing. Switch context, go on this like, you know, treasure hunt to try to find the information that they need to then go back to the con, you know what I mean? So

Bobby Hite (03:59.094)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (03:59.178)
Anyway, that's ultimately what we ended up doing, and AI obviously played a big role in that.

Bobby Hite (04:04.191)
Yeah, it's helped me so much. Having just got into climate tech about two and a half years ago, you know, I had some serious upskilling to do, um, you know, and, and pouring through IPCC reports and, you know, trying to gain some level of fluency, um, you know, for sustainability speak just in general, like all of this was somewhat foreign to me. So.

Bundle IQ really, really helped me kind of root through the noise. And, you know, as I was trying to understand various reports and articles out there, sincerely helped me upskill, you know, in a big way, you know, by making it a lot more palatable. Right. Can you talk through the difference between bundle IQ and chat GPT?

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (05:01.07)
Yeah, this is probably the biggest question we get. And it's a great question because without ChatGPT, it's actually hard to explain Bundle IQ, because we were a precursor to ChatGPT by two years. And the reality is that ChatGPT is obviously an incredibly creative tool or a cool tool for creativity. And you do a lot of writing, you can write emails and...

Bobby Hite (05:04.057)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (05:11.097)
Right.

Bobby Hite (05:15.611)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (05:29.526)
wordsmith, all kinds of things. But when it comes to research and attribution and citing and sourcing and things like that, if your reputation depends on it, let's put it this way, for those types of people, Bundle IQ is the tool that people would use because you get to focus the AI's energy on specific data sets. We call those bundles. So imagine building a curation of content.

So that's one piece of it. And then the other piece of it is at scale. So what does it look like to you mentioned IPCC report? I mean, the IPCC reports over 3000 pages. You know, chat GPT is a large language model that holds like can do really well with data and memory. But when it comes to, you know, scaling data sets and data management, things like that, it doesn't really do that. So we have a knowledge management system that is like the powers the back end.

Bobby Hite (06:06.027)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (06:15.94)
Right.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (06:28.486)
and or back in and then the LLM is sort of like the AI research assistant that kind of helps you articulate and communicate your thoughts and ideas and connect those dots.

Bobby Hite (06:41.012)
Yeah. So how are your customers, you know, kind of using Bundle IQ today? You know, just some various use cases there.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (06:50.506)
Yeah, we had a really interesting one come up yesterday. There's an attorney that's a customer and he uses it for a lot of his legal work, mostly just to try to connect the dots in his thinking as it relates to whatever discovery material he has and that sort of thing. But he is also on the board of a nonprofit here in West Palm Beach called Connect West Palm Beach. And they do a lot of...

Bobby Hite (07:02.905)
Right.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (07:18.622)
studies and basically community advocacy and kind of social impact initiatives around walkability and you know as it relates to urban planning and you know the whole kind of life cycle of civil engineering and development inside of a municipality. So that being said as you can imagine there are so many studies and so many things that you could potentially learn from but similar to the climate challenge and when you talk about upscaling.

So we basically said, okay, let's bundle up 47 reports, which was over 1,500 pages worth of content. And we spun up a chat bot, which is kind of new to Bundle IQ. So we're turning these bundles where literally you can press a button and it'll spin up a branded kind of chat experience that people can interact with and subscribe to.

Bobby Hite (08:05.56)
So cool.

Bobby Hite (08:09.227)
Yeah, man, that can go so many different directions, right? Like I'm thinking about the potential use cases here. You know, a chat pot that has, you know, associated internal language for, you know, just the marketing and discovery and research around a particular product line, right? Um, and, you know, once you start understanding the various use cases here.

you know, your, your mind really starts to, you know, kind of, kind of spin up.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (08:42.098)
Yeah, and just another kind of contrast element to Bungle IQ is like, where we really shine is focusing on industry specific knowledge. So not the content that's like readily available on the internet. And oftentimes, a lot of this industry knowledge is not even available in chat GPT or in Google. It's not even indexed because it's behind a paywall or some kind of download form or something like that.

Bobby Hite (09:12.944)
Yeah. Now let's talk a bit about some of the work that you're doing in climate and climate science. Obviously, you and I have known each other for years and you're kind of uniquely interested in this war on climate and building a more sustainable future. Can you talk about some of the work that you're doing in the space?

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (09:34.058)
Yeah, so we sort of support like the back end of this analysis. And we work with a lot of researchers and people in the sustainability industry, you know, people that are doing carbon accounting for enterprises and in municipalities. And they use Bundle IQ as a tool in their toolkit to help them, you know, with this research. And, you know, and it's interesting because, you know, you've got

Bobby Hite (09:45.913)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (10:03.99)
the SEC filing or ruling that said all publicly traded companies at whatever date have to essentially report on their carbon accounting. And so now there's this mad rush to figure that out. And there are large corporations and I know that there's different scopes and one, two, and three and all the different things that they have to account for in terms of supply chain and usage and all that. And it's a lot to make sense of. So you know...

Basically, we created this ESG bundle that has, I think, 100 of the Fortune 500s ESG reporting. And that's been really useful for a lot of people within the bundle IQ ecosystem. It's just a big passion of mine to help people connect the dots. And our North Star as a company is engineering Eureka moments. That's the thing that we believe that we can do better than any company in the world.

Bobby Hite (10:41.343)
Yeah. Oh, that's huge.

Bobby Hite (10:58.443)
Love it. Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (11:02.91)
you know, those sudden moments of inspiration where you're like, crap, without this, I would have never arrived here.

Bobby Hite (11:10.713)
Yeah. Or is your team using bundle IQ internally to help find, you know, and kind of distill all of the nonsense and noise that's out there and, and to navigate their way to some of those Eureka moments.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (11:25.45)
Yeah, I mean, we use it every day. We're constantly dog fooding the product, not only from a utility standpoint in terms of our documentation as a company, but also as a, we'll call it an R&D team slash innovation team where we're constantly trying to push the envelope on the types of data that we can ingest and make sense of. So for instance, in some of this,

Bobby Hite (11:28.089)
Right.

Bobby Hite (11:38.171)
Gotcha.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (11:54.262)
connect West Palm Beach data, there were a lot of charts, they were just images. So, you know, chat GPT multimodal just came out, but it's not even really available from an enterprise perspective. So how do we achieve some of these things without having to wait, you know, four to five months or whatever, they're going to make that available. Not only that, but it's probably too expensive to make it production. Like it's great for prototype, but to make it scalable within a production environment.

Bobby Hite (12:03.203)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (12:23.27)
is not something that is going to come easily, at least for now. So, you know, so we're looking at other ways to basically like parse up that data and make it useful to our customers today and not having to wait six, seven months potentially.

Bobby Hite (12:27.496)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (12:37.131)
Yeah, that's awesome. And I was I was really impressed with the chat that you had posted the other day around, you know, all the sustainability data. I'm not sure exactly what was in the bundle. Miami Yeah. And I have noticed this trend amongst

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (12:52.982)
It was Miami, yeah.

Bobby Hite (13:01.111)
Mostly coastal cities across the United States. Um, and now they're kind of integrating the term resiliency into chief sustainability officer. So it's chief sustainability and resiliency officer. Um, you know, which is that, which I think is important because, you know, we do really need to start, um, you know, talking about resiliency and, uh, um, you know, uh, what's the, what's the term?

not adaption, adoption, adaptation, sorry. Yeah, adaptation a lot more, you know, because those topics, you know, have been somewhat taboo in the past, right?

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (13:34.533)
Adaptation.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (13:45.15)
Yeah, well, that's the thing, right? Like a lot of these experiences around climate, well, first it was global warming and then that was too much, right? So then it became climate change. And then, so I think resiliency and adaptation are probably the most pragmatic ways to look at this because I drive down Flagler, I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, Flagler's along the intercoastal waterway and it is a...

Bobby Hite (13:56.575)
Right.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (14:14.434)
parent that every single full moon there is a flood. So, and I know Miami's like even worse, which is why we created that Miami sustainability bundle. But resiliency and adaptation are really kind of, I think the key drivers because it's like, it's in your face, you know.

Bobby Hite (14:18.583)
Right. Yeah.

Bobby Hite (14:34.291)
Yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of even citizens of, of Miami, they have no idea what's going on, what projects they have forecasted, you know, to kind of make, um, you know, some of their work more, more tangible. They have no idea. Right. And so I was able to just ask that chat bot, you know, what are the resiliency initiatives that Miami is working on right now? And it spit out, you know, four or five, six.

different projects that Miami was actively working towards. You know, and then I even asked from the perspective of, you know, a climate change denier, you know, what would their feedback be or what would their take be on this particular information, right? And it was able to, you know, come back and, you know, I think highlight some key areas that

the city should at least be, you know, kind of messaging around, um, or, or rebukting, if you will. Um, so incredibly useful tool kudos to you. I guess what, what types of data did you kind of put into that bundle to spin that up?

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (15:47.906)
There was a GHG report there. I uploaded their urban planning like design Parameters, I mean so I it was a combination of climate related stuff urban planning and code and You know building related data. I Didn't I didn't add any like GIS stuff or anything like that, but it was you know, it was pretty comprehensive

Bobby Hite (15:53.825)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (16:10.619)
Gotcha.

Bobby Hite (16:15.545)
Yeah. I see, you know, I'm thinking from the point of a, a citizen, right. And having that chat bot on the site, right. On their sustainability page that you could interact with really helps distill all of the work that, that the group's doing and make it more, more palatable, right.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (16:38.686)
Yeah, that's the goal. We spun these up just out of personal interest and our own edification to see if we can gain any insight. And it's obvious, literally, like you just gave a great example, that they're super valuable. So I think the next step is to start to have some of these conversations with city leadership and see what we can do.

Bobby Hite (16:55.097)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (17:01.791)
Yeah. Are you speaking of, uh, you know, city leadership, municipalities, government officials, um, you know, the government is obviously keenly interested in the, the development of AI, you know, as a potential, potential risk moving forward. Um, you know, along with the potential just ROI and capabilities in general, as they continue to develop, what do you see government's role, you know, kind of.

playing in the future development of AI.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (17:33.93)
Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't think it's an obvious one per se. I think there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in it right now to just do something. I mean, if you read the executive order, it was kind of a kitchen sink of, you know, precautions, I guess. But in terms of what I see as the opportunity, first off,

I think the reality is that there's already a lot of issues with just forget about AI for a second, with the way that data is managed today and how it's being exploited. I mean, think about like credit card companies and all the data that they have and how it's predatory essentially. There's an entire economic engine just developed around our data in that way.

Bobby Hite (18:09.806)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (18:31.67)
If you apply for an LLC to the state, like the next thing that happens is you get text messages and phone calls and direct mail from every kind of service provider you can imagine as it relates to business. Anyway, point being is that there's a lot of challenges around data and privacy today, and AI is only going to perpetuate that problem. So my point is that...

Bobby Hite (18:39.125)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (18:55.66)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (18:58.494)
I think we need to address some of the foundational challenges that we're up against that haven't been addressed. And then we can talk about maybe some of the guardrails and things that we can put into place for AI, because AI ultimately is nothing without data or some kind of pipelines to communication. So that's my two cents.

Bobby Hite (19:16.462)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (19:26.331)
Can you help me understand, I know Google Chrome, I believe, is taking away like 10% of users' capabilities around third-party cookie usage. And I believe they plan on phasing third-party cookie data entirely in 2024. What are the potential tailwinds of that?

Um, you know, as it pertains to, you know, various products and, um, you know, maybe even AI, I have no idea.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (20:04.586)
Yeah, so my background's in advertising. I brought behavioral targeting and geo-targeting to South Florida. So I was part of the problem. You know, in leveraging the cookie data and being able to retarget people based on their, you know, a certain profile that we would build. And this was back in 2006, 2007, probably 2007. This is before DoubleClick got acquired by Google or maybe around that.

Bobby Hite (20:07.318)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (20:24.045)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (20:33.738)
or maybe right before that time. So that being said, it's just gonna be an evolution of that. It's not gonna be the same that we've imagined as it relates to putting people in buckets based on their browsing history. What I would imagine it to be is more around...

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (20:57.694)
It's interesting. So a lot of our time is spent consuming information. And ultimately the entire internet is changing. The entire landscape of the internet is changing. When we got into kind of web, we'll call it 2.0, the information age. Traditional media was sort of flipped on its head. You know, and I come from a newspaper background and then going into digital. And

Bobby Hite (21:02.735)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (21:25.154)
The reality is that these publishers couldn't make, they couldn't charge for the information because everything, information was democratized, everything was free. And so in order to like play on the internet, they had to basically open everything up. But now with AI, what we're seeing is that content consumption is changing markedly. And you know, a lot of people are now turning to, and you probably have experienced this for yourself, they're turning to ChatGPT, they're turning to Bars, they're turning to LLMs.

and they just want the answers. They don't want to have to go open up 15 tabs and read all the articles. So what does that mean? That means that ultimately the pendulum is going to shift at some point back to the content creators and the publishers, and they're going to start locking down and putting up these walled gardens around their data for two reasons. One, chat GPT, it's like no index, no scrape.

Bobby Hite (21:56.794)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Bobby Hite (22:18.285)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (22:24.886)
because ChaiGPD is nothing without the internet, without Wikipedia, et cetera. And then two, they need to get paid because they're starting to lose the PPC game. Google is gonna start losing a lot of revenue there. If you don't go to the New York Times or whatever website, they're not gonna be able to sell you into a subscription or deliver banner ads to you. So the reason why I say all that is because the cookie game

Bobby Hite (22:32.152)
Yeah, exactly.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (22:54.014)
is an advertising game. And advertising is gonna shift. It's shifting, it's already happening. So in my mind, it's like, okay, we're gonna actually go from like cable TV to online streaming. So cable TV was the black box on everyone's television. That's like the Google of today or Google of yesterday. It was the watering hole, it was the entry point into the world's information. And then Roku came around.

Bobby Hite (23:14.203)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (23:22.554)
And they're like, you know what, we're going to have what's called OTT and all of these publishers you're going to have to subscribe to. If you want access to Paramount Plus, whatever, right? And that's what we've seen. And now that's kind of the new world for consuming television. That's that same thing is happening online. Um, but it's not maybe as a parent yet. So it doesn't answer your question directly, but basically I'm saying the landscape is changing. Therefore the rules are, are going to change.

Bobby Hite (23:29.24)
Right.

Bobby Hite (23:34.34)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (23:51.746)
pretty significantly.

Bobby Hite (23:51.891)
Yeah, yeah. And companies are going to need to stay ahead of that. Um, really, really fast.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (23:57.894)
Yeah. And in some ways the data is going to be richer. It's not going to be a cookie anymore. It's going to be, what is Bobby searching? What is he asking? What questions are he asking? What, you know what I mean? Like it's going to be so much richer than a cookie, you know?

Bobby Hite (24:09.568)
Right.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah, because there, because you're having to subscribe, therefore subscribe to terms and release that type of it. Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (24:23.89)
Exactly. And yeah, and now I know the questions you're asking, the things that you're interested in, and like the content you're consuming in a totally different way.

Bobby Hite (24:29.263)
Yeah.

Bobby Hite (24:33.803)
Yeah. Wow. Absolutely fascinating. Um, Nick, thanks so much for coming on. Oh, I always have a great time talking to you. Um, one more question for you. How can we all be better?

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (24:40.194)
Yeah.

Nicholas Mohnacky | bundleIQ (24:52.982)
I think it's an individual game. I mean, you know, especially in the Western Hemisphere, like...

being mindful about the decisions that we make as it relates to how we choose to show up to the world is such a personal thing. And I think that the ability to have introspection and sit with yourself in quietness is really like, and be contemplative. And maybe, look, we're going into the holidays. Like we said, work's kind of starting to shut down. Obviously we're gonna be with family a lot, but...

I think maybe spending some time by yourself and reflecting on the new year, this year and going into the new year, that's something I think we can all do. That's how I can say we can be better.