Pangea Summit connects industry expertise with cutting-edge AI, enabling organizations to navigate evolving market dynamics with precision and agility. By uniting technology, business, and innovation, Pangea Summit empowers technology companies with highly relevant, human-centered industry go-to-market strategies at scale.

Human-to-Human (H2H) AI is a GenAI-powered application designed to help you craft highly personalized, industry-specific messages at scale. PangeaGTM empowers sales and customer-facing teams to drive authentic human-to-human engagement. It seamlessly integrating individual audience insights, expert industry content, tailored use cases, and advanced large language model (LLM) orchestration into one intuitive platform.

Jim Vezina of Spark Ranch is one of a very limited set of worldwide industry experts invited partner with Pangea to provide feedback on company direction and better enable client success.

Agentis developed a proprietary AI agent framework and IDE to deliver custom solutions to difficult business problems.

As project manager for the Agentic AI start up Agentis, lead development and vision for custom, AI assist projects and defining vision solutions using proprietary AI agent tool set.

One project delivered tax solution for multi-state gas and electric provider. The solution determined state and local taxes and use tax on revenue, equipment and generation. Project delivered on-time, on-budget. And it is worth saying they attempted the project 2-3 times, all over budget and none successfully delivered a usable solution.

Note: this was done prior to starting Spark Ranch.

One of the significant costs of residential solar power is for permitting. While the permitting fee itself is significant, the amount of time and effort to get a permit approved is expensive. Each municipality has their own rules, procedures and hoops to jump through. And the influx of summer permits into a municipality overwhelms their staff causing delays. Then with the inevitable question/answers going back and forth, the total process could be a week or months. 

The other factor in the delay is consumer anxiety. The property owner was expecting a permit to be get approved within a week and after a month, they become worried there's a problem. This means the sales staff needs to regularly communicate to the owner to reassure them - spending time reassuring a sale rather than going out making new sales. And then if the process takes too long, the owner cancels the order. All the initial sales effort, design effort, effort working with municipalities and reassuring the owner is lost (and these costs need to be absorbed by a new sales).

Why has this been a problem? Each municipality works independently, different areas have dramatically different requirements (eg southern California beach house, Colorado chalet, Minnesota home, 200 year old Massachusetts colonial).

Then there was the Solar Foundation and Spark Ranch.

The Solar Foundation were a group of industry experts from various organizations - NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory), Tesla, Sunrun, SEIA (Solar Energy Industries Association), etc. These experts were able to determine the vision of what a common permit should include and areas where flexibility needed to be available for municipality specific requirements. Then the good fortune, DOE (Department of Energy) offered a grant program to offer 50% of the seed money to build applications that would then be commercialized. But they heard such a robust, flexible application could not be built.

Enter Spark Ranch. Jim Vezina of Spark Ranch worked with them to understand their vision and architected a solution that was not only robust and flexible enough to satisfy their needs, but could then be used to support related needs like batteries and heat pumps. He laid out the plan to quickly deliver a prototype leveraging existing Spark Ranch technology and then the phases for rollout.

Jim Vezina continued as part of the team to develop the application until it could be transitioned to a new company SolarAPP+. 

The application is significantly reducing permitting time and overall project costs. For example, one company will redesign a customer solution in order to get immediate approval from SolarAPP+ rather than going through the normal manual process with the municaplity.

Retail is a tough business. And it is even tougher for brands who cannot directly reach the consumer to get their product noticed on the shelf.

The extreme example is the retail liquor industry. Stores are densely packed with a slew of similar products, all with excellent eye-catching packaging, and most brands are not recognized. Along with the density of signage, it is overwhelming. The result, consumers go straight to the product they always buy, and then out the door.

Bottleroom 3 was created by Spark Ranch's Jim Vezina and other partners to create a new consumer touch point and personalized recommendations.

The new touch point is created as the consumer enters the store and engages the Bottleroom 3 app. Engaging at this point enables brands and store to directly reach to the consumer and influence their path through the store. Rather than just going straight to getting a merlot for dinner with friends, they could be influenced to also swing by the craft beer section for a new craft IPA.

A critical aspect of the solution is personalized recommendations. 

Typically apps will offer a consumer everything they can. The consumer is expected to go through pages and pages of products - so frustrating.

The Bottleroom 3 app personalizes a handful of beer, wine and spirit recommendations to the consumer, each with a discount to entice them to buy

A special twist is the call to action. The consumer can only use the discount during that visit - and may never see the offer again. No chance to think - I'll try that next time (which is typical when a tasting occurs at a store). It's now or never.

To round out the service, Bottleroom 3 also provides the rebate redemption required.

How are recommendations personalized?  Initially a complicated algorithm considers known purchases and preferences selected by the user. This is the approach while data is being collected. The long term goal is to use (AI) unsupervised learning to categorize user tastes along with (AI) supervised learning to identify which offers to recommend.

Note: this was done prior to smartphones becoming so common.

Reaching out to consumers is difficult with typically very low percentage rate of success - e.g. successful mail or email campaigns have a single digit success rate. However, SMS/Text messages are practically always read and have an immediate response. But there are strict rules. Sending out cold-call messages can get you shutdown.

The ClkClk solution provides a membership approach where people can easily sign up to join businesses they are interested in. For example, a table tent at a restaurant offers a free dessert if you text a number to our short code. This registers you into the ClkClk club, and member of that restaurant. Doing the same at another business will mean you are also a member there too.

Once registered, there are push and pull messages with other offers. 

For a push example, one morning a tire store saw they were very low on customers so sent out a special offer to their members that was only valid that day. That quickly filled their schedule.

A pull example is a family is going out to dinner after a long hot day of kid's sports. They text to see all offers are available to decide which restaurant to go to.

An interesting pull example is a popular bakery would make certain pies each day - and by the end of the day, all pies would be sold out. They would get calls all day from customers wondering what pies were available that day. With ClkClk, customers could text in for that business and get the list of pies for the day. For a local bakery, it was a huge time savings.

The solution of course had to integrate with the cellphone carriers and adhere to all the overall rules. And providing a portal for businesses to manager their offers and see results.

The most interesting part of the solution was to keep track of which businesses a customer was a member of.