I'm Patrick McBride. My first job out of college was writing code for a Fortune 500 insurance company. After that, I spent decades in tech, mostly in cybersecurity. JOSAI is a product of PMB Software.
The honest answer is threefold. I wanted to rekindle my old software-engineering synapses and dig into modern AI tooling — picking back up an interest in AI that started early in my career but had gone stale. I am also interested in where UI/UX will go as AI becomes a more important component of apps. Way back in the day, at Travelers Insurance, I helped build an expert system for Auto Bodily Injury claims — a rule-based AI tool that captured how experienced claim adjusters evaluated bodily-injury cases. It walked junior claim handlers through consistent, protocol-based questions so they could evaluate and adjudicate auto bodily-injury claims the way the senior people did. Ed Feigenbaum — the “father of expert systems” — kindly invited me to speak about it at the IAAI conference in Washington, D.C., in 1993. It was my very first external presentation. The tools have come a long way since then, but JOSAI runs on the same idea: capture good judgment and put it in the hands of the people who need it.
I chose the job-search problem because I kept hearing the same thing from early-career and mid-career professionals, and from later-stage people like me: the job hunt these days is a real pain in the ass. Using AI for it makes obvious sense, but nothing out there tied the pieces together — the tasks and to-dos, the multiple AI chats, which resume went to which company, to name a few. And nothing kept the full context in one place so the AI could give its best possible answers. It was a problem I knew a thing or two about, and one where I could play “product guy.” Hence JOSAI.
People ask about the hedgehog. Her name was Basil.
My daughter Vela adopted her as a baby. We drove about an hour to pick her up — Vela drove home, and I got to hold Basil the whole way. So she ended up attached to both of us. Basil was fine with being held, but what she really wanted was a dark place to snuggle. Usually that meant the collar of a shirt, where she'd fall asleep against your neck. She also liked to climb up a long sleeve and fall asleep in there.
Basil was an African Pygmy hedgehog, and she had a wonderful life. While she is no longer with us, the hedgehog you see working away in JOSAI is a nod to her spirit and energy.
