John Bodrozic Of HomeZada: How We Leveraged AI To Take Our Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Insurance and real estate opportunities — HomeZada is used directly by homeowners, but there is an additional go to market approach with partners. We are seeing increased partner opportunities with insurance, real estate, mortgage, and home improvement companies. These businesses are looking for ways to use A.I. to differentiate themselves with their homeowner customers. They need to have better customer engagement, increase renewal rates, reduce costs, and upsell additional products and services.

In the ever-evolving and never-ending landscape of business, staying ahead of the curve is a prerequisite for success. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has gone from being a futuristic concept to a daily business tool that executives can’t ignore. In this interview series, we would like to talk with business leaders who’ve successfully integrated A.I. into their operations, transforming their companies in the process. I had the pleasure of interviewing John Bodrozic.

John Bodrozic is a co-founder of HomeZada, an A.I. powered digital home management platform that empowers consumers to manage their largest financial asset and biggest expense, their home. HomeZada is also available to insurance, financial services, real estate, and home improvement businesses who want better customer engagement, new sources of data, reduced costs and new growth opportunities with their homeowner customers. John was previously a co-founder in a construction project management software company that became a market leader and successfully sold to a public company and has a B.S. degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! To set the stage, tell us briefly about your childhood and background.

I am a first generation American whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 60s and became naturalized citizens themselves. I grew up in a very blue-collar environment where education and hard work were emphasized very much to better yourself and those around you.

What were the early challenges you faced in your career, and how did they shape your approach to leadership?

No matter what your initial plan is, you will experience more hardships along the way than you ever imagined. These hardships come in various forms such as career rejections, failures, and not meeting your own expectations. These teach you resilience. Sometimes you pivot into a different direction to go around an obstacle and other times you persevere and just grind out working through the obstacle.

We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one mistake that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?

HomeZada is my second technology startup so the concept of developing innovation for a market is a passion. The lesson learned is that often your product innovation is too early for the market. If you have market validation, perseverance is the best early-stage operating model until you find the ability to scale with a timing where the market is realizing the value of your innovation.

A.I. is a big leap for many businesses. When and what first sparked your interest in incorporating it into your operations?

HomeZada’s mission is to empower consumers to manage their largest financial asset and biggest expense, their home. We already built a suite of functionality to manage home finances, home improvement projects, maintenance tasks and a home inventory for insurance purposes. We wanted to incorporate A.I. to improve our product to help homeowners access more relevant information to make better decisions about how to manage their home.

A.I. can be a game-changer for individuals and their responsibilities. Can you share how you personally use A.I. and what are your go-to resources or tools?

One of my roles at HomeZada is product management, so I get early access to various A.I. platforms from the perspective of how a homeowner might use them. I visualize with our teams how we can integrate different horizontal A.I. technology within our vertical consumer platform for managing home data. We know that our template home data and each user’s contextual data about their specific home address makes our Zada A.I. much more personalized and valuable. Our advantage is personalized generative A.I. prompts where we ask more relevant questions and save the data results so homeowners can aggregate multiple A.I. interactions into simple visualized dashboards to make better financial decisions.

On the flip side, what challenges or setbacks have you encountered while implementing A.I. into your company?

The number of large language model versions is rapidly upgrading and getting better, so staying on top of the pace of new A.I. technology for us to assess is challenging. Our vertical domain of residential real estate has a lot of information that consumers need so determining which subareas to prioritize is sometimes challenging.

Let’s dig into this further. Can you share the top 5 A.I. tools or different ways you’re integrating A.I. into your business? What specific functions do they serve and what kind of result have you seen so far? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

1 . Home improvement projects — Homeowners struggle to get an accurate budget for their remodel as most current sites give you a broad price range that is not very useful. Our platform combines four key elements including over 50 templates of common remodel projects, capturing the dimensional size, the different material choices, and whether you hire a contractor or DIY and uses Zada A.I. to create a detailed, item by item budget that is more accurate and realistic. Our Zada A.I. allows you to make changes to what you want and then save the budget as your starting point to determine how to pay for it and manage your contractor. It is the easiest yet most advanced home improvement budgeting functionality that is completely self-service by any homeowner.

2 . Weather and climate preparedness — The largest source of home insurance claims is due to severe weather. Most homeowners get caught off guard and don’t know how to prepare to minimize damage. HomeZada integrates with the National Weather Service for each user’s specific home location and sends out alerts for every severe event such as winter storms, freezing temps, hurricanes, high winds, flooding, wildfire conditions and more. Zada A.I. weather alerts then process the specific warning and provides step by step recommendations that the homeowner can take to prepare their home to minimize damages.

3 . Home inventory assessment — Every insurance company recommends homeowners have a home inventory, but most don’t because they think it will take too long. HomeZada’s templates predict all the interior rooms and exterior spaces. Users can then take wide photos of each room. Zada A.I. visually processes each photo to detect objects in it and then provides an estimated value for each item. Zada A.I. saves the itemized list per room and provides aggregated dashboards and reports. In just a few minutes, homeowners get a comprehensive home inventory to make sure they are properly insured and prepared in case fire or disaster strikes and they must file a claim.

4 . Home maintenance tasks — First time homeowners don’t know what tasks to perform. As a result, they get unexpected repair costs due to lack of maintenance and the utility bills are higher than necessary because the home is operating inefficiently. HomeZada creates a preventative maintenance schedule that provides notifications. Users can initiate Zada A.I. for each task which provides step by step instructions on how to perform the task. This saves the homeowner money in managing their home and preserves or even increases the value.

5 . Insurance and real estate opportunities — HomeZada is used directly by homeowners, but there is an additional go to market approach with partners. We are seeing increased partner opportunities with insurance, real estate, mortgage, and home improvement companies. These businesses are looking for ways to use A.I. to differentiate themselves with their homeowner customers. They need to have better customer engagement, increase renewal rates, reduce costs, and upsell additional products and services.

There’s concern about A.I. taking over jobs. How do you balance A.I. tools with your human workforce and have you already replaced any positions using technology?

As an early-stage business, A.I. is an enabler to improve our innovative platform. A.I. is not reducing our workforce, but it is enabling new and existing partner businesses to offer services to their homeowners because of our platform. There are many segments of homeowners who are still looking for a local business to help them. We have property managers, estate managers, professional organizers, and real estate agents who can use our HomeZada PRO version to launch new home services which are creating new jobs.

Looking ahead, what’s on the horizon in the world of A.I. that people should know about? What do you see happening in the next 3–5 years? I would love to hear your best prediction.

Most A.I. in use today is by businesses using horizontal A.I. platforms especially in the marketing, product development and customer service groups. The next 3 to 5 years will be a big growth in using A.I. in vertical industry applications. More A.I. will be used by consumers themselves to help them manage the various aspects of their lives including financial services, real estate, insurance, health care, travel and more.

If you had to pick just one A.I. tool that you feel is essential, one that you haven’t mentioned yet, which would it be and why?

One that is providing the most benefit today is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The ability to use their API version to embed and integrate into our existing platform within the vast domain of homeowner information is a differentiator.

For the uninitiated, what advice would you give someone looking to integrate A.I. into their business and doesn’t know where to start?

Allocate time in different functional areas of the business to review different A.I. platforms to explore how it can be useful. Have people present their findings and demonstrations to the wider group and facilitate discussions. Look for ways to prioritize which functional areas the business could benefit the most.

Where can our readers follow you to learn more about leveraging A.I. in the business world?

Here are three places:

Our corporate HomeZada X account: https://twitter.com/homezada

Kiplinger Advisory Collective: https://advisor.kiplinger.com/profile/John-Bodrozic-Co-Founder-HomeZada/5bee2d3c-4066-4934-a6be-785139617eb6

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbodrozic/

This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!

About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com