Cover of Building an AI Pricing Platform for ITAD with Mackenzie Kettwig

Building an AI Pricing Platform for ITAD with Mackenzie Kettwig

Building an AI Pricing Platform for ITAD with Mackenzie Kettwig

Listen for free

View show details

Season's Savings | 0.99 €/month for 3 months

5.99 €/month thereafter - terms apply. Cancel monthly.
Summary
 What happens when a college senior project turns into the pricing engine an entire industry did not know it needed?

Four engineering students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo set out to answer one question: what actually happens to electronics once people are done with them. That question led them into ITAD, an industry that has run for decades on gut feel, spreadsheets, and hard won experience. Two years and a $125,000 investment later, that class project is GreenSight Technologies, an AI pricing and grading platform real ITAD operators use every day.

Mackenzie Kettwig is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of GreenSight, and they join Ryan Mezera to talk about what actually surprised them building AI for an industry built on relationships and instinct. They are blunt about where AI in ITAD earns its keep and where it does not, why the company built its grading tool on computer vision, and why they thinks AI has become a buzzword that scares off more operators than it helps. They also talk through real resistance GreenSight has met in the field, and why the answer is not replacing the people who already know the business.

Mackenzie Kettwig is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of GreenSight Technologies, an AI pricing and grading platform built for the secondary electronics and ITAD market. GreenSight began two years ago as a senior project at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, when Mackenzie and their co-founders, Jake Daniels, Diego Curiel, and John Ieng, started asking what happens to electronics once people are done with them. That question led them into hundreds of conversations with ITAD operators, recyclers, brokers, and wholesalers, and eventually into a first place win and a $125,000 investment at Cal Poly’s AngelCon competition. As CPO, Mackenzie leads product strategy and spends much of their time talking directly with the people quoting, grading, and routing devices on the floor.

Key Takeaways
  • GreenSight’s core principle is augmenting ITAD operators, not automating them out of the job. The relationships and judgment stay with the people who built them.
  • The platform prices devices using live data from marketplaces including eBay, Amazon, Back Market, and Google Shopping, refreshed daily for volatile categories and weekly for niche ones.
  • Cosmetic grading runs on computer vision built out of co-founder Diego Curiel’s graduate research, scoring devices against a company’s own A through F rules from a few photos.
  • Larger ITAD operators are ahead on data driven strategy, but smaller shops can move faster because they carry less organizational overhead.
  • Mackenzie’s clearest warning for the industry: generic AI tools that do not understand a business’s compliance requirements and client relationships will give confident answers that are simply wrong.
  • “We’re augmenting the work that people are doing. We’re not automating them out of it.” Mackenzie Kettwig, Co-Founder and CPO, GreenSight Technologies
  • “Generic tools that don’t understand your business are going to give you confident answers that are just wrong.” Mackenzie Kettwig, Co-Founder and CPO, GreenSight Technologies

Timestamps

00:00 Meet Mackenzie Kettwig and GreenSight Technologies
01:15 San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, and skipping the skis
02:35 From a Cal Poly senior project to a funded company
04:07 What hundreds of ITAD conversations turned up
07:11 What GreenSight actually means by AI pricing
08:52 Inside the cosmetic grading tool
09:58 Where the pricing data actually comes from
14:54 Big players versus small shops on AI adoption
16:40 What surprised them two years in
19:23 Industry resistance, and where AI earns its keep
21:56 Free demos, free trials, and where to find GreenSight

Connect with Mackenzie Kettwig

Website: https://www.greensighttech.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mackenzie-kettwig-50a4981b7
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet