Locally, Martin Kabaki is known for delicious coffee. One of the founders of Growers Alliance, Martin has specialized in importing coffee from his native Kenya as well as Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Ethiopia, and the well-established company continually works to give back to the coffee-growing communities from which they source — through charitable projects and donation. Martin also helped establish Kijiji Hospital, a nonprofit hospital in his hometown of Naivasha, Kenya that provides basic medical care to underserved rural communities. Suffice it to say, he has plenty on his plate. But Martin has a passion for entrepreneur.ship as well as philanthropy, so instead of stopping with coffee, he pursued another path of an entirely different nature. Martin’s interest was captured by artificial intelligence and its transformative potential — which may seem out of left field, but three of Martin’s siblings work in the tech field and his setting out on a self-educational AI journey seemed perfectly natural. So he immersed himself in the AI world and emerged with a startup called AskRobot. AI is a big part of the national (even inter.national) conversation. With the popularity of bots like ChatGPT, AI has quickly moved out of the realm of science fiction and into everyday life. Martin and AskRobot are approaching it in a different way, though. Ask.Robot isn’t just a chatbot or a search engine or a helper in writing and coding. Blending the functionalities of six large language models (which are, essentially, deep learning algorithms), it’s all of that and more.
Its chatbot function shares comprehensive answers to questions and queries that the company says are powered not just by search engines but by advanced algorithms and ma.chine learning. It can critique writing and offer topic ideas. It has a suite of AI assis.tants to offer expert insight into everything from personal training to music composition. It can communicate in multiple languages fluently, from Spanish to Russian, German to Chinese. Even in the midst of this innovative new ven.ture, Martin is by no means abandoning his philanthropic work, and he plans to donate a portion of AskRobot’s after-tax profit to Kijiji Hospital. Because when it comes down to it, all of Martin’s work has been about transformation. He has worked to transform the lives of those in the communities he sup.ports, and now he is working to transform the AI landscape.
