SAN DIEGO – Looking for a way to move customer engagement and drive more sales, Abe Nodarse, general manager at the Kia North County car dealership in Escondido, knew exactly which avenue to head toward.
CourtAvenue.
CourtAvenue helps businesses accelerate their digital presence. Its clients include companies like Taylor Guitars, General Mills, Epson and the U.S. Air Force.
CourtAvenue has also counted Kia as a client since 2021 and the North County Kia dealership since the beginning of 2024.
Together with Nodarse, CourtAvenue co-founder Dan Khabie and his team at the 4-year-old company built an Artificial Intelligence tool on North County Kia’s website that has helped increase sales and also is a tool for the sales team at the auto dealership to find information.
Dan Khabie
Co-founder
CourtAvenue
Called Genjo.ai, or Genjo, something CourtAvenue’s Khabie describes as “an enterprise architecture,” Kia customers and employees are able to have a conversational commerce experience, with customer care solutions and dynamic content creation.
Genjo is an enterprise platform that enables companies to deploy Large Language Models (LLM) onto their digital platforms using their data, brand and voice. LLMs are the algorithmic foundation behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Bing Chat1.
The models process natural language inputs and predict the next word based on what they’ve seen before, like next-word prediction engines.
“It helps you find the right Kia car for you,” Khabie said. “It’s been a huge success story for them.”
Nodarse said getting to work on the AI tool was a milestone in his world. A self-described tech geek, when he first met with Khabie and CourtAvenue personnel, Khabie asked him, “What are some of your goals?”
Abe Nodarse
General Manager
Kia North County
“And being in this industry for 33 years now, and my father was in the same industry before me, I told him, ‘I want to revolutionize the auto industry.’ Now, obviously that’s a broad statement, but it starts with innovation. It starts with trying to find the new way right because the way we currently sell cars is the way we sold them 100 years ago. It hasn’t changed.”
Nodarse worked with CourtAvenue to create a better shopping experience. He said that Genjo keeps learning as it is continuously asked questions.
“It just gets better and better and absolutely has helped us make more deals,” he said. “I also like it because the salespeople can use it, too.”
AI Content Creation, Development Tools
Khabie said that was the first iteration of its Artificial Intelligence, and soon after it began with Kia this past March, CourtAvenue launched another AI tool called Catapult.
Catapult is a cutting-edge AI-powered content generation tool that changes the way businesses can create compelling, high-performing content with digital innovation in the marketplace.
Catapult focuses on increasing the content creation velocity of product detail pages, such as those on Amazon, Target or Walmart, where vast assortments, seasonality and new trends demand an ability to redefine content creation, iterate and scale quickly.
“If you’re a big CPG manufacturer, and you want to switch out a name on a cereal box really quick and then distribute that out to Amazon and all the retailers, that’s what Catapult does,” Khabie said. “And it’s an internal tool to allow you to better and more efficiently make changes on a very large product packaging detail page, and it does it all in real time.”
Like Genjo, it also offers dynamic keyword recommendations, providing product-level keyword recommendations, optimizing content for search engines and enhancing discoverability.
CourtAvenue also rolled out another AI tool called Uplift, a five-step content development process that infuses the voice of the customer while validating creative imagery using AI.
“The way to think about it is if we run a digital ad and we want to compare it against 50 different examples to see what performs better and what doesn’t, it changes the ads in real time, depending on what you’re clicking on and what you’re doing.”
CourtAvenue is San Diego’s fastest-growing medium-sized company, as reported in the San Diego Business Journal’s The Book of Lists 2024, with a 3,883% growth in revenue from 2020-22.
The company brought in half a million dollars in its first year (2020), grew to $1.3 million in 2021, in 2022 brought in $21.1 million and had its best year in 2023 with $27.3 million.
CourtAvenue
FOUNDED: 2020
FOUNDERS: Daniel Khabie, Kenny Tomlin
PARTNERS: Daniel Khabie, Kenny Tomlin, Michael Stich
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Digital Transformation Agency
REVENUE: $27 million
EMPLOYEES: 130 overall, 45 in Southern California, 20 in Mexico
WEBSITE: courtavenue.com
CONTACT: 844-COURTAVE
SOCIAL IMPACT: CEO Khabie works with the nonprofit Lucky Duck Foundation
NOTABLE: CEO Khabie is a guest lecturer in the MBA programs at San Diego State University and the University of California, Los Angeles
