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About kovac.ai
He did not start as a believer. The work still had to ship, so he learned what actually moves.
kovac.ai is an AI enablement consultancy based in Kansas City and working with clients nationally. The firm helps executives and teams adopt AI deliberately, through current state assessments, future state roadmaps, training and workshops, AI governance and policy, and light AI engineering.
Our story
kovac.ai started with a skeptic. Chris Kovac spent roughly thirty years in marketing and technology, and when friends started talking about ChatGPT in late 2022, he thought artificial intelligence was the stupidest thing he had ever heard of.
What changed his mind was need. A key employee in the family's grass-fed beef business became ill and could no longer work, and the work still had to get done. The first real test was small: a blog post on the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef. ChatGPT came back with three paragraphs, and they were better than expected. Chris graded the output a B-plus.
The grade is the part that matters. Thirty years of writing, editing and marketing is what made that output measurable instead of magical, and it raised the question the business was built on: what happens when real experience gets put behind these tools?
River Watch Beef became the sandbox. Market and competitor research, brand reputation, copy for product rollouts, content ideation; all of it tested inside a company that still had to run. In parallel, Chris went to school on AI through courses, newsletters, webinars and live training, tracking platform releases as they landed.
In March 2023, a breakfast with a longtime friend from the Social Media Club of Kansas City turned into a larger question: what if there were a place for everyone in the region working on AI to compare notes? The Kansas City AI Club held its first event in April 2023 and has become one of the fastest growing professional organizations in the city. Running it put Chris in steady contact with practitioners across the region and the country, and that is where the last of the skepticism died.
kovac.ai was founded in February 2023 and launched that September as a marketing AI practice, built directly on those thirty years. The engagements kept turning up the same thing underneath the marketing work: AI tools already in the building, no governance, no training, no plan, and no one accountable for what the tools produced. Companies were buying licenses and hoping. Closing that gap is the work kovac.ai does now.
Today the firm delivers AI enablement across the organization. That means understanding where a company actually stands, building a roadmap it can follow, training the people who have to use the tools, and putting governance in place so the whole thing holds up. kovac.ai works with companies in Kansas City and nationally, in person and remotely.
How we work
Human-first
AI is a tool, not the point. Every engagement starts with the business problem and the people doing the work, never the platform. The aim is to move repetitive work off people so their judgment goes to the work that requires it.
AI is hard
Most firms selling AI will not say that out loud. It is a business problem before it is a technology problem, and it takes an integrated, collaborative team to solve; the technology is the easy part.
Deliberate beats fast
Blanket rollouts to hundreds of people at once tend to fail, because governance is set at the executive level while the real work is departmental and no two departments are alike. kovac.ai starts with strategic pods, proves the use cases, then scales what works.
Chris Kovac, founder
Chris Kovac is an AI consultant and the founder of kovac.ai. He works with executives and teams on AI strategy, adoption and governance, and he is co-founder and President of the Kansas City AI Club, the professional community he helped start in 2023.
He came to AI after about thirty years in marketing and technology. That career began in 1996 with a web and search startup he founded with a college friend, and ran through work with brands including Hallmark, Sprint, Microsoft and 3M, alongside early-stage and challenger companies. The experience is not background. It is the reason he could look at the first useful thing AI produced for him and say exactly how good it was, and it is what he brings into a room full of executives who are being sold technology instead of outcomes.
Chris has spoken nationally for more than twenty years, at conferences, universities and professional associations, and he trains the way he consults: real use cases, hands-on work and no theory for its own sake.
Affiliations and appointments
- Co-founder and President, Kansas City AI Club
- Business Analytics Advisory Board and Marketing Advisory Council, Henry W. Bloch School of Management, University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC)
- Perplexity Business Fellow
- Judge and mentor, The Blox, Season 11
- Panel moderator, artificial intelligence and human rights, Global Ties Kansas City, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State
Connect
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chriskovac
- Kansas City AI Club: kansascity.ai
- X: @chriskovac