When AI moves lightning fast, startups have to anticipate where it's going to strike.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The startup Winnie is a marketplace for child care.

The way it works is parents type in the age of their kid and their zip code,

and then different child care providers in the area will pop up.

You can also filter by languages spoken, whether you want a child care center or a home-based daycare, that kind of thing.

It's free for parents to use.

But the company was founded back in 2016 when AI search wasn't really a thing. And Winnie's CEO and

co-founder, Sarah Moscoff, says parents now want to be able to describe what they're looking for in

natural language. So Winnie has had to adapt. It's just released an

AI-powered search tool. So we're still using all of the really comprehensive data that only Winnie has

about daycares and preschools, but we are letting the parent type in natural language what they're

looking for. So an affordable Spanish immersion preschool near

San Mateo for a three-year-old or whatever it is that matters to them. And then our AI search

agent can interpret that request, plan the search, so know what our data structure is and what we actually have data on,

and then return the most relevant programs. So right now, we still do give back a list of results,

but it's much more relevant, much more filtered to what the user is exactly looking for.

When were you like, this is something we have to do?

So I think we started with AI just sort of automating a lot of the processes we did as a

company.

So a lot of our back office stuff, we realized we could automate with AI.

If it was something we did frequently and it was rule-based, AI would do it better. And then we started building AI into the product

...