Tag Archives: Cory Brandolini

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Advanced AI Platform Helps Software Developers Tackle a Trillion-Dollar Problem

Demand for software continues to rise in our increasingly digitized world as companies across all industrial sectors look to make their operations more efficient. Little do most people know that software developers themselves rely on other technologies to help them be more effective in the development, building, and maintenance of software applications.

Railtown AI Technologies (CSE:RAIL) is one of the companies tackling the inefficiencies in how software applications are developed, built, scaled, managed, and maintained. Using innovative artificial intelligence developed in-house, Railtown’s suite of technology will identify problems within the software development and deployment process, providing knowledge and insight that includes suggested fixes and tests to increase the velocity of resolution.

Chief Executive Officer Cory Brandolini co-founded Railtown with a clear goal: to create an AI solution that transforms and elevates the end-to-end software development process.

“My co-founders and I have been building software applications for 30 years, and as a result, we have built applications across many verticals and have used most development methodologies in doing so,” Brandolini tells Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine.

“We have experienced the best and worst of those methods, and it was from that experience that we knew we wanted to build the tools and frameworks to tackle all of the negative and inefficient software engineering and maintenance processes. Our Conductr AI model is the result of that work and is now positioned to be a big player in the AI-driven conversion of traditional methodologies of software development into a more efficient approach.”

“We wanted to create a very intelligent agent that not only understood the design aspects of what you were trying to build but also the running and the maintenance of what you built as well.”

Brandolini explains that all of the work that goes into software development still relies on talented developers. “Human beings make up the bulk of the workload that goes into designing, building, training, deploying, managing, and maintaining a software application,” he says. “It’s a manpower-heavy load to run large, scalable software applications. The goal is to alleviate the non-productive tasks from the developer workload and to free them up and assist them in the creation of great new game-changing applications.”

With reams of data to examine, Railtown has been able to determine that its technology can save over eight hours of a human developer’s time per week. Apply that metric across a developer team and a full work year, and the potential to recapture incredible amounts of corporate value becomes obvious.

Railtown operates in a high-growth space where more than 30 million software developers work globally, with that number climbing by 3% to 4% every year. Not surprisingly, the developer tools market is projected to expand from US$6.6 billion in 2024 to US$22.6 billion by 2033, according to Business Research Insights.

For Railtown, the opportunity lies in reducing losses caused by inefficient software development. “It works out to be about 40% of your resources in non-productive tasks,” Brandolini explains. 

“Our goal was to be able to create a very intelligent, agentic solution that could do a significant amount of the non-productive tasks in order to keep developers building and running new products, as opposed to fixing and maintaining and constantly reviewing historical technical debt.”

In the United States alone, the cost of inferior software was estimated to be US$2.4 trillion in 2022 by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ). Related losses due to cybercrime and problems in software supply chains were cited, as was the term “technical debt,” which is the implied cost of future work to fix sub-optimal software.

At scale, software bugs can lead to extremely costly problems, with the millions of automobiles being recalled in 2024 due to software issues being just one example.

A flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in July 2024 disrupted everything from personal laptops to enterprise infrastructure. One estimate put the resulting losses for Fortune 500 companies at over US$5 billion. 

Railtown is helping to address these types of problems with its proprietary Application General Intelligence (AGI) platform, Conductr.

The system is designed to support the entire software development lifecycle. It ingests a wide range of data sources, including developer tickets, code repositories, deployment logs, and documentation, and uses the information to understand how a software application works. 

From there, Conductr can automate many of the repetitive, time-consuming tasks developers typically manage. This includes generating reports and release notes, identifying root causes of bugs, writing code fixes, creating documentation, and deploying tests.

As the platform learns more about an application’s architecture and workflows, it can begin to predict issues before they arise and recommend fixes, helping software development teams to reduce technical debt and maintain code quality at scale.

Unlike other developer tools that are often fragmented and domain-specific, Conductr serves as a unified platform that connects all aspects of software development, automating tasks across teams and workflows to improve productivity and collaboration. The platform evolves with the application it supports to help ensure that development goes as smoothly as possible from start to finish.

Importantly, Railtown’s platform integrates seamlessly with popular integrated development environment (IDE) and continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) tools, such as Visual Studio, VS Code, Azure DevOps, Jira, GitHub, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zapier, and many more, enabling smooth workflow automation.

The company’s revenue model is based on recurring software as a service (SaaS) subscriptions, which can support predictable cash flow and scalability as more organizations adopt the platform.

Railtown recently announced that it has entered into a memorandum of understanding to acquire AI Partnerships Corporation (AIP). AIP has a network of over 160 AI-SaaS–based Affiliate companies, the majority of them in Canada, that provide AI-driven vertical market solutions and development tools.

Toronto-based AIP’s Affiliates operate in 13 countries and serve over 5,000 clients in industries such as fintech, healthcare, manufacturing, and supply chain management. The company’s “AIP Central” platform connects the Affiliates, allowing them to subscribe to each other’s services and pursue opportunities together in a shared environment.

Railtown sees significant value in leveraging the AIP Affiliate sales network and also in the opportunity to add a common platform layer for all Affiliates and their end-user clients to utilize.

According to Brandolini, bringing AIP and Railtown together will offer clients not just a marketplace but also access to the core infrastructure and tools needed to build and deploy AI applications through the frameworks and services that Railtown has created. The approach is similar to how Microsoft offers both a partner network and access to its technical services, such as Azure Cloud, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio, GitHub, and more.

Brandolini also emphasizes that the acquisition enhances Railtown’s strategic positioning in the Canadian AI ecosystem.

“Railtown and AIP’s goal, along with the Canadian government’s AI program initiatives, is to build a strong Canadian ecosystem for Canadian companies to build and deploy AI-based technologies in Canada first, so they don’t immediately need to look south of the border, as well as being able to address data sovereignty concerns,” states Brandolini.

“So, this was very much a sovereign AI ideology that we have here at Railtown and AIP as Canadian companies, to be able to provide as many of the most important services, tools, and frameworks that Canadian AI companies need and want.”

With its AI-powered platform and expanding network, Railtown is not only addressing the costly inefficiencies of software development today but shaping how AI tools will support the next generation of work in this vitally important industry.

This story was featured in Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine.

Learn more about Railtown AI Technologies at https://www.railtown.ai/.

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Railtown AI Technologies: Software Engineers Get a Co-Pilot to Help Navigate the Inevitable Turbulence of Development

Artificial intelligence is everywhere right now, and in the tech sector, thousands of entrepreneurs are looking for a way to plug AI into their business models.

The problem is that anyone who’s gone back and forth for more than a few minutes with a bot such as ChatGPT knows one thing: its responses are full of errors.

For AI to be truly useful, it needs to be trained effectively and have a defined purpose. Railtown AI Technologies (CSE:RAIL) has not one product but three designed for software developers that meet those criteria.

The company’s proprietary AI has been in stealth development for three years under the direction of Chief Executive Officer Cory Brandolini and Chief Technology Officer Marwan Haddad, a pair of self-described software geeks who became fast friends at a previous company and partnered up.

Their raison d’être is making it easier for developers to create new software and manage ongoing projects.

The first offering is Railtown’s Root Cause Analysis Co-Pilot, which is designed to detect bugs within applications and then quickly pinpoint the root cause of the errors and the impact on the application.

Right now, 40% of a software engineer’s time is, on average, spent identifying bugs and fixing them. It creates an enormous manpower challenge, according to Haddad. He and Brandolini once installed a fire engine light in the bullpen at their previous company that would go off whenever an issue arose. Senior engineers would drop everything to figure out what was wrong, at times taking hours to diagnose the root cause of the error and the impact it had on the application, resulting in delayed deliverables and pushing schedules behind.

Root Cause Analysis eliminates the mad dash to comb through every line of code. The Root Cause Analysis Co-Pilot hooks into the developer’s machine, where it spots errors before they reach production and immediately determines the root cause and ticket where the problem originated.

That’s why Brandolini says the company doesn’t design bots – it builds co-pilots.

“No matter how strong your team is technically, no matter how senior your developers are, when you’re building complex applications they are still fraught with functionality, logic and syntax issues,” he explains. “We’ve got it to the point today where AI can do a ton of the heavy lifting for you.”

The British Columbia-based company has also built an application to streamline the process of documenting product updates and enhancements, which are known in the industry as release notes.

Writing release notes takes an enormous amount of time for a team lead to produce, as they have to sift through dozens, if not hundreds, of completed work items to summarize and then write digestible release notes that can be consumed company wide. This is where Railtown’s Release Notes Co-Pilot comes in, as it is continually analyzing all new software deployments, as well as any changes made to software which will trigger the co-pilot to automatically generate comprehensive and accurate release notes. The net result is saving hours of developer downtime.

The Root Cause Analysis Co-Pilot and the Release Notes Co-Pilot are now available to over 400,000 Microsoft partners on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and at Railtown’s website.

Then there’s Scrum Master, currently in the alpha stage of development, which could be Railtown’s crown jewel.

Scrum Master is a co-pilot in the truest sense of the word. Utilizing Railtown’s AI engine, the Scrum Master Co-Pilot can provide reason-based answers related to a wide range of topics including work items, deployment issues, build errors, bug fixes, performance issues and much more. Developers can ask the Co-Pilot specific questions or describe the problem that they are facing, and the Co-Pilot will provide relevant and actionable information to help solve the problem.

Brandolini calls Scrum Master a targeted language model, in contrast to large language models such as Open AI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard AI. Integrating Railtown’s proprietary AI into a development team’s builds, code changes and work items creates a more precise learning environment than any large learning mode could dream of.

“ChatGPT and Bard are trained off of what’s readily available and free, so any painting by Picasso or any book written by T.S. Eliot, they can train their machine on it. But they don’t have access to what goes on inside a company’s own specific applications,” Brandolini says.

“Because our AI is integrated with a company’s projects, our machine is now training on that data. Where Open AI’s is trained on the internet, our co-pilot understands exactly what you and your team are building and can answer questions in real time.”

It also keeps a developer’s data from being exposed to the broader internet, which means companies get the benefit of AI without exposing proprietary information to the prying eyes of Big Tech.

Scrum Master could even be used to onboard new engineers by delivering them detailed information on application features and answering any questions they might have.

That simply doesn’t exist in the market today, say Brandolini and Haddad, and it wouldn’t be as close as it is today if the two hadn’t become good friends.

“We were on a family holiday together in Whistler and sat down over a glass of wine. Marwan says, ‘I’ve got this idea,’” Brandolini explains. “I was like, ‘I’m in 100%.’ Life works that way by chance, but when both people have the common drive and our goals are the same, then it’s an instant connection.”

The plan is to release Scrum Master in the next quarter.

“Version one was like a child in elementary school. Now, version six or seven is like a university professor,” Brandolini exclaims. “It went from learning how to understand what a bug is to where it’s now using knowledge and reason to generate answers. Ask any developer if they would like this running for their team and the answer will be 100% yes.”

To help make that a reality, Railtown plans to ramp up spending on market awareness and user acquisition starting in June. The company expects a significant increase in paying customers and revenue growth over the next two to three quarters.

“This is not a bubble; this is just the beginning of the AI generation,” concludes Brandolini. “Artificial intelligence is having, and is going to continue to have, a profound and positive impact across all of our lives and across every business. The question investors should be asking themselves and asking their financial advisors is ‘what is my AI investment strategy’?”

This story was featured in Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine.

Learn more about Railtown AI Technologies at https://www.railtown.ai/

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