From Automation to Intelligence: Kantiv Rebrand Signals a New Era for AEC Marketing

SAN DIEGO, CA – June 02, 2026 – In a move that speaks volumes about the maturation of artificial intelligence in the professional services sector, proposal platform Joist AI has rebranded to Kantiv. But this is far more than a new logo and domain name. The change signifies a deliberate pivot away from the increasingly commoditized promise of AI-powered speed towards a more profound value proposition: pursuit intelligence. For the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, this shift from an operational tool to a strategic intelligence partner could fundamentally reshape the role of marketing and business development.

Since its founding in 2022, the company has attracted an impressive roster of over 200 AEC clients, including one in five of the ENR Top 50 design firms. The rebrand to Kantiv, its leadership states, reflects what they’ve learned alongside these industry leaders: AEC marketers deserve more than just faster proposals. They need a way to strategically leverage their firm's most valuable, yet often most inaccessible, asset—its accumulated institutional knowledge.

The Problem with 'Faster'

The initial wave of AI in AEC marketing focused on a simple, alluring promise: efficiency. Tools emerged to automate the laborious process of compiling proposals, shaving hours off the scramble to meet RFP deadlines. While valuable, this focus on speed addresses a symptom, not the root cause of the challenges facing modern pursuit teams. The real bottleneck isn't just the time it takes to copy and paste project data; it's the strategic deficit created when teams are too buried in administrative tasks to think critically about their win strategy.

"AEC marketers are among the most talented, most overlooked teams in the industry. We started this company to change that," said Rohan Jawali, CEO and Co-Founder of Kantiv. Jawali, a former engineer with industry giant Hensel Phelps, witnessed this dynamic firsthand. "When pursuit teams can access everything their firm knows, they spend less time searching and more time winning. And when marketers get that time back, they can reach further to see around corners and pursue the right work with real strategy.”

This sentiment resonates across the industry. Marketing leaders often describe their days as a frantic search for the right resume, the perfect project description, or the most recent client testimonial, all stored across disparate servers, inboxes, and spreadsheets. The result is a reactive cycle of execution that leaves little room for proactive planning, market analysis, or crafting a narrative that truly differentiates the firm. Kantiv’s new focus aims to break that cycle.

Unlocking the Institutional Brain

The term 'pursuit intelligence' is Kantiv's answer to the limitations of simple automation. It describes a system that actively transforms a firm’s entire history of proposals, project data, client relationships, and personnel expertise into a living, searchable intelligence layer. From the moment a firm's data is uploaded, the platform begins to extract, organize, and label it, creating an interconnected web of knowledge without demanding manual data entry or tedious tagging.

The new name, Kantiv, is derived from 'cantilever'—a structural form that extends into space, supported entirely by its anchored base. For Jawali, the metaphor is precise: a firm’s institutional knowledge is the anchored base from which its marketing team can confidently extend its reach into new markets and project types. Instead of just generating content, the platform provides the insights needed for smarter go/no-go decisions, identifies which markets are most profitable, and flags where a firm’s project experience may be aging.

For users, the experience is transformative. "For marketers with deep institutional knowledge and an ever-growing inbox, this is like a second brain that you can share with your whole organization,” shared Joey Sminchak, Communications Manager at Horner & Shifrin Inc., a long-time customer. “Not only is the platform a space to store your information, it's the key to unlocking that information and improving your win strategy."

A Technical Edge in a Crowded Field

Kantiv is not entering an empty arena. The AEC tech landscape is populated with established players like Unanet and Deltek, alongside a growing number of AI-native startups like Workorb AI, all vying to streamline marketing and business development. While many offer AI-powered proposal features, Kantiv is betting on its underlying technology to provide a critical advantage.

Rather than relying on a single Large Language Model (LLM) like many off-the-shelf AI tools, Kantiv is built on a multi-LLM orchestration framework. This means it intelligently routes each task—from analyzing a complex RFP to drafting a technical narrative—to the best-suited model for the job. This approach is designed to overcome the weaknesses of generic AI, which often falls flat when confronted with the specialized terminology, complex compliance requirements (like the SF330 form), and nuanced data relationships of the AEC world.

This technical foundation provides a more robust, reliable, and high-quality output, avoiding the outages or generic responses that can plague single-model systems. For the enterprise-level firms that make up a significant portion of Kantiv's client base, that reliability is non-negotiable. It represents a move away from treating AI as a creative assistant and toward deploying it as a mission-critical business system.

A Barometer for Industry Maturity

Ultimately, Kantiv's rebranding is a bellwether for the broader digital transformation sweeping the AEC industry. Recent studies show that AI adoption in the sector has surged, with 75% of firms now using AI in some capacity. The conversation is evolving beyond 'if' and 'when' to 'how' and 'why'.

The move away from 'Joist AI' to 'Kantiv' is a conscious uncoupling from the AI hype cycle. It reflects a growing understanding that AI is becoming table stakes; the real differentiator is the quality of the data that fuels it and the strategic intelligence it produces. This is especially crucial in an industry where, according to recent reports, only 29% of firms have high confidence in the underlying data feeding their AI tools. By focusing on automated data governance and hygiene, Kantiv directly addresses this fundamental trust gap.

By positioning itself as a pursuit intelligence platform, Kantiv is making a bold claim: that the future of AEC marketing lies not in simply doing the same tasks faster, but in empowering marketers with the data-driven insights they need to earn a strategic seat at the leadership table. It’s a vision that seeks to transform an often-overlooked department into a primary driver of intelligent, sustainable growth.