This former tech consultant launched an AI-powered scheduling startup to optimize your workday

Looking for a calendar that’s created specifically for you, automatically preventing conflicting meetings or inconvenient appointments? Look no further than Confirmed LLC, a Pittsburgh time management effectiveness startup.

Founder and CEO David Radin built Confirmed because he feels your pain. Launched in 2017, Confirmed has a goal of helping its clients reclaim wasted time. Its suite of solutions offers scheduling and other time management tools for individuals and teams by helping them ensure that meetings, travel, collaborations and the like are made as “effective” as possible (and yes, that word matters). Pittsburgh tech leaders have already taken hold of the platform, and the startup is actively growing, with a new feature in its product offering launching last week.

The idea for the startup, which is headquartered at the Alloy 26 space in the North Side, came out of Radin’s own three decades of experience as a consultant for tech companies. He often found himself traveling to different locations and working with different teams. Between that and the transfer of equipment needed for his job, Radin realized that “that scheduling continues to be a problem, and that the problem is that the one-size-fits-all calendar really doesn’t do the job.”

David Radin. (LinkedIn)

Those issues, he said, came down to a core difference between efficiency and effectiveness: “Efficiency is when you can do something more frequently or more often because you can do it quicker, but effectiveness is when you get the right results.”

In his experience and those of others on the Confirmed team, too many companies or business people are looking to maximize efficiency before achieving effectiveness. And to Radin, that comes down to a lack of proper time management tools.

“We said well, look, we can build out a system that is not one size fits all, but it’s component-ized and will start with the most effective situation and build on top of that,” he said. With customizable features, the scheduling tool could be adjusted for a variety of different industries and roles as needed.

Last week, Radin and the Confirmed team announced a new feature for its main time management platform — an artificial intelligence-powered feature to minimize travel costs and schedule in-person meetings according to the conditions of a current schedule. For example, if a business person has a meeting in Harrisburg at noon, but someone wants to a schedule a meeting with that person in Pittsburgh on the same day, Confirmed will automatically only provide options that are four hours before or after the meeting in Harrisburg, because that’s how long it takes to drive between the two cities. And given the increasingly high gas prices in the United States right now, saving both time and miles on the road is attractive to a lot of companies.

This new feature integrates seamlessly into Confirmed’s existing scheduling and time optimization tools, and will integrate with future ones that look bridge the gap between company communication platforms and things like customer relationship management solutions to improve client strategy. That’s particularly important in the realm of sales, Radin said.

“Using our concepts we can also work in other parts of the organizations such as the executive suite and HR and marketing and other places, but we’ve decided that because the ROI is so high in sales, that’s our first place to go,” he said. He added that even a small increase in effectiveness for a salesperson at a company can translate pretty directly to an increase in revenue for the company, hence the early emphasis on those clients.

Overall, Radin and his small team are hoping to solve the issues that current calendars and time management platforms have today, particularly as people begin to more frequently manage the back-and-forth of a hybrid work environment. The startup plans to expand its product offering even further later this year, with more features to come.