{"id":1162,"date":"2025-12-16T11:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T02:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evanburkosky.com\/?p=1162"},"modified":"2025-12-16T11:23:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T02:23:23","slug":"it-business-today-interview-with-evan-burkosky-ceo-and-co-founder-kimaru-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evanburkosky.com\/ja\/it-business-today-interview-with-evan-burkosky-ceo-and-co-founder-kimaru-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"IT Business Today – Interview with Evan Burkosky, CEO and Co-Founder @ kimaru.ai"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mr. Evan, can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at\u00a0kimaru.ai<\/a>?<\/span><\/p>

Over the past two decades I\u2019ve led analytics and go-to-market teams for enterprise software across Japan and APAC. My career has evolved together with technology, as we moved from early analytics platforms to optimization, recommendation, personalization, and now prescriptive recommendations with Agentic AI. I co-founded digital marketing agency konnichiwa-japan in 2007, focused on multilingual web development, analytics, and optimization. I ran that until 2013 when I joined e-Agency to help build the account development function that helped Fortune-500 companies operationalize GA360 and Optimizely experimentation. As Country Manager for recommendation and personalization platform Dynamic Yield I built the GTM function and led the region to a #1 global sales quarter. At Meltwater Japan, I rebuilt a disrupted sales org and returned it to growth. Most recently, as Head of Data Analytics at TechnoPro, I stood up an executive analytics capability to inform the solutions consulting business. In 2024 I co-founded and serve as CEO of Kimaru AI, where we turn supply-chain data into actionable recommendations on the right product in the right place at the right time.<\/p>

Evan, can you walk us through your journey, from the early experiences that shaped your approach to operations and AI, to how they influenced your focus on decision intelligence in supply chains?<\/span><\/p>

At e-Agency I led large-scale rollouts of Google Analytics 360 and Optimizely, which taught me that measurement only matters when it triggers a concrete operational step. At Dynamic Yield I built the Japan go-to-market for a real-time personalization and product recommendation platform, and saw that channel gains don\u2019t automatically flow upstream to replenishment, pricing, or markdowns. At Meltwater, a media-intelligence and social-listening company that uses AI and NLP to turn news and social data into structured signals like mentions, reach, and sentiment, I helped rebuilt the Japan sales organization to help clients translate those external signals into predictable actions and results. At TechnoPro I stood up an executive analytics function that delivers decision advisories tied to commercial teams and regular business cadences. Those experiences led me to decision intelligence for supply chains: a decision layer that reads context from ERP, WMS, and POS (and relevant external signals), produces clear, prioritized recommendations with reasons, and writes approved decisions back into the systems operators already use.<\/p>

Before founding Kimaru.ai, what were some operational or data challenges you observed that made you realize traditional tools like Excel or static ERP systems weren\u2019t enough? Any early lessons or failures that shaped your approach?<\/span><\/p>