Partner Story · in conversation with Marie-Chantal Vincent, founder and sole developer of ProDispo. This is a written interview submitted through Submit Your Story. The claims below are the founder's own, presented as they were given to us. No payment was involved.
Marie-Chantal Vincent, founder of ProDispo, Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, Quebec. Image: courtesy of ProDispo.
Type "I need help at home preparing meals. I live in Montreal." into most directories and you get nothing useful. You are expected to know the right category first, pick the right filters, and then call providers one by one to find out who is actually free.
ProDispo was built so that sentence is enough. Its founder, Marie-Chantal Vincent, started the project in 2025 in Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, a small municipality in Quebec, and has built it alone: no team of programmers, no outside technical consultants, no investors.
"My ambition is to make the discovery of human resources and services more equitable, accessible, and independent of advertising budgets," Vincent says.
The problem: visibility you have to pay for
Finding the right professional, Vincent says, is still surprisingly complicated. People jump between websites, try to make sense of categories they don't know, and contact providers without knowing whether anyone is available. Businesses looking for a specialist, a referral or a new employee run into the same wall.
The other side of the problem is money. Online, being found often depends on how much a business spends on advertising and search rankings. A small independent with no marketing budget can be the right answer and still be invisible.
"Access to services and professional opportunities should not depend primarily on marketing budgets or familiarity with digital platforms," Vincent says.
How the AI works
The question Vincent started from was simple: what if people could just describe what they need, and the search engine worked out the rest?
ProDispo sends each request, typed or spoken, in French or English, to OpenAI's GPT-4o mini through the API. The model reads it and pulls out the criteria: the kind of profile, the profession, specialties, location, language, and whether the service happens remotely or at the client's address.
So the Montreal request becomes something like: home support and care, Montreal, a 50 km radius, service at the client's home. The user sees those criteria, can change any of them, and then gets the matching profiles, on a map when location matters. When we tried that exact sentence on the site, it came back with six professionals in the Montreal area.
Vincent is clear about the division of labour. The AI understands what people are asking for. ProDispo's own search logic decides which registered profiles match. "This combination makes natural-language interpretation a fundamental part of the platform rather than an optional AI feature."
Free to search, and nobody can buy the top spot
ProDispo puts four uses in one search box: services for individuals, services for businesses, referrals between professionals, and finding people who are open to employment.
Searching is free and needs no account. There is no advertising space, no paid ranking and no commission on any work that comes out of a connection.
The business model sits on the professional's side, and it is unusually simple. According to the profile page, a professional pays CAD $59 plus tax, once. That buys a profile that can list several services, a public web page in English and French that Google can index, and an option to show they are open to work and attach a CV. There is no subscription, no renewal and no commission. Profiles paid at the regular price, given free, or funded by a partner organization all get the same treatment in the results.
One feature gives the platform its name. With "Is there a ProDispo?", a user sends a single availability request to all matching professionals who have opted in. Only those who confirm they are free come back as available. The user then opens their profiles and contacts them directly.
ProDispo also keeps aggregated statistics on search criteria and results, including searches that find nothing. Vincent sees this as a future tool for organizations trying to spot missing services in a region or a sector. The original written or spoken requests are not kept for these statistics, and the site uses no advertising tracking.
Where it stands today
ProDispo is live in French and English, with browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Vincent says it had around 145 registered professional profiles as of October 2026, including the first ones from Europe. Over a recent reporting period, Google Search Console showed 166 profile pages appearing in Google results, with an average position of about 8.5.
Organizations are starting to come on board too. Through the ProDispo Initiative, launched in July 2026, partner organizations can offer the professionals in their network a promotional code. The Association québécoise de la physiothérapie is listed as a partner, alongside two training schools.
Vincent is careful not to oversell. "These are early milestones. ProDispo has not yet achieved large-scale adoption, and growing participation remains one of my main priorities."
The lesson: AI widens what one person can build
Vincent's background is business administration and finance, not software engineering. ChatGPT and Gemini were the only technical assistants, helping to understand code, build features, fix problems and improve the platform.
That did not make it easy. "Having access to AI assistance does not eliminate the work involved. I still have to define what I want to achieve, make decisions, test solutions, identify problems, and ensure that the different components work together."
What began as a way to find available professionals grew into natural-language search, geographic matching, availability requests and aggregated statistics. And the biggest lesson came at the end of the build, not the start.
"AI can dramatically expand what an individual can build, but building a working product and creating the conditions for people to adopt it are two different challenges," Vincent says. "Technology makes new possibilities accessible. Trust, participation, and usefulness determine whether those possibilities become valuable."
What comes next
The next priority is more profiles from more places, and partnerships with professional associations, businesses, recruitment organizations, municipalities and institutions. Vincent is especially interested in pilot projects that show how fair service discovery and search statistics could support regional and sector development.
The long-term goal is for ProDispo to become a familiar way to find services and available talent, wherever people live. Organizations interested in testing it, adopting it or introducing it to their networks can reach Vincent through prodispo.ca.
---
This is a Partner Story: a written interview with a founder building with AI, submitted through Submit Your Story and published free of charge. Statements about the company's product, users, results and partnerships are its own. Building something with AI? Tell us about it.
Would you try this product?
