A Conversation With ... Andy Dierks

In February, Pitt Technology announced it was rolling out private AI solutions for clients, incorporating machine learning into company systems with an emphasis on security. Tell me more about that technology and the need that drove that investment.
People are familiar with OpenAI and Llama through Facebook; they’ve typed into ChatGPT and kind of seen some of the power that’s out there. So, we’re taking those same models, bringing them local so they can run locally on hardware that one of our customers owns in their building, maybe even disconnected from the internet potentially for security reasons, but then we’re also helping retrain those models to incorporate the customer’s own data that can make those same type of requests that you might make on a public ChatGPT, make those requests really relevant to your own data, your own company’s information, and keep it local, keep it proprietary.

So, you’re able to ask questions that only your internal systems would know?
Correct. And we can do it through your private data, within your own SharePoint site. We can even be more private than that where we’re accessing your database that lives on your own server, accessing that to feed the answers to some sort of chatbot or an agent. It can be really tailored to a specific task that a business wants to accomplish using their own data that’s way more relevant than just the general chatbot like ChatGPT. A number of those large language models are open source, which means anybody can download those, bring those in-house and run those on their own hardware. We’re not retraining from the ground up; we’re augmenting what’s already there.

What were you hearing from customers that made you want to invest in this, and how do you see this tech evolving?
I think customers of every size are familiar with AI in a general sense. I think a lot of our customers don’t realize how close they are to harnessing some of that power internally. They know big companies are doing that kind of stuff, billion-dollar companies. And what we’re finding is that it’s possible to do some things that are really innovative, really cool, on way smaller, cheaper hardware. When we show them a couple of things we’re working on, the wheels start turning and they go, “Oh, so in my environment we struggle with this or we spend tons of time going through these documents or I would like to quickly ask these type of questions out of my data.” So, that’s what we’re working with right now is getting customers to understand this is closer to them than they think.

Cybersecurity vendor Netwrix did a nationwide study and found 76% of managed service providers had a cyberattack on some scale on their own system in the last 12 months. You are in the business of protecting clients, but what about the impact on your own systems? How do you shore those up, and what does the threat feel like today?
The threats are always there. On some level, we are constantly being attacked. We use all the basic security measures that everyone does, but the more recent thing that’s come out that’s gotten a lot of attention is MDR, managed detection and response. It’s sort of like antivirus on steroids. You’ve got companies, the one we work with and sell is Sophos, but there’s a number of others that they’ve got whole teams in a data center and probably multiple data centers across the world where they’re looking at things that are coming in from the antivirus agents out in the field, and they have AI, of course, and humans that can let the most concerning things float to the surface. Then humans can interact and jump in, shut off systems. We will get a call or an email from that security team that will say, “This is concerning; can you look at it?” Or if it’s concerning enough, they will say, “We have already shut off a system, this is why.” Recently, that’s the most powerful thing that customers can do. Of course, there’s all the things people are doing all the time: firewalls, antivirus, email filtering, all those kind of things to mitigate the basic attacks. But everybody’s concerned about the more advanced attacks that maybe aren’t something that we’ve seen yet – zero day attacks is what you hear them called. There’s no precedent for it, so we’ve got to use new ways like AI and collecting data and having human beings actually reviewing it.

Do you anticipate AI helping internally in regard to staffing? Do you think that more processes could become automated?
For sure. That’s one of the things that as we’re doing the AI stuff that we’ve talked about, we’ve got half our attention on how could this help customers and we’ve got the other half of our attention on how can it help us internally. Every one of our technicians when they work on an issue for a customer, they’re entering time, they’re entering notes in the ticket. If we can in a more efficient way leverage the information from a past issue that is similar to an issue that we’re working on a year from now, then we can make a junior engineer more efficient when they’re able to find that information quickly. We’ve also got an internal project where we’re taking all of our time entries and we are running them through an AI-trained model that we’ve specifically trained to look at time entries and floating to the surface the time entries that we think are not descriptive enough – this is a 30-minute time entry, but the text of it sounds like it’s longer or shorter than that. It lets our managers who normally would be overwhelmed with hundreds and thousands of time entries, it brings to the surface the ones that really probably need attention and can help them give that technician feedback.

SBJ had past reporting that Pitt has grown significantly. In 2022, you had about $8 million in revenue and it was expected to be about $12 million in 2024. What’s driving that growth, and where do you see 2025 landing?
There’s been a number of things that have driven that growth. Some of the biggest ones have been audiovisual. We bought an audiovisual company several years ago, and that infused a bunch of new products and services for us at that time. And that’s only grown, especially ever since COVID. People have really latched onto virtual meetings and virtual spaces. So, we’re doing a lot of conference rooms at hotels. We’re doing a lot of audiovisual at churches. Access control is another really big growth area for us, cameras and doors. People are bringing those items onto the network. Everything’s getting so much more network-centric, and we’re the right company to do that because we’ve already got IT and cabling, and so it makes a ton of sense to do audiovisual and cameras and doors because those all things are all just connected to the network as well. We were at about $10.6 million in 2024. We haven’t landed on an exact number yet, but we’re hoping to grow – $11 million or $11.5 million I would think is something we would shoot for. It’s not all about growth. We want to do quality work and growth is part of the puzzle, but we’ve been growing, so I don’t see any reason that we would stop.