I’m Alex. I own NC AI Services. If I built it, I stand behind it.

Big companies have whole departments for the things that win customers. Someone keeps the website sharp, someone answers every inquiry within minutes, and someone automates the busywork. A mom-and-pop shop has the owner, a phone, and not enough hours in the day.

That gap has nothing to do with who does better work. It comes down to resources: the big players have the tech power, and the small ones don’t.

I spent years building that kind of power inside a global corporation, and I’m good at it. Now I’d rather put it to work for the businesses that need it most: family-run shops, contractors, marinas, manufacturers, and the tourism businesses that make Eastern North Carolina what it is.

Give a small business the same tools a big one takes for granted, set up for how it actually runs, and it can compete on what it’s always been good at.

I’ve spent more than ten years in IT and cyber defense. I started on the repair bench in Morehead City, then ran IT for a Crystal Coast marina, then became a senior security consultant at a global managed-security provider, advising large enterprise clients from the C-suite down.

At the world’s largest convenience-store chain, I took over a cyber defense program that was a burning hole in the ground. The documentation was gone, no policies existed, the team was empty, and much of the environment was whitelisted problems. I wrote the policies and procedures, handled every incident myself at first, and hired the team: five engineers and 25 to 30 analysts over time. It was my program to build.

I built the in-house Security Operations Center, which handled about 3,000 alerts a month and saved the company $1.8 million a year. Then I automated it. Using SOAR tools and my own Python and Bash scripts, analysis time dropped from about an hour to five minutes, and roughly 95% of manual triage went away. That automation won us sandboxing competitions, and we were recognized for advanced use of threat intelligence: tracing attacks back to first contact and tracking the actors behind them.

Small businesses get the same approach I used there, at your scale. First I find what’s actually broken. Then I write down how it should work. Then I automate the repetitive part, so your people can spend their time on customers.

It also means security-conscious setup: access limited to what the job needs, customer data handled carefully, and nothing wired together that I can’t explain to you.