From AI conversation to
AI implementation.

I attended Silicon Slopes STACKED this week and walked away with something more valuable than a list of new technologies to research: a much clearer picture of how quickly artificial intelligence is moving from something companies talk about to something they are beginning to incorporate into everyday business operations.

First, I want to recognize Silicon Slopes and the people who made STACKED happen. Lindsey Ivie, Chief Marketing Officer at Silicon Slopes, encouraged me to attend when I reached out about becoming more involved in Utah's technology community. I'm glad she did.

Lindsey and the broader Silicon Slopes team did a great job bringing the local technology community together around meaningful conversations. I focused primarily on the AI sessions, but the event created opportunities to learn, connect, and hear how technology leaders are thinking about the systems and strategies shaping modern organizations.

AI is becoming more than a chatbot

One of my biggest takeaways was realizing how much more there is for me to learn.

I've spent considerable time working with AI and automation while building IT Bytes. But listening to organizations discuss what they are implementing made something very clear to me:

The conversation is expanding toward AI agents that can perform specific business functions, systems that let employees interact with organizational knowledge, and automation that connects AI with the applications businesses already depend on.

Microsoft Dynamics and the broader Microsoft ecosystem are especially interesting to me because they illustrate how AI can become part of an actual workflow instead of another disconnected application employees have to manage.

The question I'm asking at IT Bytes

The conference caused me to come back to IT Bytes with a different question.

Instead of asking, “How can we sell AI services?” I'm increasingly asking, “What would it look like if we built IT Bytes itself as an AI-enabled company?”

I want IT Bytes to become our own laboratory.

• Could an AI agent help identify organizations that may benefit from our services?
• Could another organize incoming opportunities and prepare research before I speak with a prospective customer?
• Could employees eventually use a searchable HR resource to ask questions such as where to find a paystub or how a company policy works?
• Could accounting automation recognize when an invoice is scheduled for payment, monitor for the deposit, and prepare the appropriate bookkeeping workflow?
• Could internal company knowledge become something employees can converse with instead of digging through folders, email, and documentation?

These aren't ideas I want IT Bytes to simply recommend to customers. I want us to build them, operate them, learn where they fail, improve them, and then bring that experience to our customers.

AI still needs good infrastructure

Another thing STACKED reinforced for me is that AI doesn't eliminate the fundamentals of enterprise IT. It makes them more important.

Data still needs to be protected. Identity matters. Security matters. Governance matters. Infrastructure matters. Business continuity matters. Connecting AI to corporate systems without understanding those foundations can create entirely new categories of risk.

That's where my background in enterprise systems engineering and architecture intersects naturally with what we're building at IT Bytes.

The opportunity isn't simply helping companies “get AI.” It's helping organizations determine where AI actually makes business sense, what systems it should connect to, what should remain under human control, and how to implement it responsibly.

Utah has an incredible technology community

My other takeaway from STACKED wasn't technical. It was community.

I've lived in Utah my entire life and have spent more than 17 years working in its technology community. As I build the next chapter with IT Bytes, I want to become much more involved in that community. Events like STACKED make that easier by bringing people together who are solving problems, building companies, operating technology, and learning from one another.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you take away from a technology conference isn't an answer. It's discovering better questions to ask.

STACKED gave me quite a few. Now it's time to start building.