YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Artificial intelligence is a dominant topic in the information technology discussion among local industry professionals, as it plays a growing role in productivity and security.
Many area businesses in the field find that the advancing technology is also adding a new wrinkle to efforts to recruit and retain talent, their leaders report.
“It’s more automation and efficiency that’s driving most of the activity today,” says Paul Hugenberg, managing member at Pelican3 Consulting in Poland. “Higher complexity clients” are reviewing their internal processes and attempting to determine whether tasks being performed manually can be automated, or if they can create a new application to solve their problem.
People are using AI “mainly to drive automation, affirms Mike Timko, president of Cortland Computer in Warren.
They also use it to “come up with ways to do things that people were doing manually or semimanually,” Timko adds.
Productivity and Security
The drivers affecting “everything from automation to efficiency to purchasing” are AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Grok, as well as “the ability for users to create solutions without having to be programmers or developers,” Hugenberg says. People with no formal IT training “want to create applications or automate their environment” and are looking at how they can create a task list, generate proposals, write letters to customers and build websites with greater impact.
All of the advances in the industry are AI-driven, Ralph Blanco, president and CEO of ECMSI in Struthers, says. Because his company does IT for a variety of businesses, the challenge is “bringing the latest and greatest security protection” to clients and to make sure ECMSI remains “on top of anything that looks suspicious” from an AI perspective.
“The processing that happens is extremely reliable, very fast and ridiculously amazing,” Hugenberg says. “It is very good now, and it’s getting better very fast.”
Ricky Baird, manager of managed technical services at GBS Corp., a North Canton-based company with offices in Youngstown, says the technology can identify a trend and flag it for review across multiple workstations.
“AI can do a lot with ingesting logs and different things that would be too much for a person to watch and can actually identify different trends and different vulnerabilities that might have gone unnoticed,” he says.
And most IT departments or service providers are using it to augment threat hunting and defense pools to glean better and faster data insights, according to Timko.
“It also works in analyzing data set information,” he adds. “It’s very quick on analyzing and comparing data sets that used to be time consuming before.”
A lot of the AI-powered attacks on companies come through email, Blanco says.
“The social engineering of the email has increased significantly,” he continues. AI used by bad actors drafts and pushes “a lot more emails out to the individuals to try to get them to click on malicious activity to penetrate into the network,” he warns.
Many of the information technology advances Baird says he sees are on the security side. Businesses are protecting their data by moving from internal hardware to a cloud environment.
In some cases they are utilizing a private data center, “where you’re kind of inherently getting the security and the protection because the data center typically has a lot of experts on site who know what they’re doing but they also have to carry all of the different certifications and things to make sure that they’re doing the right things to handle that data,” he continues.
Increases in payouts to cover ransomware breaches over the years have led insurance providers to request that companies outline steps they have implemented to protect against such breaches. “The insurance part has really helped us,” Blanco says.
Education and Verification
The biggest issue isn’t always technology but rather “education in technology,” Blanco says. People often will receive an email they believe is from someone they are familiar with and click a link to change accounting information without personal verification. Often a CEO will receive a request from someone requesting a change in routing numbers and before they know it the company is paying someone other than its legitimate vendor.
“We always recommend picking up the phone, calling the person you know and verifying if there’s any type of accounting changes,” he says. Additionally, people also are vulnerable because they often fail to update their passwords, so Blanco recommends two-factor authentication even on social media accounts.
People are getting better about educating themselves but have more work to do, Blanco says. Some people assume their companies are too small to be targets and dismiss the potential threat.
“The hackers don’t necessarily look at the size of the company,” he warns. It is far easier to go after $10,000 each from 10 companies than to go after $100,000 from a larger company.
Recruitment
Talent is always a challenge for businesses – not just those in technology fields – in the Mahoning Valley. Up-and-coming talent can command higher pay in markets such as Cleveland, Columbus or Pittsburgh, which are attractive markets for people looking for more entertainment and cultural options, Timko says.
“You have to be competitive and aggressive when it comes to pursuing that talent in our specific field,” he says. The ability for much of that work to be done remotely means local companies can cast “a wider net for talent” in communities where the cost of living is higher.
Covid resulted in a downturn for people applying for positions, but the situation has improved in the years since, Blanco reports.
“We’re getting a lot of good candidates that are applying for the jobs now,” he says. ECMSI is recruiting from local schools for the young talent it needs and boosting compensation to attract those with more experience.
Meeting the demand for talent is an issue, challenged by how technology advances, Hugenberg acknowledges. Previously, feature capacity would double and take place at half the cost every seven years. AI now is accomplishing that in two to three months.
“The education side, the career professional side, doesn’t have the landing strip to kind of catch up,” he remarks. “We’re accelerating so fast right now that the concentration of talent is pretty small, so it is a struggle today to find quality, experienced folks that can take this new wave of information technology capabilities and use it to its fullest extent.”
Like his colleagues, Baird admits during the pandemic GBS faced challenges with turnover “and just getting people to work.” More recently, the company has had “a good stretch” of successfully recruiting local talent that has come not only from Youngstown State University but also from area technical schools.
Tariffs
Timko points to what he describes as the “elephant in the room” – the potential effect of tariffs being proposed and established by President Donald Trump. There already is chatter about it with providers in Canada and other countries.
“They’re of course worried about our side. You know that it’s going to drive prices up for them,” Timko says. “But there’s also the back end. Almost all technology is produced overseas.”
While tariff increases will affect prices on common items in a business environment, including laptops, computers and servers, there also is concern about increases on more “invisible components,” such as service and support costs that accompany those items that are manufactured overseas.
He also expresses concern about consumer-level devices that businesses use, including smartphones, tablets and similar devices.
“As costs come up, they end up at the client,” he says. “We saw a big jump in technology costs during post-Covid and we’re worried about a second round of that.”