to this articleTeaching businesses how to apply generative AI to their work has become a full-time job this year for area entrepreneurs looking to help lead the Midstate into its AI revolution.
For Andrew Kochanowski and Adam Marsh, finding a niche in the quickly expanding AI space has meant understanding the technology and how quickly it’s evolving, but it’s also meant giving a local, accessible face to AI at a time where the technology can feel dehumanizing.
Marsh, president and owner of Spring Grove–based Ledge Inc., a quality-management consultant for manufacturers, has given nearly 70 AI talks since he began familiarizing himself with the technology last year — work that now includes pairing traditional engineering services with AI tools that streamline routine tasks.
“We’re not trying to take the things they’re good at out of their hands,” said Marsh. “We’re trying to make them better at the things they’re not good at. And that’s a lot of paperwork.”
Kochanowski, founder and CEO of Harrisburg-based data center Alerify, launched operations in 2024 and began seeing AI as a unique opportunity to differentiate his business this year.
Alerify’s clients typically use the center to store company data privately and with redundancies that can be too expensive to have on site. With generative AI’s expansive growth in 2025, Kochanowski sees an opportunity for the data center to build its computing strength and become a place for area businesses to access private AI servers.
“As a data center, we’re pretty bland. It’s co-location, it’s a private cloud server, or it’s disaster recovery. That’s kind of been the three swim lanes,” he said. “However, as I started learning about AI, it’s become a big-time differentiator, and it’s gotten a lot of attention with customers.”
Their surge in demand reflects a broader shift in the Midstate. Businesses want to use AI to automate routine work and explore new tools, but many lack the training, infrastructure and secure systems to do it responsibly — creating growing demand for local experts who can help bridge that gap.
Education first
Both Marsh and Kochanowski have given talks on how businesses can harness generative AI—Marsh from the perspective of the many applications available to manufacturers in the region and Kochanowski from his understanding of the infrastructure.
The two agree that today, they spend nearly 75% of their time on education.
When talking to a client for the first time, Marsh said that they often want to solve the big problems on day one, but he’s found that starting smaller tasks builds more confidence in what the software can do.
“Most folks are at the crawl stage of this,” he said. “If the goal is to crawl, walk and then run, they are just getting started. So let’s get them an AI policy, get them hooked up with the software and start to learn.”
A local connection to the software also helps bridge the wide gap between the companies creating the software and the end user. Marsh compared today’s generative AI tools to the early internet, adding that a common misconception has been the expectation that AI tools need to act as glorified search engines.
“It’s an interesting world where the AI guys are really, really high up here, and the manufacturers are down here, and we’re trying to get them somewhere in the middle,” he said. “When we deploy AI at a company, this is different than any other software that anybody has bought. When they used to buy software, they would buy software to solve a solution. Now they’re buying a tool that can solve many solutions throughout the company, and they might not even know what solution or what problem they’re trying to solve right away.”
Make it local
Marsh and Kochanowski have seen the benefits of working together to give area businesses local resources for augmenting their work with AI.
Together, the two offer businesses a way to use AI without sending sensitive data to large public cloud platforms.
Marsh can provide businesses with Ledge’s proprietary software, which uses the generative AI software of a number of popular options, like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
A company can then use Alerify’s data center to privatize its information and ask the AI to only generate responses using the protected knowledge base from Alerify’s private servers.
Kochanowski said that while a larger company can host all of this from their own servers, mid-sized and smaller companies may find that cost prohibitive.
“[Generative AI] requires a tremendous amount of horsepower, and that’s where Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) can handle that volume of searches and queries and tying together all these questions,” said Kochanowski. “For a business to invest in their own GPUs, that’s an astronomical expense. So, by us providing that resource, they can come in, use it on a metered basis, and only pay for that they use.”
Today, Marsh and Kochanowski’s primary competition are big national names, whether it’s the business offerings from today’s generative AI platforms, or large data storage options like Amazon Web Service.
“Amazon isn’t going to be picking up the phone, answering your question. They’re worried about General Motors, Harley Davidson, Georgia Pacific,” said Kochanowski. “But for us, it’s all about jumping all over that and getting it resolved immediately because we understand it’s our neighbors, it’s our associates and colleagues in this area.”
The cost of standing still
What Marsh and Kochanowski are seeing locally mirrors national trends—a majority of companies are experimenting with AI but have yet to commit to the technology.
According to a 2025 study by Chicago-based consulting firm McKinsey & Co., nearly two-thirds of a pool of 1,993 participants across 105 nations say their organizations have not yet started scaling AI across their companies, however a similar 62% say their businesses are experimenting with it.
Both say one of the biggest risks for companies is not misuse of AI, but using it without leadership knowing where or how it’s being applied.
“If any plant manager, CEO or executive president, thinks that their employees aren’t already using AI, they’re completely off base,” said Kochanowski, adding that today’s college graduates are entering the workforce knowing how to use and access AI.
“If I can give my employees the right tools to keep this private and not including the big public cloud, the company is better off and the employees are more effective,” he said.
For Marsh, the answer is to get ahead of that usage and have the company assign an AI champion and put together an AI policy.
“From there I like to show them use cases because it gets their brains going,” said Marsh. “And once they see those, they say ‘well, can it do this? Can it do that?’ And from there it snowballs. We like to have that session where we can sit with them and walk through the possibilities.”
