At the end of April, Bob Doucette, our founder and CEO, will be in Las Vegas for the 25th annual convention of Technology Assurance Group (TAG). He’s been invited to share what we’ve learned about putting AI to work, in sessions on service operations, cybersecurity and internal workflows, and to bring back what other providers have learned.
That probably isn’t news you were waiting for. But it’s a good excuse to explain something most clients never see: who an IT provider learns from, and who checks its work.
An IT provider that only learns from its own mistakes learns slowly, and you pay for the lessons.
What TAG is
TAG was founded in 1998. It’s an organization of managed technology providers across the United States and Canada, companies like ours that look after IT, phones, security and printing for businesses in their own regions. Members don’t compete with each other, which is the point. A provider in Ohio has no reason to hide from a provider in Florida what went wrong on a project last month.
Members compare their numbers against each other, meet in small peer groups through the year, and share processes that work. Our ISO 27001 compliance program comes through TAG. So do a lot of the questions we ask ourselves about how we run the company.
Why it matters to you
An IT provider that only learns from its own mistakes learns slowly, and you pay for the lessons. One that sits in a room a few times a year with people doing the same work in other cities finds out sooner which tools hold up and which security problems are on the rise in other regions. It also hears which vendor changes are about to cause trouble.
It also makes a provider answerable to someone. TAG members are benchmarked against each other and talk through their results in their peer groups, and nobody likes being the one at the bottom of the chart. It’s a fair question to ask any provider, including us, who they compare themselves against, and the answer tells you a fair amount.
This year: AI
The 2026 convention is about AI, and specifically about getting real results from it rather than talking about it. That suits us. Bob has written about using AI to give people back hours in their week (Unlocking Time With AI), and much of what we do for clients now is helping them use it safely: an AI use policy so staff know the rules, and an approved place to use it so company data stays under the company’s control.
What comes back from Las Vegas goes into that work, and into the conversations we have with clients at their next review.
If you’d like to hear about it
If you’re a client and want to know what we’re bringing back, ask at your next review, or call us at (386) 252-2292. If you’re not a client yet, our Automation & AI page is a good place to see what we do with it today.