AI Innovators: How 15 Solution Providers Are Transforming Their Businesses
CRN’s inaugural AI Innovators project spotlights solution providers who are putting AI to work in their own operations—and turning that firsthand experience into smarter, faster and more secure solutions for customers.
For many solution providers, the past 12 months have marked a decisive shift in their AI strategies as it moves from being an emerging opportunity to an operating imperative. The companies in CRN’s inaugural AI Innovators project show what that transition looks like in practice: applying AI inside their own businesses to gain speed, scale and insight, and then turning those lessons into real-life solutions that help customers move beyond experimentation.
Across this year’s honorees, AI is reshaping service delivery, software development, cybersecurity, cloud operations and customer engagement. Integris, for example, reports that more than 130 AI-driven automations have run over 3 million times, saving more than 34,000 hours of human effort and improving mean time to resolution by 60 percent. CBTS says its internal use of AI increased productivity by 40 percent and cut its statement-of-work cycle from five days to one. Caylent, meanwhile, has embedded agentic automation into modernization and managed services, while Presidio has paired workforce development—567 AI credentials across 389 employees—with advisory and testing capabilities designed to move customer initiatives securely into production.
Other honorees illustrate the breadth of the opportunity. Pearl Technology turned its own employee-informed AI maturity effort into a client offering, while Methodology IT expanded from managing infrastructure to building production AI products. Together, these companies demonstrate that meaningful AI innovation is not simply about adding a tool or launching a practice. It is about redesigning how work gets done, building governance and expertise, and translating firsthand experience into measurable customer outcomes.
Read on to learn how a sampling of CRN’s 2026 AI Innovators are using the technology to transform the way they run their business and the solutions they offer.
Arctiq
Brentwood, Tenn.
Top Executive: Paul Kerr, CEO
One word: significant. Over the past year, Arctiq has embraced AI across our business and the solutions we deliver. Internally, we’re using AI to optimize processes and have built an AI-powered knowledge hub for employee search and productivity. We’ve accelerated investment in AI engineering, skills development, and embedded AI capabilities across our strategic partner portfolio. For customers, we’re putting that expertise into practice, from AI-powered contact centers and AI Factory solutions spanning infrastructure through code to Claude Mythos cyber defense and Dynatrace-powered enterprise observability. Our focus is helping organizations move AI from experimentation to real-world impact.
Avahi
San Francisco
Top Executive: Jack Singh, CEO
AI has reshaped both what Avahi sells and how it delivers. The company reorganized around an AI-first model, designing to the customer outcome first and building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, and voice agents on Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and Nova as core offerings. Internally, Avahi uses generative AI to speed its own delivery, from code generation and automated evaluation to documentation, compressing proof-of-concept timelines to weeks. An AWS-funded proof-of-concept model lets eligible customers validate production AI quickly, expanding Avahi’s reach across healthcare, finance, retail, and education while customers keep full ownership of the resulting solution.
BetterWorld Technology
Oak Brook, Ill.
Top Executive: James Kenefick, Founder, CEO
AI changed our operating model before it changed our catalog. We run AI inside service delivery for ticket triage, documentation, security log review, executive reporting, and production Voice AI agents in the service desk, which returned technician hours to client facing work rather than reducing headcount. Every internal deployment runs under the governance framework we sell, so our own environment is the reference implementation. On the solutions side, AI moved from a project line item to a practice with assessment, proof of concept, agent build, and managed operations motions.
Caylent
Irvine, Calif.
Top Executive: Valerie Henderson, CEO
AI has fundamentally transformed both how Caylent delivers services and the nature of the solutions it offers customers. Rather than treating AI as an add-on, Caylent has adopted an AI-native delivery model that embeds agentic automation directly into its engineering workflows, cloud operations, and customer engagement frameworks.
Internally, Caylent leverages AI across the software development lifecycle, from automated code generation and testing to AI-driven project management and delivery orchestration. This has enabled the company to increase throughput, reduce delivery risk, and compress time-to-value for customers without proportional increases in headcount.
From a solutions standpoint, the launch of Caylent Accelerate in 2025 represented the most significant evolution in how Caylent delivers modernization services. The portfolio’s agentic execution layer automates assessment, planning, code conversion, validation, and deployment, activities that previously required large teams of engineers executing sequential manual processes. The result has been dramatic improvements in speed and efficiency: up to 75 percent time-savings for application modernization, up to 60 percent for database modernization, and up to 50 percent for cloud migration.
In 2026, Caylent is extending that same agentic pattern into managed services with the launch of Caylent Accelerate for Cloud Evolution, its Agentic Cloud Operations capability. This shifts managed services from reactive ticket-based support to a model where AI agents continuously anticipate issues, surface cost optimization opportunities, and accelerate remediation inside expert-defined guardrails, while Caylent architects retain accountability for outcomes.
Caylent has also expanded its GenAI practice to help customers build custom AI solutions, with more than 100 AI product initiatives currently underway across industries including fintech, media, healthcare, and manufacturing. These engagements span intelligent search, AI-powered customer experiences, ML platform buildouts, and agentic application workflows. AI has shifted Caylent from a project-based consultancy to an operating partner that builds, runs, and evolves intelligent systems delivering ongoing, compounding value for its customers.
CBTS
Cincinnati, Ohio
Top Executive: Kristin Russell, CEO
CBTS has been leveraging AI for its own operations for nearly two years. When the company counsels clients on adoption, it draws from its own experience.
Most of our competitors’ conversations are about a product. Ours is about a partnership. We’ve deployed AI software internally, resulting in a 40 percent increase in productivity. This includes CBTS’ internal SOW cycle dropping from five days to one.
We build a comparable model for clients’ unique environments in the readiness assessment, specific to their headcount, their workflows, and cost structure.
That internal depth is what powers Forge AI, our external AI services portfolio launched this year. When we help a client deploy AI, we’re drawing on what we’ve already solved: governance, data readiness, adoption, security architecture. We’re not figuring it out on their dime.
Forge AI unites AI advisory, data readiness, and engineering into a single end-to-end framework. It addresses the single biggest reason AI initiatives fail: companies don’t have the data foundation to support them. Forrester puts the scale of that problem at more than 90 percent of organizations having made limited progress in their data journey. Forge AI addresses that gap before a model is ever touched.
e360
Irvine, Calif.
Top Executive: Mike Strohl, CEO
We build AI. We secure and govern AI. We help executives operationalize AI. And we put AI to work across every e360 department—driving efficiency, productivity and progress. Over the past 12 months, AI has expanded e360’s services from traditional IT transformation into AI engineering, AI governance and AI risk management. e360 now helps customers move from AI pilots to production through trusted data foundations, custom AI applications, generative AI deployment, automation and operational support. AI has also strengthened e360’s security-led approach: governance, access controls, auditability and risk management are incorporated into AI engagements from design through deployment.
Evotek
Solana Beach, Calif.
Top Executive: Cesar Ensciso, Founder, CEO
AI has transformed both what EVOTEK sells and how it operates. Demand inflected sharply in early 2026, as security leaders who once treated AI as optional began treating it as non-negotiable, and EVOTEK shifted much of its advisory practice toward AI security and governance. The firm replaced static, PowerPoint-based assessments with its own AI-powered assessment application, automating discovery, scoring, and report generation and dramatically compressing engagement time.
General Informatics
Baton Rouge, La.
Top Executive: Donald Monistere, President, CEO
AI transformed how GI operates and how we serve clients. Internally, we run our own business on the same SAIL platform and workflow tools we put in front of clients. That discipline drives faster documentation, automated reporting, and sharper threat analysis across our operations. For clients, SAIL addresses shadow AI risk - largely invisible inside most organizations today. SPEAR delivers structure. Crawl-Walk-Run delivers a pace teams can actually sustain. The result: AI engagements consistently expand into vCISO and vCIO advisory, into GI Watch, Guard, and Protect managed security bundles, and into cloud and professional services.
Integris
Cranbury Township, N.J.
Top Executive: Rashaad Bajwa, CEO
AI has moved from an emerging capability to an operating principle at Integris. Over past year, we embedded AI across our operations and transformed what we deliver to customers. More than 130 AI-driven automations have executed 3 million-plus times, saving 34,000-plus hours of human effort and improving MTTR by 60 percent. We also launched CORE, our managed services offering built for the AI era, with AI, automation, governance, and cybersecurity at its foundation. Our $100,000 AI Investment Fund further extends this model, helping customers implement AI initiatives that deliver measurable business value.
Methodology IT
Los Angeles
Top Executive: Keith Parker, Founder, CEO
AI now runs through everything we do. Internally, our service desk is AI-augmented: client updates are AI-drafted and gated by a mechanical fact-checker, dispatch and scheduling run through an AI teammate in Microsoft Teams, and meetings flow automatically into ticket actions—letting a lean team deliver enterprise-grade response times. Externally, AI changed what we sell: we moved beyond managing infrastructure to building production AI products, from client portals with AI assistants to an AI front desk answering chat, email, and phone. AI is now our fastest-growing service line.
Pearl Technology
Peoria Heights, Ill.
Top Executive: Anthony Mini, President, CISO
Pearl ran its methodology on itself before selling it. It interviewed 57 employees to find where work actually breaks down, scored itself against its own AI maturity model, and now has 5 internal agents live: AV field techs’ install agent, AV turnover documentation agent, IT ticket resolutions agent, a sales engineer agent, accounting analysis and support agent. A named AI champion sits in every department, governance docs shipped before rollout, and the president and CISO sponsors the program. That internal build became the client offering: an assessment, roadmap, governance, and agents Pearl has already lived with.
Presidio
New York
Top Executive: Bob Cagnazzi, CEO
AI has reshaped both how Presidio operates and what it delivers. Internally, Presidio embedded AI across engineering, security and delivery workflows, including AI-assisted code scanning, while building readiness through 567 AI credentials across 389 employees. For customers, Presidio launched the Lighthouse AI Advisory team, aligned with Presidio’s AI Blueprint, to support clients with a business-focused AI Strategy combined with executable architecture and services. Presidio also launched the P.A.T.H lab to test and validate AI before deployment, with solutions including the Agentic AI Accelerator and P.A.T.H Stack AI reference architecture helping clients move from experimentation to scalable, secure implementation.
Simform
Orlando, Fla.
Top Executive: Prayaag Kasundra, Co-Founder, CEO
Generative AI has disrupted software programming and the product engineering business, forcing innovation in how we deliver services. Instead of merely rolling out AI coding tool licenses, we rapidly developed AI-Native engineering practices. CodeTools, our 2024-built accelerator, is evolving into an end-to-end Software Factory automation platform where hundreds of agents automate the bulk of software development. Within months of Anthropic’s launch, we rolled out Claude Code upskilling and now have 75-plus Claude-certified developers and 30-plus Claude-certified architects. This IP, practice transformation, and upskilling let us deliver generative AI’s productivity benefits to customers and lead AI innovation in software development.
Syntax
Montreal, Quebec
Top Executive: Christian Primeau, Global CEO
Syntax has made people the foundation of its AI strategy, building an AI-enabled workforce that embeds AI fluency across every role through tools, training, and hundreds of custom agents built on its proprietary AI repository, including agents employees build themselves. As AI becomes woven into systems and workflows, differentiation hinges not on access to the technology, but on how effectively organizations leverage it, trust it, and lead with it. These investments profoundly strengthen Syntax’s capabilities and directly shape how the company delivers practical, proven solutions like DnA3, GenAI Starter Pack, CodeGenie Suite, and others.
Uprise Partners
Portland, Me.
Top Executive: Malinda Gagnon, CEO
AI has fundamentally changed how Uprise delivers and evolves cybersecurity and managed services. Through Kineo Intelligence, AI helps our engineers identify risks, prioritize issues, and make informed decisions faster, increasing automation and enabling more proactive service. It has also changed how we approach our technology stack: we continuously evaluate emerging AI, security, and automation technologies and evolve Kineo as more advanced capabilities become available. Clients are insulated from that complexity. They experience seamless service, fast performance, best-of-breed security, and continually improving capabilities. AI enables us to amplify our people, scale intelligently, and continually raise the standard of service we deliver.