Ben Liu has. Every week.
As a Field Service Technician at Allegion Canada (Stanley Access Technologies), Ben services 15–20 commercial, healthcare, and retail facilities every week across Calgary. Hospitals, medical clinics, law firm offices, commercial buildings — the exact environments AKYB builds AI systems for. He understands their operational reality not from a sales deck, but from showing up and making things work when something breaks.
96% first-call resolution rate. Every job documented. Every system left running.
Before Allegion, Ben spent five years as an industrial automation electrician in manufacturing environments — installing and maintaining Siemens and Mitsubishi PLCs, ABB/Siemens VFDs, motor control centres, and automated production systems serving facilities with 200+ employees.
He reduced unplanned downtime by 40% across three facilities by building preventive maintenance programs from scratch. The discipline — systematic root cause analysis, structured diagnostics, a bias for reliable outcomes over clever solutions — is the same discipline applied to every AKYB deployment.
Ben spent a year as an Electrician Instructor at PowerAlpha, teaching Canadian Electrical Code and industrial control systems to 50+ students. 92% exam pass rate. The ability to explain complex technical systems in plain language to non-technical audiences is not a soft skill at AKYB — it is a core requirement. Clients who cannot understand what their AI system is doing will not trust it, and a system that is not trusted does not get used.
Ben is completing a Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering at CU Boulder, with specialization in power electronics and advanced control systems. The relevance to private AI deployment is direct: running large language models efficiently on local hardware, optimizing inference latency, and building control loops that keep inference systems stable under real-world conditions is fundamentally an electrical and systems engineering discipline, not a software one.
AKYB is a focused boutique. Every engagement is handled by Ben directly — no junior consultant manages your project, no account manager sits between you and the person doing the work. Every system AKYB deploys uses open-weight models and is fully documented, so your operation is never dependent on a single vendor or person. If this engagement ever ends, your system keeps running.
All engagements include a complete runbook, architecture documentation, and model configuration files delivered to the client. A system you can understand, maintain, and — if needed — hand to another technical team.
A law firm does not have a data centre. A medical clinic does not have a dedicated IT team. Most AI consultants learn this when they arrive to install something and find no rack space, no UPS, and no one who knows where the network switch is. Ben already knows what these environments look like — because he works in them every week.
Private AI deployment is fundamentally a hardware problem. The model has to run somewhere. That somewhere has to be reliable, maintainable, and appropriate for the environment. Years of diagnosing and fixing electromechanical systems under time pressure produces a very different relationship with hardware than writing software that talks to cloud APIs.
Red Seal certification is the highest technical standard in the Canadian skilled trades — an interprovincial qualification that signals rigour, accountability, and a professional obligation not to cut corners on safety-critical systems. It is the same signal AKYB gives its clients: this person is qualified, shows up when something goes wrong, and does not disappear after delivery.
The dominant narrative in AI is about capability — which model is smarter, which tool is faster, which platform does more. That is the right conversation for consumers and software developers.
For a law firm, a medical clinic, or an oil & gas operator, the conversation is different. The question is not "what can this AI do?" — it is "can we actually use this without compromising what we owe our clients?" Most of the time, the answer with standard tools is: not without significant risk and significant legal work to manage it.
AKYB exists to close that gap. AI systems that are genuinely confidential, genuinely yours, and genuinely operated by someone who understands the environments they are deployed in. That is the business.
Every engagement is handled personally. No account managers, no handoffs. You work with the person who builds the system.
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