AI Services Built for Businesses That Cannot Afford to Get It Wrong
Your competitors are already using AI to cut costs, accelerate compliance, and serve more clients with fewer people. Petronella Technology Group brings secure, compliant AI implementation to businesses across Raleigh, Durham, and the Research Triangle — backed by 25+ years of IT and cybersecurity expertise. From custom AI development and model fine-tuning to our AI receptionist Penny, every solution we deploy is built for security-first environments where data privacy is non-negotiable.
No Long-Term Contracts • 30-Day Results Guarantee • Serving the Triangle Since 2002
BBB Accredited Since 2003
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2,500+ Businesses Served
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Founded 2002
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Craig Petronella — MIT Certified in AI & Cybersecurity
AI Implementation Done Right — The First Time
Most AI projects fail because they start with technology instead of strategy. We start with your business goals, your compliance requirements, and your security posture — then engineer the AI solution that fits.
Petronella Technology Group has been helping businesses across Raleigh, Durham, and the Research Triangle Park corridor adopt technology responsibly since 2002. When AI emerged as a transformative force for business operations, we did not rush to slap a chatbot on every website. Instead, our founder Craig Petronella earned MIT certification in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, then spent years building an AI practice grounded in the same principles that have kept our managed IT and cybersecurity clients secure for over two decades: rigorous security, regulatory compliance, and measurable business outcomes.
That deliberate approach is what separates PTG from consultants selling AI hype. We understand that for healthcare organizations handling PHI, for defense contractors protecting CUI, and for financial firms under SOX and PCI-DSS requirements, a poorly implemented AI system is not just inefficient — it is a compliance violation waiting to happen. Every AI deployment we architect considers data residency, access controls, audit logging, encryption at rest and in transit, and the specific regulatory framework governing your industry.
Today we operate a fleet of purpose-built AI agents, offer end-to-end AI consulting and development services, and maintain the infrastructure to run AI workloads securely on premises or in compliant cloud environments. Whether you need a single process automated or a comprehensive AI transformation strategy, our team brings the cybersecurity expertise to do it without introducing new risk vectors into your organization.
Six Core AI Services for Modern Businesses
Each service is engineered for security-first environments. No generic chatbots. No black-box algorithms. Full transparency, full compliance, full control.
AI Implementation
End-to-end AI deployment for your business. We assess your workflows, identify automation opportunities, select the right models, integrate with your existing systems, and train your team. Every implementation begins with a thorough discovery phase where we map your processes, audit your data quality, and define success metrics. We handle the technical complexity — API integrations, data pipelines, model selection, prompt engineering, and ongoing optimization — so your team can focus on using AI rather than building it. Our implementations integrate with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, QuickBooks, legacy ERP systems, and custom databases through secure connectors and APIs. Typical deployments go live within 30 to 90 days depending on scope.
AI Compliance
AI-powered continuous compliance monitoring for CMMC, HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, SOX, FedRAMP, and GLBA. Traditional compliance is a snapshot in time — an annual audit that shows where you were, not where you are. Our AI compliance platform monitors your controls 24/7, auto-collects evidence across access logs, configuration states, security scans, training records, and policy acknowledgments. When a control drifts, the system flags it instantly and initiates remediation workflows before it becomes an audit finding. For defense contractors facing CMMC Phase 1 requirements, our ComplyBot AI agent handles NIST 800-171 gap analysis, SSP guidance, SPRS score tracking, and audit preparation. The result: audit-ready documentation at all times, not just during scramble season.
Secure AI Inference
Run AI workloads without sending your sensitive data to third-party cloud providers. Our secure inference infrastructure lets you deploy large language models, computer vision systems, and machine learning pipelines in environments you control — on premises, in GovCloud, in HIPAA enclaves, or in air-gapped networks. This matters for defense contractors handling CUI, healthcare organizations processing PHI, and any business where data sovereignty is a regulatory requirement. Your prompts, your data, and your model outputs never leave your approved security boundary. We handle hardware provisioning, model deployment, load balancing, and ongoing maintenance so your team gets the benefits of AI without the data exposure risk.
Custom AI Development
Off-the-shelf AI tools solve generic problems. Your business has specific ones. Our development team builds custom AI solutions tailored to your industry, your data, and your workflows. We develop intelligent document processing systems that understand the difference between a standard NDA and one with unusual liability clauses. We build AI agents that speak your industry's language and follow your organization's policies. We create predictive models trained on your historical data to forecast demand, detect anomalies, or optimize resource allocation. Every custom solution includes human-in-the-loop oversight for critical decisions, complete audit trails, and the ability to explain its reasoning — because in regulated industries, a black box is not acceptable.
AI Model Fine-Tuning
General-purpose AI models know a little about everything but not enough about your specific domain. Fine-tuning takes a foundation model and trains it on your proprietary data — your contracts, your compliance documentation, your customer interactions, your operational procedures — until it becomes an expert in your business. The result is an AI that understands your terminology, follows your policies, and produces outputs aligned with your standards. Fine-tuning is critical for organizations that need AI to handle domain-specific tasks with high accuracy: medical record classification, legal document analysis, defense contract interpretation, financial risk assessment. We manage the entire pipeline from data preparation and annotation through training, evaluation, and deployment, with strict data handling protocols that satisfy HIPAA, CMMC, and SOC 2 requirements throughout.
AI Receptionist (Penny)
Never miss another call. Penny is our AI-powered front-desk agent that answers your phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. She qualifies leads, books appointments, answers frequently asked questions about your services, and routes callers to the right person when human attention is required. Penny is not a robotic IVR menu. She holds natural conversations, understands context, remembers caller history, and escalates with full notes so your team never asks a returning caller to repeat themselves. For businesses in Raleigh-Durham that rely on inbound calls for revenue — medical practices, law firms, service companies, professional offices — Penny captures the after-hours and overflow calls your front desk cannot handle. Call 919-335-7902 to talk to Penny right now and hear what your callers will experience.
The PTG AI Agent Fleet
Four purpose-built AI agents, each trained for a specific operational role. These are not generic chatbots — they are specialized systems built on domain expertise accumulated over 25 years of IT and cybersecurity work.
Eve handles immediate security incident intake and triage. When a potential breach is detected or reported, Eve classifies the threat severity, initiates containment protocols, collects initial forensic data, and escalates to our human SOC analysts with full context. She operates around the clock, ensuring that no security event goes unacknowledged regardless of when it occurs. Eve reduces mean time to initial response from hours to seconds, giving our analysts a head start on every investigation.
ComplyBot is built specifically for CMMC and NIST 800-171 compliance. It performs automated gap analysis against all 110 controls, guides organizations through System Security Plan documentation, tracks SPRS scores in real time, and prepares evidence packages for C3PAO audits. ComplyBot understands the nuances of CUI handling requirements and can answer detailed questions about control implementation. Defense contractors across the Research Triangle use ComplyBot to maintain continuous compliance instead of scrambling before audit deadlines.
Penny answers calls, qualifies inbound leads, schedules appointments, handles common customer questions, and routes complex inquiries to the right team member with complete context notes. She integrates with your scheduling system, your CRM, and your knowledge base. Penny never puts a caller on hold, never forgets a follow-up, and never has a bad day. She is live and available right now at 919-335-7902. Businesses using Penny report capturing significantly more after-hours leads and eliminating hold times entirely.
Joe handles Tier 1 IT support: ticket triage, password resets, common fix walkthroughs, software installation guidance, and troubleshooting steps for known issues. When an issue exceeds his capability, Joe escalates to a human technician with a detailed summary of what was already tried, what the symptoms are, and what the likely root cause is. This context transfer means your human support staff spend less time asking diagnostic questions and more time resolving the actual problem. Joe is currently in beta testing with managed IT clients.
How Businesses Across the Triangle Use PTG AI
AI is not a product. It is a capability applied to specific business problems. Here is how organizations in Raleigh, Durham, and RTP are putting our AI services to work.
Defense Contractors & CMMC
CMMC Phase 1 is now active. New DoD contracts can require CMMC certification immediately. Defense contractors in the Research Triangle are using ComplyBot and our AI compliance platform to monitor all 110 NIST 800-171 controls continuously, auto-collect audit evidence, and maintain SPRS scores in real time. Our AI-powered threat detection identifies nation-state intrusion attempts targeting CUI, while secure inference infrastructure ensures that AI workloads handling controlled information never touch unauthorized networks. For contractors facing tight certification deadlines, our AI-accelerated compliance process compresses the timeline from eighteen months of manual effort to as little as six months of AI-assisted implementation.
Healthcare & HIPAA
Healthcare organizations handle the most sensitive data imaginable. HIPAA violations carry fines up to $2.1 million per incident, and ransomware gangs target healthcare more than any other sector. Our AI compliance platform monitors access to PHI in real time, detects unauthorized access patterns, tracks BAA compliance across all vendors, and auto-generates the documentation your compliance officer needs. For clinical operations, our document intelligence systems process intake forms, insurance verifications, and medical records with high accuracy, freeing staff to focus on patient care. All AI processing occurs within HIPAA-compliant infrastructure with end-to-end encryption, BAA coverage, and complete audit trails.
Legal & Accounting Firms
Professional services firms sell time. Every hour spent on administrative work is revenue lost. Law firms use our document intelligence AI to review contracts, discovery materials, and legal briefs at dramatically faster speeds than manual review. Accounting firms deploy our intelligent data extraction to pull numbers from client documents, bank statements, and prior returns automatically, with AI-powered reconciliation that catches discrepancies before they become costly errors. Both rely on Penny to capture after-hours client calls that would otherwise go to voicemail. For firms in Durham and Raleigh managing peak-season workloads, our AI tools increase capacity without adding headcount or burning out existing staff.
Financial Services & Banking
Financial institutions face pressure from regulators (SOX, PCI-DSS, GLBA), cyber criminals, and competitive forces simultaneously. Our multi-framework compliance automation monitors all applicable controls in a single dashboard, generating audit-ready documentation continuously instead of quarterly. AI-powered transaction monitoring identifies suspicious patterns — social engineering, account takeover, synthetic identity fraud — that rule-based systems miss. Automated regulatory reporting reduces compliance costs that typically consume 15 to 20 percent of operating budgets. For community banks and credit unions across North Carolina, these tools deliver enterprise-grade capabilities at a manageable cost.
AI Security Is Not an Afterthought — It Is the Foundation
Craig Petronella built this company on cybersecurity. Every AI service we offer inherits that DNA. Here is how we keep your data safe while delivering AI-powered results.
Data Isolation
Your data is never comingled with other clients. We maintain strict tenant isolation across all AI workloads. For regulated industries, we deploy in compliance-specific environments: HIPAA enclaves for healthcare, GCC High for defense, PCI-DSS certified infrastructure for financial services. Your data stays within your approved security boundary at all times.
No Training on Your Data
We never use your data to train models for other clients. Period. When we fine-tune models on your proprietary information, the resulting model belongs to your engagement and is deployed exclusively for your use. Your competitive intelligence, client data, and operational details are never exposed to any other organization through our AI systems.
Complete Audit Trails
Every interaction with our AI systems is logged: who accessed what, when, what inputs were provided, and what outputs were generated. These audit trails satisfy SOC 2, HIPAA, CMMC, and PCI-DSS logging requirements. When your auditor asks to see evidence of AI governance, you hand them a comprehensive, time-stamped record of every AI operation in your environment.
Encryption Everywhere
All data is encrypted at rest using AES-256 and in transit using TLS 1.3. API communications between your systems and our AI infrastructure use mutual TLS authentication. Encryption keys are managed through hardware security modules and rotated on a regular schedule. There are no plaintext shortcuts anywhere in our pipeline.
Human-in-the-Loop
For critical decisions — financial transactions, compliance submissions, patient data handling, security escalations — our AI systems flag items for human review rather than acting autonomously. The AI handles the heavy lifting of analysis and recommendation; your qualified staff makes the final call. This approach satisfies regulatory requirements for human oversight while still delivering the speed and accuracy benefits of AI.
On-Premises Option
For organizations that cannot send data to any cloud provider — defense contractors with air-gapped requirements, government agencies with strict data residency rules, or any business that simply prefers full physical control — we deploy AI models on your own hardware within your own facility. Our secure inference service handles the entire stack from GPU provisioning through model deployment and monitoring.
See PTG AI Services in Action
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Services
Answers to the questions we hear most from businesses in Raleigh, Durham, and the Research Triangle considering AI adoption.
Most implementations take 30 to 90 days depending on scope and complexity. Simple automations such as ticket routing, document classification, or AI receptionist deployment can be live in two to three weeks. Comprehensive deployments involving compliance automation across multiple frameworks, custom model fine-tuning, or integration with legacy ERP systems typically require 60 to 90 days. Every engagement starts with a discovery phase where we assess your current systems, data quality, and compliance requirements before writing a single line of code. We focus on delivering measurable results quickly, and most implementations produce clear impact within the first 30 days.
Data security is the foundation of everything we build. We handle CUI for defense contractors and PHI for healthcare organizations, so we understand that security is not optional. All AI systems operate within SOC 2 Type II certified environments with end-to-end encryption, role-based access controls, and complete audit logging. We never use your data to train models for other clients. For regulated industries, we deploy in compliance-specific environments: HIPAA enclaves for healthcare, GCC High for defense contractors, and PCI-DSS certified infrastructure for financial services. Your data never leaves your approved control boundary. For organizations requiring the highest level of control, our secure inference service runs AI models on your own hardware within your own facility.
Three things set us apart. First, cybersecurity is in our DNA. We have been securing businesses since 2002, and our founder Craig Petronella holds MIT certification in both AI and cybersecurity. Every AI deployment we build is engineered with the same rigor we apply to our managed security services. Second, we are local. Our team is based in Raleigh-Durham, we understand the business landscape of the Research Triangle, and we are available for in-person meetings, on-site assessments, and hands-on training. Third, we are selective. We evaluate every potential engagement during a free audit and only take on projects where we are confident we can deliver measurable results. We have been BBB accredited since 2003 and have served over 2,500 businesses across the region because we earn trust through outcomes, not promises.
No. Our AI solutions integrate with your existing technology stack. We connect to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, QuickBooks, legacy ERP systems, custom databases, and on-premise servers through APIs, secure connectors, and where necessary, custom integration layers. The AI augments what you already have rather than replacing it. We have integrated with systems ranging from modern cloud platforms to 20-year-old on-premise applications. If your software has an API, a database, or even a file export, we can connect AI to it.
Fine-tuning takes a general-purpose AI model and trains it on your specific data so it becomes an expert in your domain. Think of it as the difference between hiring a generalist and hiring a specialist who already knows your industry's terminology, regulations, and workflows. You need fine-tuning if your business requires high accuracy on domain-specific tasks: classifying medical records against specific coding standards, interpreting defense contract clauses, analyzing financial instruments, or processing legal documents with specialized terminology. If general AI tools give you 80 percent accuracy and you need 95 percent or better, fine-tuning bridges that gap. During our free audit, we assess whether fine-tuning is necessary for your use case or whether prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation will achieve your goals at lower cost.
Compliance is built into every layer of our AI architecture, not bolted on afterward. For CMMC, we deploy AI workloads in GCC High or on-premises environments that satisfy NIST 800-171 requirements for CUI handling. For HIPAA, all AI processing occurs within BAA-covered, HIPAA-compliant infrastructure with end-to-end encryption and access controls that satisfy the Privacy and Security Rules. For SOC 2, PCI-DSS, SOX, and FedRAMP, we configure AI systems to meet each framework's specific requirements for data handling, access logging, and audit trail generation. Our AI compliance monitoring platform then watches these controls continuously, ensuring that AI systems themselves remain compliant over time rather than just at the moment of deployment.
Messy data is the norm, not the exception. Nearly every business we work with has data scattered across multiple systems, in inconsistent formats, with varying levels of quality. Our discovery phase includes a thorough data audit where we assess what you have, where it lives, and what needs cleanup before AI can be effective. In many cases, AI itself is the best tool for cleaning and organizing your data — document classification, deduplication, format standardization, and entity extraction are among our most common initial deployments. If your data quality is below the threshold where AI adds value, we tell you during the free audit before you invest anything. We would rather be honest upfront than take on an engagement that will not deliver results.
When you use a cloud AI service like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, your data is sent to a third party's servers for processing. For many businesses, that is fine. For defense contractors handling CUI, healthcare organizations processing PHI, or any company with strict data residency requirements, it is a compliance violation. Secure AI inference means running AI models on infrastructure you control — your own servers, a private cloud, or a government-approved cloud environment — so your data never leaves your approved security boundary. PTG deploys and manages this infrastructure for you, handling hardware provisioning, model installation, load balancing, updates, and monitoring. You get the full capability of modern AI without any third-party data exposure.
No. AI handles the repetitive, low-value tasks that burn out your best people — data entry, document processing, ticket triage, compliance evidence collection, routine customer inquiries. Your employees stop doing work a machine should handle and start doing strategic, high-value work that actually grows the business. Teams using PTG's AI tools report higher job satisfaction because they are freed from tedious administrative tasks to focus on creative problem-solving, client relationships, and work that matters. The goal is not fewer people. The goal is more effective people handling more work without the burnout.
Pricing depends on scope, complexity, and compliance requirements. A focused automation engagement such as AI receptionist deployment or document processing costs less than a comprehensive AI transformation involving custom model development, secure inference infrastructure, and multi-framework compliance monitoring. We provide transparent pricing after an initial consultation where we assess your specific needs and calculate the expected return on investment. If the numbers do not make sense for your business, we tell you. Our free AI readiness audit gives you a clear picture of what is possible and what it will cost before you commit to anything. Call (919) 348-4912 to start that conversation.
Small businesses often see the largest proportional benefit from AI because efficiency gains have an outsized impact on lean teams. A 10-person accounting firm that automates data extraction and reconciliation can handle the workload of a firm twice its size. A small law practice that deploys document intelligence can compete on turnaround time with firms that have dedicated paralegal teams. A medical office that uses Penny as an AI receptionist captures every after-hours call without hiring overnight staff. We work with businesses from 5 to 500 employees. The key question is not how big you are — it is whether you have repetitive processes that consume your team's time and whether AI can address them cost-effectively. Our free audit answers that question.
AI is not a set-and-forget deployment. Your business evolves, regulations change, and AI models need continuous optimization to maintain peak performance. Every engagement includes ongoing monitoring of AI system performance, regular optimization reviews, proactive system updates, and priority support. We track the metrics we established during discovery — time saved, error rates, throughput, compliance scores — and report them monthly so you always know exactly how your AI investment is performing. When you need workflow changes, new automation, or strategic guidance on expanding AI capabilities, our team is a phone call away at (919) 348-4912.
Ready to See What AI Can Do for Your Business?
Book a free AI readiness audit with our team in Raleigh-Durham. We will assess your current workflows, identify the highest-impact automation opportunities, evaluate your data quality and compliance requirements, and give you a clear roadmap with transparent pricing. No sales pressure, no obligation, no surprises. Serving businesses across the Triangle, North Carolina, and nationwide since 2002.
We evaluate every engagement during the free audit. If AI is not the right fit for your business today, we will tell you honestly.
Related Services
AI is one layer of a comprehensive technology strategy. See how our services work together.
Ready to get started? Call us at (919) 348-4912 or contact us online for a free AI readiness consultation.