My career started at a mall kiosk in Spokane. It ended in a Verizon C-suite, reporting to the Chief Revenue Officer. I came home. I'd rather build the next chapter from the Inland Northwest than from a glass tower in Manhattan.
What that means for a Spokane-area operator: when you hire an AI consultant here, you're not paying a partner-track firm to fly in for a workshop and disappear. I'm at your table. I'm on the hook. And I run a four-node local AI cluster out of Spokane: a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with Qwen, an M4 Max running OpenClaw, and a 4090 PC. That hardware is the difference between someone who has read about AI and someone who has lived in it.
There are good national firms. I've competed with them. They sell decks. I sell working software, and I'll prove the fix before you commit to scaling it.