Bay Area · San Mateo
AI agents and automation for Bay Area SMBs.
We're an AI agent and automation shop based in San Mateo, serving SMBs and public-sector IT teams across the San Francisco Bay Area. We run an MSP, ship our own product, and tell you what not to build.
Why a Bay Area shop, specifically
The Bay Area has more AI companies per square mile than anywhere on earth, and that's exactly the problem for a 60-person operations team in San Mateo or a city IT department in the Peninsula. Everyone is selling AI. Almost nobody who's selling it has run a small business or sat on an understaffed public-sector help desk.
We have. AIXTEK has managed IT for Bay Area municipalities, school districts, nonprofits, and SMBs since 2009. AIX Automation Lab is the AI arm of that practice. When we scope a project, we're pricing it against the labor of the people who'd otherwise do the work by hand — people whose constraints we understand from the inside.
What the Bay Area gets wrong about AI
About 60% of what local SMBs pitch us as "an AI project" is actually workflow automation — and we tell them so on the discovery call, before any money changes hands. An automation that runs the same steps every time is cheaper, more reliable, and easier to maintain than an agent that decides what to do next. The skill is knowing which problem you actually have. That's the first thing we figure out together.
Public sector on the Peninsula
Bay Area municipalities and districts share a stack: Microsoft 365, tight budgets, real data-residency and records-retention rules, and IT teams stretched across too many systems. We've shipped Microsoft Copilot Studio agents for municipal help desks where the M365 tenancy was a hard requirement, and we've built retrieval systems that respect records-retention policy instead of ignoring it. The constraints aren't an afterthought for us — they're where we start.
Built in our lab, shipped to our own clients
Before we recommend anything, we run it ourselves. AVA, the Aix Virtual Assistant, is the AI assistant our own MSP runs every day — deep Autotask integration, retrieval over years of ticket history, drafted notes and time entries inside the chat. It's the clearest proof of how we build: see the case studies for what shipped, including a Bay Area construction firm's reporting dashboards.
Coverage
Where we work
What we build
Three pillars, scoped to your org
Every Bay Area engagement starts narrow — one workflow, one team, one metric — and earns the right to expand.
- Custom AI agents — systems that decide the next step from what came back from the last one. Eval harness, cost dashboard, and a named human owner, or we don't call it shipped.
- Workflow automation — n8n, Power Automate, Zapier, or custom code. The unglamorous work that pays for itself fastest.
- Knowledge systems & RAG — document QA and internal search that respects the access rules a municipality or a regulated SMB actually has to follow.
Not sure which one fits? The AI Readiness Assessment is a 10-question, three-minute diagnostic that tells you where to start — and the first three Bay Area orgs to commit get design-partner pricing.
FAQ
Bay Area questions
Do you work with small businesses in San Mateo and on the Peninsula?
Yes — that's the core of who we serve. Our office is at 20 N. Railroad Ave. in downtown San Mateo, and most of our SMB and public-sector clients are within an hour of it. We also work with clients elsewhere in California and nationwide, fully remote.
Which Bay Area counties do you cover?
San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Alameda counties are where we do most on-site work. The discovery call and the bulk of delivery happen remotely regardless of county, so distance rarely changes the engagement.
Do you work with Bay Area municipalities and public-sector IT?
Yes. AIXTEK, our parent, has run enterprise IT for Bay Area municipalities, school districts, and nonprofits since 2009. We know the M365 tenancy, the procurement timelines, and the data-residency constraints that come with public-sector work, because we've lived inside them.
How fast can a Bay Area SMB get started?
The discovery call is 30 minutes and usually happens the same week. A pilot — one agent or one automation, fixed scope and fixed price — runs four to six weeks from kickoff. We scope the first project on the call so you leave knowing whether it's worth doing.
Book the call.
Thirty minutes, no slides. Bring the workflow you've been arguing about internally and we'll tell you whether it's the right first project — and whether it's an agent, an automation, or neither.