In the role of sentinel and strategic advisor for businesses and organizations reliant on information technology is Advanced Computer Specialists in Bradley, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year.

The banner year was capped Dec. 10 at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, where the 2025 MSP Titans of the Industry Awards ceremony saw multiple finalist honors go to Advanced Computer Specialists for excellence in serving the government/public sector and the Midwest.

“To have a culmination of having some recognition for 20 years of hard work was pretty awesome,” President and CEO Jason Hamende said about his firm, a managed services provider, or MSP, that essentially is the outsourced IT department for its customers.

Clients, primarily small to midsize, range from local government and nonprofit organizations to auto dealers, contractors, accounting firms, law offices and health care. ACS also serves as a contractor for some larger enterprises with their own internal IT departments.

“We provide strategic planning, budgeting, we provide hardware, networking, cybersecurity, backup and communication solutions,” Hamende said, noting ACS is a Xerox dealer and offers a cloud-hosted business communications system.

“The 5G rollout in our area has been pretty awesome … immensely improved,” Hamende said of the surrounding rural region’s faster cellular network. He views artificial intelligence technology as a requisite in today’s business world, both inside ACS and for its clients.

“You have to use it, otherwise you’ll be left behind,” Hamende said, adding he agrees with industry leaders and experts who say, “AI is mankind’s single greatest invention,” putting it right up there with fire making and the wheel.

“We’re rapidly working on developing ways to incorporate [AI] into our internal business processes, but also leverage it to help our clients assist with their workloads and operations … helping businesses integrate AI into their existing workflows," Hamende said.

His team offers training for clients’ staff. ACS also has planned a webinar with an industry leader on AI to help business owners and leaders develop their own custom 24/7 AI employee or avatar.

An example is creating an AI employee that works around the clock on marketing materials and emails, using a written communication style that mirrors the client’s brand image and voice.

Hamende said that through prompts, one can train an AI worker to understand its target market and acquire knowledge on a brand, region and industry to become an expert in the related field in an hour.

People still provide human oversight, but gain valuable time for their higher-value activities. When it comes to IT, ACS embraces a proactive service delivery model rather than a reactive one, Hamende said.

The goal is prevention when it comes to potential problems – preventing fires rather than putting fires out.

“Just this last month, we helped a nonprofit get a better business phone system, faster, more reliable internet and save around $200 a month,” Hamende said. “We helped a car dealer in the last quarter take their internet phone bill from $2,000 a month to $800 a month. That’s part of that strategic planning and budgeting that comes in with our process. We’re not just fixing people’s problems, we’re helping their businesses do better, whether it’s cutting costs, mitigating risk, becoming more efficient, better performance, product evaluations. We call it our technology success process. … I coach other MSPs.”

About 98% of all IT fixes can be handled remotely, he said. ACS offers a 24/7 help desk ready to respond to any request, and is glad to provide such gentle prompts as a reminder to check whether there’s paper in the printer tray, as one example of what Hamende calls the human problems they field.

“Cybercrime is becoming easier and easier for less talented criminals … [it’s] at an all-time high,” Hamende said, noting AI and the internet are helping criminals misrepresent people, even using AI-generated speaking voice replicas.

“Phishing [is] getting more rampant, the scam calls. The best defense is a multilayered approach, like an onion. With cybersecurity, you have to have multiple layers,” he said. “So, if they peel back, there’s another layer. With that said, there are attacks that circumvent all the layers, and that’s the human element. They don’t have to hack you in order to perpetrate some kind of cybercrime. It’s manipulating people.”

A new client came to ACS after losing $3 million because a criminal monitored the company’s payment process by breaching one of its vendors. With perfect timing, the thief inserted what appeared to be a valid payment address change request in the vendor’s genuine email, which was the compromised account, Hamende said.

ACS trains clients’ staff in many ways not to be fooled.

“We do security awareness training, phishing simulations and things like that to teach people to prevent them from doing things that are still technically cybercrimes, but couldn’t have been prevented by other means,” Hamende said.

With eight full-time employees plus part-time staff, the company serves clients in Kankakee, Iroquois and Will counties. Learn more at acsweb.biz.