Raleigh, NC · Research Triangle · Wake County
A part-time CIO for Raleigh, NC firms, with an answer for the customer's AI questionnaire.
Software and life-sciences companies where the first request for an AI policy arrives inside a customer's security questionnaire.
Systems common in this market. The figure is city population.
The market
What Raleigh looks like from here.
Raleigh leans on software, life sciences, and the law, accounting, and consulting firms that support both, with state government and the universities setting the pace. No one from a regulator is going to ask you about AI this year. Your customer will, in a security questionnaire with a box for your AI policy that you cannot yet check. Meanwhile your engineers and sales team are already using assistants every day.
A Raleigh firm usually runs Microsoft 365, a sales system, and a project and time tracking tool. Finance is either a cloud accounting system or a handful of tools that meet in a spreadsheet. Downtown, Midtown, and the RTP edge run the same tools at different sizes. We write the AI rules you can hand to that customer. Then we connect the sales and project systems, so billed hours and pipeline come from one dashboard you own instead of four exports. Wake County firms and the rest of the Research Triangle run these systems at different sizes, and the order of the work does not change.
What we would expect to find here. The pressure here usually arrives as a customer security questionnaire rather than a regulator. We get the written rule done first, then make billed hours and pipeline come from one place.
The customer security questionnaire
Firms here meet the AI question inside a customer's security questionnaire. The written rule is what they can hand back with that questionnaire.
Billed hours and pipeline come from the sales system and from project and time tracking. Connecting those two puts both numbers in one place.
Raleigh is a service area, not an office. One team, based in North Carolina, works in your own systems.
Where this has run
A profile close to this setup.
The firm asked for automation, but its systems were not ready for it.
Professional services firm · ~30 staff
Industries in Raleigh
Who we work with here.
Start here
- AI Use Policy — Advisory review
- Applications assessment — Assessment
- Base dashboard deployment — Deployment
Where are you based and do you work remotely?
Third Shift Group LLC is based in North Carolina and works with firms across North and South Carolina. Most of the work runs remotely, against your Microsoft cloud account and your systems. Policy meetings and leadership sessions can be on site where that helps. See where we work for the regions and towns we cover.
Do you help with customer security questionnaires?
Yes, Third Shift often helps with customer security questionnaires. Raleigh firms get asked about AI use by their customers before they have a rule of their own. The AI Use Policy and the assessment give you a written answer, and the dashboard shows where information actually flows, so the questionnaire stops being guesswork.
Our billed hours and pipeline live in two tools. Can one report show both?
Yes. Pipeline usually lives in the sales system, and billed hours live in project and time tracking. Connecting those two puts both numbers in one place.
Do Morrisville and Wake Forest firms get the same written rule as Raleigh?
The order of the work does not change across Wake County. Morrisville and Wake Forest follow the same Research Triangle pattern as Raleigh: the customer questionnaire first, then billed hours and pipeline from one place. Each firm's rule is written for its own systems.
Start here
The first step is the same in every location.
Advisory first, in Raleigh as everywhere else: a written assessment you own.