A new category of business services
What is a Managed AI Provider?
A Managed AI Provider (MAP) runs the AI workforce inside your business — on a monthly retainer, with an SLA, with named bots operating your existing tools. Same model as an MSP managing your IT. New substrate.
The Fort AI Agency is the local Managed AI Provider for Northeast Indiana — built and run by an operator who spent 20+ years in the MSP trenches before AI ever entered the conversation.
From the founder
“We were an MSP before that was an acronym.”
Andy Oberlin built and ran a regional Managed Service Provider out of Fort Wayne for nearly two decades. The MSP category didn't exist as a named business model when he started — he was just the guy who kept the servers running for businesses that couldn't afford their own IT team. By the time the industry caught up and gave it a name, he'd already lived every lesson in the playbook: SLA muscle, monthly recurring pricing, onboarding friction, incident response, tiered service discipline. Now he's applying that same playbook to AI for Northeast Indiana businesses.
Why Fort Wayne Needs a Managed AI Provider
Most AI work in the U.S. is built by coastal AI consultancies for Fortune 500 companies. That model doesn't translate to a 40-person manufacturing shop in Huntington, a three-provider clinic in Auburn, or a mid-sized law firm in downtown Fort Wayne. The engagement is priced wrong, the deliverable is a slide deck nobody uses, and there's no operator on the ground Monday morning when something breaks.
Northeast Indiana SMBs don't need a consultant to tell them AI matters. They already know. What they need is the same thing they needed when IT got complicated in 2005: a local managed services operator who shows up, deploys the tech, runs it, and bills a predictable monthly number. That's what The Fort AI Agency is.
The Three-Tier Model
Same structure MSPs have used for 30 years, tuned for AI.
Tier 1
Shared Managed Bot
$2K–$3K/mo
Runs on Fort AI Agency shared infrastructure. Ships in 3–7 days from contract to live bot. Best for single-department automation, first-time AI buyers, and solopreneurs scaling past themselves.
Tier 2 — Most popular
Dedicated Managed Instance
$5K–$10K/mo
Runs on a customer-owned cloud with your own LLM account. Full codebase access. Your data never leaves your environment. Ships in 2–4 weeks. Best for multi-department operations, regulated industries that need data locality, and businesses scaling past one bot.
Tier 3
Enterprise / Regulated
$15K–$50K+/mo
Private VPC, HIPAA and SOC 2 controls, BAA signed, dedicated engineer, 24/7 paged on-call. 6–8 week onboarding. Built for clinics, legal firms, financial services, and any business where compliance is the actual deliverable.
We Already Run the Playbook
The Fort AI Agency isn't a concept. We operate a fleet of production MAP engagements today — from local Fort Wayne SMBs running Shared tier bots, to a clinical AI platform handling 7,800+ patients, to the video-and-coaching platform running for USA Wrestling. Each of those is a live, supervised, tuned-monthly engagement under exactly the tier structure above.
If you want the deeper category-defining playbook — AImpact Nexus, our sister company, publishes the national thought-leadership on what it means to operate as a Managed AI Provider. The Fort AI Agency is the local delivery arm for Northeast Indiana.
Questions people ask us
What is a Managed AI Provider?
A Managed AI Provider (MAP) runs the AI workforce inside your business on a monthly retainer — same model as a Managed Service Provider (MSP) managing your IT, but the thing being managed is a fleet of AI bots doing actual work. Instead of buying AI software and figuring it out yourself, you hire a MAP to build it, deploy it, and operate it day-to-day.
Why does The Fort AI Agency call itself a Managed AI Provider?
Because the founder, Andy Oberlin, ran a regional MSP (4eos) for almost two decades before building this. The MSP discipline — monthly recurring contracts, SLA-backed response, tiered pricing, hands-on operation — is exactly how AI should be delivered to small and mid-sized businesses. Most AI consultancies write strategy decks. We build, deploy, and run the bots. That's the difference.
How is a MAP different from hiring a regular AI consultant?
Consultants bill by the hour and hand you a deliverable. A Managed AI Provider bills monthly and operates the AI for you, ongoing. If a bot goes down at 2 AM, a consultant is already home. A MAP has an SLA and pages on-call. The consulting model is built around thinking; the MAP model is built around operating. Fort Wayne SMBs need operators, not slide decks.
What kinds of Fort Wayne businesses does The Fort AI Agency serve as a MAP?
Manufacturing shops that want shop-floor AI without hiring a data scientist. Healthcare clinics that need HIPAA-compliant bots handling intake. Law offices that want case research bots. Real estate teams with automated follow-up. Sports organizations (we built the platform for USA Wrestling). Any Northeast Indiana business running under 500 employees that wants enterprise-grade AI output without an enterprise-grade IT team.
How much does it cost?
We offer three tiers. Shared Managed Bot: $2,000–$3,000/mo, runs on our infrastructure, ships in 3–7 days. Dedicated Managed Instance: $5,000–$10,000/mo, runs on your own cloud, ships in 2–4 weeks. Enterprise/Regulated (HIPAA, SOC 2): $15,000–$50,000+/mo with private VPC and a dedicated engineer. LLM usage, hosting, and custom integrations are billed separately and transparently.
Do I own the bots and the data?
Yes. On our Dedicated and Enterprise tiers, the bot runs on your infrastructure using your own AI account. Your data never leaves your environment. You see the monthly AI usage bill. If you ever part ways with us, you keep the bot, the data, and the account. No vendor lock-in — same promise a good MSP has always made on the IT side.
How fast can you get a bot running?
Shared tier: 3–7 days from contract to live bot. Dedicated tier: 2–4 weeks. Enterprise/Regulated tier: 6–8 weeks including compliance review. Our 30-day onboarding template (discovery → architecture → shadow mode → go-live) is based on the same playbook we ran at 4eos for IT deployments.
Is this just fancy wording for an AI chatbot?
No. A chatbot is a single app that answers questions. A MAP engagement deploys AI workers with named roles that operate your tools — CRM, email, scheduling, billing, deployment — not just talk about them. Think of the difference between 'installing Microsoft 365' and 'hiring an IT manager.' Same difference between 'buying a chatbot' and 'hiring a Managed AI Provider.'
Ready to hire a Managed AI Provider?
30-minute call. No slide deck. We'll tell you which tier fits, what the first bot would do, and what it'll cost per month.