Tom Merkle
Strategy
Was at UiPath through the company's IPO, leading enterprise automation for Fortune 500 clients. Co-founded Hashbranch, a US datacenter brokerage platform, run on the same playbook.
About Ashland Insights
Operators, not software salespeople.
Helping small and mid-sized businesses put AI to work. Practically, locally, on their terms. That's the mission. The rest of this page is how we got here and who we are.
The team
Who you'll actually be working with.
Deepak Atyam
Implementation
Forbes 30 Under 30 aerospace engineer. NASA and SpaceX alum, multi-patent inventor, led Tri-D Dynamics to an acquisition by a publicly traded company. Now runs the technical build at Ashland.
Mark Wright
Client Success
Spent his career selling enterprise and AI software to operators. Runs client success at Ashland Insights.
Ken Zink
Engineering
Senior software engineer with a decade-plus building and leading test engineering at high-growth tech and consumer platforms. Makes sure what we ship keeps working in production.
Why we started this
Because good businesses deserve better than sales pitches.
AI is everywhere right now. Every week, a new tool claims it'll transform your business. Most of it is noise. Some of it is useful. And almost none of it is being sold by someone who's actually run a business that looks like yours.
Good businesses are being asked to figure out AI on their own while Big Tech spends billions convincing them to buy a platform they don't need. We think that's backwards.
Ashland Insights is a team that's built and run operations using this technology before offering it to anyone else. We work alongside local businesses to make AI actually work for them.
How we work
Strategy. Implementation. Rollout.
Every engagement follows the same three-step shape. We get our bearings before we build. We build only what aligns with the plan. And we treat rollout, the part where most AI projects die, as its own serious piece of work.
We aren't tied to a platform. We don't sell licenses. If the honest answer is that AI isn't the right move for your business right now, that's what we'll tell you.