AI Doesn't Have to Leave This Region Behind
February 23, 2026
I'm a native Texan, raised in Nebraska, and spent most of my career wherever the work took me. Three years ago my family and I chose Johnson City, Tennessee. Not as a stopover. As home.
I ran a 70-person engineering organization from here, not Austin, not San Francisco. Here. And now I'm building Ergon Insights here because I believe something that most of the tech industry hasn't figured out yet: AI could be the best thing that's ever happened to regions like Northeast Tennessee, if we move first.
The Problem Nobody's Talking About
Every week I read another headline about AI eliminating jobs. And every week, the conversation happens in the same places, Silicon Valley boardrooms, Manhattan think tanks, DC policy panels. The people most affected by what's coming are the last ones invited to the conversation.
Small businesses in the Tri-Cities don't have an AI strategy. They don't have a Chief AI Officer. They have a phone that rings and sometimes nobody answers it. They have a help desk running on Excel spreadsheets and tribal knowledge locked in the head of one person who's about to retire.
That's not a technology problem. That's a revenue problem. And it's solvable right now.
The Thesis
Here's what I believe: AI creates more jobs in regions like ours than it displaces, but only if we're the ones building it.
When a security company in Memphis can suddenly monitor 3,000 cameras from a unified dashboard instead of juggling four disconnected platforms, they don't fire people. They redeploy them to higher-value work. They stop hemorrhaging money on manual processes and start growing. Growth requires people.
When a small business owner in Kingsport picks up every call, even the ones that come in at 2 AM, because an AI agent is handling the first touch, they don't lose a receptionist position. They gain three new customers they would have missed entirely. More customers means more work. More work means more hires.
The math isn't "AI replaces X jobs." The math is "AI unlocks Y revenue that funds Z new positions that didn't exist before."
What We're Actually Building
Ergon Insights isn't a consultancy that talks about AI. We build it, deploy it, and maintain it. Right now that looks like:
AI voice agents that answer phones, qualify leads, and route calls, operational in under two hours. A window treatment company that missed 40% of inbound calls is now capturing every single one. That's not automation replacing a human. That's automation creating pipeline that generates the revenue to hire more humans.
Unified operations platforms that replace the duct-taped-together stack of Excel sheets, disconnected SaaS tools, and manual processes that most small and mid-size companies run on. When your team stops spending four hours a week updating a spreadsheet, they spend that time on work that actually grows the business.
Knowledge capture systems that preserve institutional expertise before it walks out the door. Every company has a Paul, the person who knows everything, has it all in their head, and is six months from retirement. AI makes that knowledge searchable, accessible, and permanent.
None of this requires the business to be in Silicon Valley. None of it requires a $200K engineer. It requires someone who understands both the technology and the operator, and who's willing to price it for the market we're actually in.
The Multiplier Effect
Here's where it gets interesting for the region.
Every AI deployment I build for a local company creates downstream demand. The security company needs someone to manage the new platform. The window company needs a sales rep to handle the leads they're now actually capturing. The operations team that got four hours back per week is now doing work that creates more operational complexity, which creates more jobs.
But the bigger play is this: we're building the talent base.
When we deploy AI systems here, we train local people to manage them. When we onboard a client in two hours, we're proving that AI services can be delivered from Johnson City as effectively as from anywhere. When we build a platform and maintain it from this region, we're creating the kind of technical jobs that people currently leave Tennessee to find.
I've developed hundreds of leaders in my career. The infrastructure is here. The talent pipeline exists. What's been missing is the economic engine that creates demand for what they can do.
AI is that engine.
The Choice
Every region in America is about to face the same fork in the road: adopt AI or get adopted by it. The companies and communities that move first will set the terms. The ones that wait will accept whatever terms are left.
Northeast Tennessee has a real shot here. We have low cost of living, a growing university system, a military veteran population with discipline and adaptability baked in, and a business community that still operates on handshakes and follow-through.
What we need is for the operators, the people who actually run businesses here, to see AI not as a threat to their workforce but as the tool that funds their next three hires.
That's what Ergon Insights exists to do. Not to sell technology. To generate jobs by making the businesses in this region too efficient, too responsive, and too competitive to ignore.
My family chose this place. We're building it up. The work starts here. It stays here.
Jason Oglesby is the founder of Ergon Insights, based in Johnson City, Tennessee. He previously served as CTO of Rev.io and brings 30+ years of experience in software development and technology leadership.
Ergon (ἔργον) — one's proper work, done with excellence.