Harrisburg tech CEO unlocks business potential with new AI platform 

If you’ve talked with a smart-speaker device, jumped on a customer service chat, or sat in a car with self-driving features, you’ve interacted with artificial intelligence (AI).

With AI quickly becoming ubiquitous in nearly every area of life, Jamison Rotz, founder and CEO of AI development company Nearly Human in Harrisburg, is creating AI solutions to prevent organizations from being left behind. 

This winter, Jamison is launching Cortex, an AI-driven platform that helps companies build and train machine-learning models.

A complex solution to a complex problem

“I’ve always been really interested in finding elegant solutions to the problems that I see causing friction in the system,” Jamison says.

He began working as a developer after graduating from Shippensburg University in 2000 and has never looked back. But when he launched Nearly Human, AI was not his niche.

A decade ago, he and his now-retired business partner were integrating systems for a U.S. Navy global support center. From ship maintenance requests to vacation balance errors, the support center was tasked with addressing thousands of issues.

“It was a really complex problem,” he says.

Human or AI-nimal?

Finding the AI-driven solution to the problem helped Jamison secure a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to hone his concept for Nearly Human’s Cortex platform. Over the last decade, he has worked alongside his team of five engineers to create a machine-learning platform that would take a midsize company years to develop and train. 

One of his clients, a medium-size green-energy company, uses his AI platform in its quest to make old buildings more energy-efficient and power them with renewable energy.

“That’s a complicated process that they spend a lot of money on,” he says.

By incorporating his AI tech, Jamison will help the company save money and buy time for its engineers to focus on other issues.

Ethical intelligence

Jamison is excited for what the future holds with the explosion of AI. At the same time, he’s watched big tech companies misuse personal data and ignore faulty algorithms that foster race, gender, economic, and age biases.

He’s on a mission to help steer a world ever more immersed in AI tech toward building with integrity and ethical guardrails.

“It can be a really optimistic place,” he says. “Any time something like ChatGPT, for example, comes out and makes something way more efficient than it used to be, it frees up resources for other things, and that is a very constructive situation to be in as a society.”