Two ways in. A paid assessment that tells you which work should be automated, which should be left alone, and what each costs to own instead of rent. Or, if you already know the workflow, the build itself: lead qualification, intake and triage, document handling, posting, inbox sorting, handed off to AI agents built for established Fort Wayne small and mid-size businesses.
A paid, written assessment of where AI belongs in your business and where it doesn't. You keep the plan whether or not 3Rivers WebTech builds any of it, and the fee comes off the project if we do.
The assessment is priced on a free discovery call, before any work starts. Most run one to two weeks, depending on how many workflows are in play. Build it in house afterward, hand it to another shop, or hold it until the budget's there. No license, no expiry, no strings.
The shapes this work takes. Each one gets scoped against your actual workflow before anything gets built.
Inbound lead arrives → AI asks the right qualifying questions in your voice → sorts hot, warm, and not-a-fit → books real prospects directly on your calendar.
Customer requests, support tickets, or form submissions are read, categorized, prioritized, and routed to the right person with a draft response attached.
Invoices, receipts, applications, and PDFs read and filed automatically. Inbox triaged into "act now," "needs a draft," and "auto-acknowledge." Drafts ready when you open the message.
Centralized content engine that drafts and schedules posts across Google Business Profile, social channels, and listings — with human approval before anything goes live.
An assistant trained on your SOPs, product documentation, or playbooks. Staff ask it questions instead of interrupting whoever knows the answer.
Customer reviews monitored, drafted replies generated in your tone, ready for one-click approval — instead of a backlog you never get to.
AI got sold hard for two years straight. Some of it worked. A lot of it turned out to be a monthly subscription with a chatbot bolted on, priced like custom software and delivered like a template. If you already paid for one of those, you know the feeling.
Four questions. Ask them of any vendor, including this one.
If the answer is a login to somebody's platform, you're renting a configuration. There's nothing wrong with renting. Just know that's what it is, and do the five-year math before you sign.
If it stops working the day the vendor stops answering email, you didn't buy a tool. You bought a dependency.
"It's secure" isn't an answer. The answer is a name: which model, running on whose hardware, under what terms. Some jobs shouldn't leave your building at all. A vendor who can tell you which of yours those are has actually thought about it.
Anyone who has really built this can tell you where it fell over. Which tasks the model got wrong. Where it still needs a person in the loop. If everything worked, nothing got tested.
The AI work here is not a reseller arrangement. 3Rivers WebTech is run by Nathan M. Thornhill, a Fort Wayne native who researches how AI systems behave and built CiteStamp, a citation tool that catches references AI made up. His research was accepted to The Science of Consciousness 2026, the world's longest-running consciousness conference, organized by UC San Diego. He also speaks on where AI quietly gets things wrong.
Which is the same skill as building one that doesn't. It is why this page is careful about where AI fails, and why the questions above are the ones worth asking any vendor. More on the research.
Established local businesses with repeatable, repetitive work
Owners ready to invest in real software they own
Not a fit: public-facing AI for Fortune-500-scale companies or HIPAA-heavy enterprise compliance work
Either route starts with a free discovery call. If you already know the workflow, we map it and write a scope for the automation, and you see what you're buying before any build work starts. If you don't yet, the paid assessment comes first and its fee is credited toward whatever gets built.
Engagement minimums vary by scope. The discovery call is where we figure out together whether the build is sized for us.
Most AI builds need a subscription with an AI provider: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or similar. That part is a running cost and it isn't ours to remove. What we can do is pick the tool that actually fits the job and your budget, tell you what it runs before you commit, and keep everything else we build yours outright.
Most of our automation builds are designed to keep running for years with little to no backend maintenance. Some workflows depend on third-party APIs or live data — in those cases we tell you upfront which pieces require ongoing hosting or model costs.
Then the assessment says so, and it's shorter and cheaper. Some businesses come out of it with a data cleanup list and a recommendation to wait a year. That's a real result, not a failed sale.
No. Training teaches people to use tools. The assessment decides which tools, if any, belong in the business and what to build instead.
Yes. The plan is yours: build it in house, hand it to another shop, or sit on it. The fee is only credited if 3Rivers WebTech does the build, and nothing in the plan is licensed or locked.
Custom. We build AI workflows tailored to your business and integrated with the tools you already use. We choose the underlying AI model based on what fits the job, not what's trendy.
Sometimes — with your sign-off on the tone and the boundaries. Often, the higher-leverage move is keeping the AI internal: it drafts, sorts, and prepares; a human approves and sends. We design where that line goes.
We design with your data-handling requirements in mind. We don't ship sensitive customer data into third-party model APIs without your explicit sign-off, and for some engagements we'll use locally-hosted models. We don't take on HIPAA-regulated PHI workflows.
We design for that. The AI drafts and routes; humans approve the high-stakes work. We instrument the workflow so you can see what it did and override when needed. Nothing important goes out without a person seeing it first, unless you explicitly choose otherwise.
No. We're a fit for established small and mid-size businesses with repeatable manual work. We're not the right shop for enterprise compliance programs or public-facing customer AI at giant scale.
Usually, yes. If the steps repeat and the data lives somewhere software can reach, that's exactly the work AI automation does well. It handles the moving and typing; you approve what matters.
The unglamorous stuff that eats your week: sorting and drafting email replies, moving data between systems that don't talk to each other, preparing reports, chasing intake forms, first-pass scheduling. If a task has rules you could write down, it's a candidate.
It's a scoped project fee, quoted free after we look at the actual workflow. The honest math: automation is worth it when the manual work is repeatable and eats real hours every week. If your numbers don't clear that bar, we'll say so at the consultation instead of selling you something you don't need.
Book a discovery call. Walk us through the manual work; we'll tell you whether an AI engagement makes sense.
Serving Fort Wayne and the surrounding region.
