Bill Burkey — operator, builder, based in Cleveland.

I'm president of Zebra Skimmers, an industrial coolant management equipment company that ships into machine shops, fabrication plants, and tool-and-die houses across North America. I've spent enough years in that chair to know what a 60-person fab shop's Tuesday morning actually looks like, which is the only credential I trust when someone is selling me technology.

Northcoast.ai is what happens when an industrial operator gets useful at AI workflows and starts building them for peer companies. I run it out of Cleveland. From here I can be in Akron in 40 minutes, Canton in an hour, Toledo or Pittsburgh in two, Detroit or Columbus in two and a half — which is the entire Lake Erie industrial corridor and a meaningful chunk of the Great Lakes manufacturing base. Geography is a feature here, not an afterthought.

On the build side I run Frozen Iguanas LLC, my one-person studio that ships software on Cloudflare and Claude. The portfolio is mostly smaller brands, some quirky, all real. The point of mentioning it is that I personally write, deploy, and maintain everything I quote. There is no junior consultant. No offshore team. No "engineering partner." That keeps the work honest and the prices in the ranges you see on the services page.

By training I'm a consumer industrial psychologist. That background mostly shows up in how I scope projects: most "AI problems" inside a $20M manufacturer are really process problems with an AI-shaped wrapper, and a lot of the value is in the diagnostic, not the build. I try to charge for both honestly.

The point of view I bring to this work is narrow on purpose. Small, owned, maintainable workflows beat big "transformation" engagements every time at this revenue band. AI gets dropped in next to what already works, not on top of it. Every recommendation comes with a number — hours saved, dollars in, dollars out — or it doesn't get recommended. When safety is involved, the AI doesn't get the final say; a person does. None of this is a marketing position. It's how I'd want a vendor to behave inside my own plant.

Things I don't do: chatbots for B2B industrial buyers who would rather call. "AI strategy" deck engagements. Anything that requires ripping out an ERP. Vertical SaaS resale. Speculative builds priced as "discovery." If you ask me for one of those, I'll tell you no and try to point you somewhere that will say yes for the right reasons.

If any of this lands, the easiest thing is to send a note or call (216) 428-0724. First conversation is 30 minutes and costs nothing — half the time the answer is that you don't need to hire me, and that's a perfectly good outcome.