Peter Perez recently built a piece of enterprise software for his company in two months. Before AI, he says the same project would have run him $300,000 and taken two years.
He says it almost in passing, the way other people mention they repainted a room over the weekend. But it’s the kind of number that stops you: a quarter million-dollar build, compressed into eight weeks, by a CEO who could have hired it out and didn’t. For Perez, the founder and CEO of Calgary-based PCe Solutions, it wasn’t really about the software. It was the same thing that’s driven him since he was twelve years old: something was hard, and he wanted to see if he could make it easy.
He was that kid. The one who took the family computer apart to get a video game running, then put it back together before anyone noticed. By his teens he was making house calls around the neighbourhood, troubleshooting tech problems for family and neighbours for pocket money. His parents, who had opened their first business in the early 1980s, gave him the entrepreneurial blueprint without ever sitting him down to explain it. He simply absorbed it.
The path didn’t run straight. His mother, watching her computer-obsessed son, encouraged him to study law, a respectable, secure career. Perez gave it an honest try and enrolled in criminology and political science at Mount Royal University. He calls the experience miserable. It lasted long enough to convince him his future was nowhere near a courtroom. He dropped out, enrolled in SAIT’s network engineering program, and never second guessed the decision again.
“I carried my side job all the way through college, helping small and medium-sized businesses with little IT projects,” Perez says. “When I finished school, I got my first serious IT job.”
What followed was a decade of the unglamorous, foundational work that builds a real technologist: standing up network operations centres, doing hands-on network engineering, eventually rising to regional manager for an Edmonton-based IT firm. The whole time, the side job never stopped. He kept working nights and weekends, and somewhere in there the realization landed that he couldn’t shake – he had the technical depth and the business sense to build something of his own.
In 2010, he did. PCe Solutions opened with a single client, a 30-user company, and word travelled fast.
Before long Perez was hiring to keep up. Today he leads a team of 20, a group he assembled deliberately varied skill sets, but a shared standard for the kind of work that goes out the door.
That standard shows up in the contract. Most IT firms talk about responsiveness; PCe writes a guaranteed 30-minute response time into its standard client agreement. And when a problem surfaces, Perez has little patience for band-aids. His team is expected to find the root cause and fix it once, properly, rather than booking a return trip for the same issue next month. It’s a philosophy that won clients quickly, and shaped who he went looking for.
“One of the things we look for in any prospective customer is a company that’s growth-driven,” he says. “We want to work with people who are hungry, who are eager to grow, and who want us to be one of the strategic partners that helps them get there.”
He’s chosen partners well enough that PCe now supports organizations across North America, running seamless service whether a client’s offices sit across town, across the country, or south of the border. A virtual branch in Florida marks the start of a deliberate U.S. footprint.
Some of that work goes places most managed IT service providers can’t follow: PCe’s certifications and security knowledge let it support clients handling genuinely sensitive material, including organizations connected to the U.S. military and the Department of Defense. Every staff member clears enhanced background checks to meet those requirements. It’s not a line Perez throws around for effect; it’s a different tier of trust, and it’s why engineering firms, along with clients in finance and medicine where confidentiality and data security is the whole game, keep landing on his doorstep.
Each gets a package built around the actual sensitivity of the data they handle, not a one-size template.
“Managed IT is our core. We run three tiers—bronze, silver and gold—and they include everything a company needs today, with cybersecurity built in,” he says. “It used to be a separate line item. Cybersecurity was optional. You can’t make it optional anymore.”
He’s right, and the headlines prove it weekly. Ransomware, phishing, and breaches have stopped respecting industry lines. What Perez sells, underneath the tiers and the certifications, is the absence of that worry. His team monitors client systems around the clock so the people running those businesses don’t have to think about it. Cloud, hardware, phone systems, 24/7 emergency support—it all rolls up to a single promise: the technology works, and stays working.
“AI in everyday operations is going to be as big as the internet was. It’s at that level. It’s going to reshape the entire world, and getting to be part of that is just exciting.”
Fifteen years in, with a profitable company behind him, Perez treats complacency as the real threat. PCe runs daily in-house knowledge-sharing, keeps up its industry subscriptions, and requires every employee to complete at least one certification or course a year —on the company’s dime. He’s building a workforce that stays current by design, not by accident.
Today, he’s also removed himself from the part of the business he loved most. The kid who lived inside the machine now spends his days on leadership and relationships, and he’s gotten good at the hardest translation in the industry: turning technology into plain business terms. Clients don’t want to hear how a solution works. They want to know what it does for them.
Which brings him back to that two-month software build, and to the thing he’s most energized about in years. To a lot of people, Perez notes, AI still means a chatbot. ChatGPT, Copilot, a smarter search box. He thinks they’re looking at the wrong thing entirely. The real value, in his view, is operational: automating the repetitive work that eats a team’s day, putting predictive analytics behind supply and inventory decisions, turning a mountain of data into something a person can actually act on. Increasingly, he points out, you can hand a narrowly skilled AI agent a defined job and let it run the way you’d delegate to a member of your team, which frees your actual people for the work that needs a human mind.
PCe has rebuilt its own processes around that idea, and Perez has seen the payoff up close. The AI portal he built was the proof of concept; the company’s broader bet is bigger. His entire team is being trained on Anthropic’s Claude models, so PCe can do for clients what it’s already done for itself: fold AI into daily operations without breaking anything, and without compromising security. It’s the first time since his start-up days that the industry has made him feel this restless in a good way.
There’s a symmetry to where he’s ended up that isn’t lost on him. The same curiosity that took apart a computer in a Calgary bedroom is now taking apart the assumptions of an entire industry. The tools have changed beyond recognition. The instinct hasn’t moved an inch: find the problem, understand it, build something better and never stop looking at what’s coming next.
