CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
From Blind AI Spend to Billable Insight
Cinch IT is a managed service provider founded in 2004 and headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Company Snapshot
Cinch IT provides managed IT support, cybersecurity, and strategic technology consulting to small and mid-sized businesses nationwide, with a client base spanning healthcare, legal, financial services, insurance, and construction.
The Challenge
Cinch’s clients were adopting AI aggressively, with speed prioritized over security and governance – and Cinch had no scalable way to see into it, let alone manage it, across its client base:
- No visibility into which AI tools, models, or data employees across the client base were actually using
- Clients racing to roll out AI with little regard for security or governance
- No way to analyze real usage beyond surveys logs, and interviews
- No easy way for Cinch to deploy AI observability, security, and adoption controls across every client
- No single pane of glass to manage AI risk and governance across the entire client base from the service-provider side
How Portal26 Helped
Portal26 gives Cinch complete visibility into every data type a service provider needs to advise a client and put controls in place quickly – tool and model usage, cost, token consumption, prompt, and risk signals – paired with the control types to act on it: access, budget, and policy enforcement. Portal26 enabled Cinch to directly manage its entire client base from a single console.
“Portal26 gave us visibility and controls. I haven’t found an AI use case yet where we can’t pull a real data point out of a client’s organization once we’re watching for it.”
Jack Wilson, CEO, Cinch IT
Business Outcomes
- Real-time visibility into who is using which AI tool, for what purpose, and at what token cost – visibility the client’s own AI vendors were unable to expose
- License and budget decisions grounded in evidence and observed usage instead of department-level assumptions
- Real-time, full inventory of sanctioned and shadow AI usage, replacing DNS filtering and firewall rules as the only line of defense
- A defensible, data-backed basis for AI governance policy instead of survey-based guesswork
- AI investment decisions grounded in real usage data instead of guesswork – catching wasted spend before it compounds, not after
- A governance foundation that scales as AI adoption grows, and adapts as usage expands
- Room to adopt AI more aggressively, knowing security and governance are keeping pace rather than lagging behind
Case in Point
The same pattern kept showing up across Cinch’s client base: clients were buying advanced AI packages for every employee with no insight into who was using them, which subset of users genuinely needed the advanced tier, or what risk their employees were introducing along the way. Portal26 helped to optimize licensing while removing the risks.