Atlas Expands AI Solutions for Businesses with New Team Members

Artificial intelligence is moving quickly from experimentation to implementation. For business leaders, the challenge is figuring out where AI can create meaningful value, and how to implement it securely and effectively. To help connect those dots, Atlas Professional Services is expanding its team and offerings focused on AI solutions for businesses.

As part of this growing practice, Atlas recently welcomed Christian Lopes as AI Process Consultant and Nihar Maddina as Forward Deployment AI Engineer. Together, they bring complementary expertise in business process analysis and AI engineering to help Atlas clients turn AI’s possibilities into practical business solutions.

It’s the latest step in Atlas’s evolution from managing clients’ technology to helping them determine how emerging technologies can move their businesses forward.

A Business-First Approach to AI Advisory Services

There is no shortage of AI products on the market. But buying another tool isn’t the same as having an AI strategy.

Atlas’s approach to AI Consulting and Managed Services starts with the business itself: its goals, processes, people, data and existing technology. Atlas can then help identify where AI could deliver measurable value and build a strategy for putting it to work.

“We’re really focusing on not so much what AI we’re using, but more so solving our clients’ business needs,” Christian said. “Whatever tool that takes is what we’ll build.”

That philosophy is reflected throughout Atlas’s AI solutions for businesses, which include:

• AI strategy and roadmap consulting
• Business process automation
• Security and governance
• AI integration and deployment
• Employee training
• Data management and analytics

Atlas uses a four-phase process — Discover, Design, Deploy and Manage — to take organizations from identifying opportunities through implementation and ongoing management.

For businesses, that could mean automating a repetitive manual process, making company knowledge easier for employees to access, integrating AI with an existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software or establishing appropriate governance around the AI tools employees are already using.

The common denominator is that the solution is built around the business need.

Nihar describes Atlas’s approach as creating solutions “specific for your workflow.” Rather than limiting the conversation to standard, out-of-the-box applications, the Atlas team evaluates where AI could add value based on the way a client actually operates.

Meet Christian Lopes: Finding Where AI Can Make a Difference

As Atlas’s new AI Process Consultant, Christian focuses on the business side of the AI equation.

He brings more than seven years of business analysis experience across industries including healthcare and banking, with expertise in workflow analysis, enterprise modernization and technology adoption.

Before joining Atlas, Christian worked as a senior business systems analyst at Optum, where his experience included supporting an enterprise fax modernization that moved more than 600 million pages of fax volume to the cloud, as well as a major secure email migration. Christian also played a role in building Optum’s Copilot Center of Excellence, in support of its enterprise AI initiative.

At Atlas, his role begins with understanding how clients work. He partners with organizations to analyze day-to-day processes, document workflows and identify high-value opportunities for AI and automation. He also helps guide change management and training, so that a technically successful AI project becomes something employees will actually use.

That process-first perspective is important, because Christian sees a common tendency among organizations exploring AI: starting with the technology rather than the problem or opportunity.

According to Christian, the better question isn’t necessarily, “Which AI tool should we buy?” It’s “Where is our business experiencing friction, and could AI help us solve it?”

Meet Nihar Maddina: Turning Opportunities into Working AI Solutions

Once an organization identifies a strong AI opportunity, someone has to turn the idea into a working solution. That’s where Nihar comes in.

Nihar joined Atlas as a Forward Deployment AI Engineer after earning his bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of South Florida in August 2026. His background includes software engineering, machine learning, generative AI and cloud infrastructure.

His previous work includes building AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation systems, document-processing pipelines and cloud-based AI applications. He has also worked with technologies that allow AI systems to interact with business data and other software tools, rather than operating as standalone chatbots.

At Atlas, Nihar works directly with clients to understand their workflows and then designs AI and automation solutions around them. That can include integrating AI with CRMs, ERPs and cloud systems, building document-processing tools or developing custom AI agents.

“The place where we differ is we create custom solutions specific for our clients’ workflow,” Nihar said.

And those possibilities can extend far beyond the AI use cases many executives first imagine. As Nihar explains, a solution might be as straightforward as an AI assistant that helps employees access information or as specialized as using computer vision to identify product defects.

Bringing AI Expertise into the Atlas Client Relationship

Christian and Nihar aren’t operating in an AI silo. For Atlas’s existing managed IT clients, the AI Advisory Services team can work alongside account managers and other Atlas professionals who already have established relationships with those businesses.

Clients that are experimenting with AI or wondering where to begin can meet with the AI team for discovery around their processes and potential use cases.

Atlas is also making its AI solutions for businesses available beyond its managed IT client base. Businesses can engage Atlas for AI Advisory Services without moving their entire IT environment under Atlas management.

That flexibility reflects a broader shift in what businesses increasingly need from their technology partners. Keeping systems running remains essential, but companies are also looking for guidance on how technology can make their operations better. Atlas’s AI practice is designed to provide that bridge.

The company’s AI solutions for businesses are focused on identifying real operational opportunities, developing an actionable strategy, implementing the right technology and then managing it with the security, governance and support businesses need.

And with Christian and Nihar now on board, Atlas has added dedicated expertise on both sides of that process: understanding the business problem and engineering the solution.

Curious where AI could create real value in your organization? Contact us today to start the conversation.