Dave Carlson

Dave Carlson is the CEO of Summit Technology, a Salt Lake City IT firm built on a single bet: AI and automation are about to do for startups and growth-stage companies what the cloud did a decade ago, putting enterprise-grade firepower within reach of teams that never had it. Summit helps those fast-moving companies, usually 20 to 200 people scaling faster than their technology can keep up, turn that shift into real outcomes on Microsoft 365 and Azure, with cybersecurity that holds, its own SaaS platform (Inspect 365), and the GRID Fiber network underneath it all.

Dave came to that bet the long way. He studied at Weber State University, George Washington University, and MIT Sloan, earning degrees in Computer Science and Economics, then spent 29 years in technology across aerospace and defense, intelligence, finance, and two startups before taking the top seat at Summit. The economics half of that education is the part most IT people skip, and it's the part that shapes how Summit works. Technology is only worth what it returns. Dollars follow value.

The thinking traces back to a 2003 article, Nicholas Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter," that got Dave looking at business technology differently. By 2012 the cloud had made the thesis real. Capabilities once locked inside Fortune 500 data centers were suddenly within reach of a 30-person company in Utah, and most of those companies just had no one to unlock them. That's the job Dave built Summit to do. AI is the next wave of the same story, and a bigger one.

Today Summit helps growth-stage companies secure what matters, modernize how they work, and put AI and automation to work in the business. The team runs its managed IT suite, Agility 365, ships its own SaaS platform, Inspect 365, and operates the GRID Fiber network. The throughline is outcomes, not parts. Dave's team architects the whole stack instead of selling a box and walking away.

Dave leads with culture as much as technology. Summit runs on the OKR methodology, keeps a staff psychologist on the team, and measures every new idea against two questions: will it create a better outcome for a customer, or for the way Summit itself runs? If the answer is yes, the person who raised it gets the credit. The best idea wins, no matter where it comes from.

When he isn't working, Dave keeps a fountain-pen journal of the things he learns, more than a dozen volumes and counting, and once paid a $100 bounty to his twin sons for landing a Kerbal Space Program rocket he'll admit took him fifteen hours to figure out himself.