About Oh My AI

About Michael Torigian

Michael Torigian (hitechmike) is a technologist who started working with and programming computers in the 1970s. He learned on the large systems the University of Texas ran in those years, the CDC 6600 and CDC 6400 mainframes, and wrote his first programs in three languages:

• BASIC was created at Dartmouth College in 1964 to make programming easy for beginners. It uses plain English-like commands, which is why so many people first learned to program with it.
• FORTRAN is one of the oldest programming languages. It was built at IBM in the 1950s for science and engineering, and it handles heavy math and number-crunching very well.
• SNOBOL was developed at Bell Labs in the early 1960s and is designed for working with text. It searches, matches and rearranges strings of characters, which makes it an early ancestor of the pattern-matching tools used today.

The CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray and introduced in 1964, is widely regarded as the first supercomputer. Machines like it, and the CDC 6400 that followed in its family, are what he learned on.

Michael holds numerous network and voice-system certifications and has extensive experience in security and remediation. He built Oh My AI to give friends, family and clients the same thing he has always tried to give them: plain answers about technology, with the facts checked.

Track record

Michael has led technology initiatives at the executive level across automotive retail and energy, in work spanning more than two decades.

• Public company leadership (1997). As a member of the executive team and a division president, he helped take a technology company public.
• Pioneering the dealership contact center (1994). He launched one of the first call centers in an automotive dealership, years before it became standard practice.
• National rollout for a luxury automaker (2002). He designed and implemented a nationwide contact-center program.
• Enterprise wireless across a large auto group. He ran a national Wi-Fi rollout reaching every site, including dealership lots spanning many acres.
• Infrastructure for an online automotive retailer. He designed and implemented the complete technology infrastructure for a startup that grew into a national online brand.
• Turnaround leadership (2019). A large automotive retailer of about 30 dealerships faced lender pressure over delayed financial reporting. The company's counsel turned to Michael for his knowledge of automotive retailers. He recommended an executive he had known for years, whose reputation in automotive finance restored lender confidence and made room to replace the group's finance leadership and bring its filings current. Michael led the overhaul of the group's entire technology infrastructure. The group was later sold to a national retailer.
• Unified systems for a pipeline operator. He rolled out unified systems across dozens of sites for a major interstate pipeline operator.

Client names are withheld by policy.

What Michael does for clients

Outside this site, Michael advises business owners and C-level executives on the technology their companies depend on. He focuses on telecom, networking, voice and security. Many of these relationships last years. He acts as a long-term advisor who helps leadership plan ahead, weigh new technologies and hold vendors accountable, not only a vendor who shows up for one project.

Where he's helping leaders today:

• AI, with eyes open. Real opportunities separated from hype, with the return and the risks understood before budget is committed.
• Security and risk. A clear view of where the business is exposed, gaps ranked by business impact, and a tested plan to keep operating through an attack or outage.
• Network security. Each person gets only the access their job requires, which limits how far a stolen password or compromised device can reach. Monitoring watches for unusual behavior on the network, so problems are caught early.
• Physical security. Knowing who enters a facility matters as much as knowing who is on the network, and in sensitive areas, sometimes more. AI-assisted multifactor checks confirm the person, the credential and the authorization before a door opens, which also helps in spaces where the law requires access control. For employees it’s seamless: they walk up and the door opens, with no extra steps. Every entry is logged, so the company keeps a record of who accessed what and when, which many regulations require. Cameras watch for incidents, visible firearms and unusual activity, and alert the team so it can respond quickly. Done right, this includes clear policies on consent and on how biometric data is stored, since the rules differ by state.
• Vendor and technology oversight. One independent voice on leadership's side: evaluating purchases, holding vendors to their contracts, and replacing them only when they can't or won't meet the standard.
• Lower total cost of ownership. Simpler designs and easier management cut long-term infrastructure costs and downtime while improving performance.
• Modern communications. Voice and contact-center systems that improve customer experience, support a flexible workforce, and scale with the business.

Michael's business sites: XOtavo (xotavo.com) and U.S. Low Voltage (us-lv.com). These are his own businesses.

How facts are verified

1. Primary sources first. Prices come from the company's pricing page. Privacy rules come from the company's own privacy policy or help center. Laws come from the bill text or the government's page. Court cases come from the court record.
2. Every fact is cited. The small numbers link to the source list at the bottom of each page. Every source is also listed on the Sources page.
3. We say when we couldn't confirm something. If a company's page doesn't state something, we write "not stated" rather than guess. Where we rely on a secondary source, such as a law firm's analysis, we name it.
4. Opinions are labeled. Anything marked hitechmike's take is opinion. Everything else is sourced fact.
5. Dated. AI prices and policies change monthly. Each page shows when its facts were last checked.

Independence

Oh My AI is not affiliated with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, xAI, Meta or DeepSeek. Product names belong to their owners.

How the site is paid for

There are no ads and no affiliate links on this site right now. If that ever changes, the links will be labeled where they appear. See the affiliate disclosure and the site privacy policy.

Corrections

If you find an error, we want to know. Write to M.I.K.E., the Modern Intelligent Knowledge Engine and your friendly AI guide from HiTechMike, at mike@ohmyai.ai. When we fix a fact, we update the page and its "last checked" date.