Understanding Cellular Access Control and AI Adoption with Mark Bentsen

Guest Introduction

Mark Bentsen serves as the Chief Information Officer at CellGate Access Control Systems and is the Co Founder of Secure IVAI, an artificial intelligence managed service provider. His career includes decades of experience in logistics, banking software, healthcare technology, and security engineering. Mark spent ten years at FedEx in technology roles before transitioning into software development, AI integration, and cybersecurity work across multiple industries. His combined background in physical security, AI adoption, and enterprise software gives him a unique perspective on how organizations can secure remote properties, implement AI safely, and prepare for the next generation of intelligent systems. Today, Mark leads technology strategy at CellGate while supporting clients through Secure IVAI as they adopt AI in a practical, scalable, and secure way.

 

Here's a Glimpse of What You'll Learn

• How CellGate provides full stack access control using hardware, software, and cloud managed systems

• Why cellular to cellular failover is one of the hardest engineering challenges in security devices

• How Secure IVAI helps small and medium businesses adopt AI safely and securely

• Why many businesses feel overwhelmed when choosing where to begin with AI

• How Mark uses frontier models like Claude to talk directly to years of operational data

• Why verifying AI outputs is essential for trust and long term adoption

• How organizations can evaluate emerging AI products in a crowded market

• What the next phase of AI looks like as agentic systems accelerate

 

In This Episode

Mark Bentsen explains how CellGate solves one of the biggest problems in physical security: providing reliable access control in places where wired connections do not exist. CellGate devices operate in remote ranches, oil fields, and rural properties, relying entirely on cellular networks. Mark describes why switching between carriers is not as simple as choosing the strongest signal at any moment and why true cellular failover requires sophisticated engineering that most competitors have not mastered.

Mark also shares the origin of Secure IVAI, a managed service provider he co founded with a longtime friend who served as a chief information security officer. Their goal was to help businesses adopt AI responsibly, building real world solutions rather than theoretical prototypes. Mark explains how early reactions to AI ranged from skepticism to fear and why most companies struggled with one foundational question: where do we start. His work focuses on giving businesses a safe and structured entry point into AI adoption.

The conversation expands into how AI can be used today to query years of company data across tools like Fabric, Salesforce, and Jira. Mark describes how he asks natural language questions of millions of records and then verifies those results directly in the company's internal systems. He outlines how businesses can evaluate new AI products, why they should understand what a model was trained on, and how to test for reliability. He also explains why specialized models can outperform general purpose tools when they are trained on narrow, domain specific data.

Mark closes by discussing the future of agentic AI. True agents, he notes, are not simple workflow tools but systems capable of understanding goals, coordinating tasks, and making decisions with minimal oversight. With AI capabilities doubling roughly every seven months, Mark expects meaningful agentic systems to emerge within months, not years. He also emphasizes why professionals must develop horizontal awareness, stepping outside their own silo to drive business impact across the entire organization.