From his days at Applied Materials to his success with TechSovereign Partners, John Ghekiere has seen many changes in the tech industry — including the arrival of artificial intelligence. 

TechSovereign Partners LLC is a global semiconductor process and equipment consulting firm created by Ghekiere in 2024. He advises and works with deep tech companies, which specialize in cutting-edge technologies, often for research and development. He works with companies that have great startup ideas that are looking to become established in the industry. 

“The part we play is to take the actual technical deliverables, the idea that got the company started, and help it move toward the industry believing in it,” he said. “The industry adopts it, it goes into a building or a manufacturing plant, and it works in that world.”

With his background in manufacturing semiconductor chips, Ghekiere has seen cutting-edge technology become a part of everyday life. He’s watched the chips be integrated into all sorts of essential uses, from smartphones to cars.

Like the internet, he believes AI is the next innovation to become part of the world’s day-to-day infrastructure. Ghekiere kicked off the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce’s Catapult Collective last summer with a presentation about AI — explaining what it is and opening discussions about apprehensions about the new technology. 

“The effort was to just give tangible commentary on how it can be readily implemented in the workplace. You have really great conversations afterwards too, because everybody’s going through the same thing,” Ghekiere said. “People say, ‘I don’t really know what the heck this thing is — I got on chat GPT and I asked it to write a wedding reception speech in the voice of Stephen King. And it was funny, but how useful is that? Does it do something more?’ Yeah, it does a lot more.”

What it can do for productivity depends on the industry it’s being applied to. During discussions, he heard from a good cross-section of the local economy: people who work in digital marketing, health care, manufacturing and education. 

He spoke to someone in digital marketing who had been utilizing AI to visualize multiple pitches for her customers. Because generative AI has been considered a threat to creative industries like marketing, Ghekiere wasn’t sure what her opinion would be on AI. 

“She was actually pretty intrigued and excited,” he said. “What used to take her two to three days, she could do in a few minutes. In her experience so far, it didn’t take opportunities away; it actually made it so that she could take on more clients in a given time frame.” 

AI as a concept has been around for decades, but new systems slowly matured over the course of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — eventually leading to the current age where there has been a surge of common-use AI tools, according to Tableau, a business intelligence software company. 

Ghekiere remembers when AI started showing up in more substantial ways, back during his time at Applied Materials. Using freeware, he saw an AI model that could tell the difference between a picture of a cat and a dog. That seems inconsequential in comparison to today’s AI power, but back then, Ghekiere said he could see it being applied to multi-million-dollar manufacturing processes.

“And then, I’m like anybody else with ChatGPT. When it landed, I started using it pretty early, understanding how it could do what it does — change the way you work. It enabled me to go from having this idea about starting a company to getting everything necessary in two weeks, while working full-time. AI was key to that,” Ghekiere said. 

Ghekiere used ChatGPT to assist in preparing the paperwork to start TechSovereign Partners after spending about six years as vice president of technology at Class One Technology. 

But that is the tip of the iceberg for Ghekiere’s spanning career in tech, featuring companies all based in the Flathead Valley. 

Ghekiere was born and raised in Montana, moving around the state during his father’s career working in the oilfields. His family settled in Columbia Falls when he was in second grade, and he went on to study chemical engineering at Montana State University. 

He got his professional start in 1997 at Semitool, and worked there for about a decade before it was purchased by Applied Materials. 

“If you’re talking to companies like Intel and Samsung that’s the kind of customer base for Semitool, then Applied, a much bigger company bought it and absorbed it into their broader product line. But they continue to market products to those same companies,” he explained. 

He worked for Applied Materials for another decade before making a move to Class One Technology. 

And the more the merrier — Ghekiere believes advanced manufacturing companies and other tech-focused businesses that call Montana home are paving the way for bringing more of the industry to the state.

“It’s a massive economic stabilizer, especially in a place like this, where there’s a lot of tourism, health care and home construction. All good, we need all those. But they don’t necessarily and genuinely generate new wealth like Applied Materials or Class One Technology, or a Proof Research or Nomad GCS,” he said. 

As local businesses try to find ways to incorporate AI, Ghekiere said it’s important for professionals to at least become familiar with the ways it can increase productivity. Because if it becomes the standard over the next several years, no one wants to be left behind. He likens it to completing a task by hand, when using a computer can make that task faster. 

As a new technology, it can be a bit disconcerting, but all society-changing innovations have been disconcerting, too, he added. 

“To be on the inside of technology is actually really fun, because you do get to see things emerging. When you’re involved in the core technology, from the outside it maybe sounds ridiculous. But on the inside, you can maybe see it in a slightly different way. You can look at predictions by futurists or industrialists and think, ‘this person is probably right, given where things are going,’” Ghekiere said. 

Reporter Taylor Inman may be reached at 758-4440 or [email protected].