Nexos, the San Diego AI and software division of Abrams & Luchanski, is an AI development company serving Illinois businesses in Chicago, its suburbs and downstate: we design and build AI agents, integrations between the systems you already run, private LLMs and bespoke software. Every Illinois engagement runs remotely over video on a schedule set for Central Time, and each design takes the Biometric Information Privacy Act and the Human Rights Act’s rules on AI in employment decisions into account, with your counsel confirming compliance.
The Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity pitches Illinois as the only state served by every U.S. Class I freight railroad, with three international airports, the third-largest interstate highway system and more than a dozen ports and waterways. Its list of core industries follows from that position: agribusiness and food processing, advanced manufacturing, energy, life sciences, business and professional services, and transportation, distribution and logistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 1.22 million Illinois jobs in trade, transportation and utilities in its preliminary August 2026 estimate — the largest single group in a nonfarm workforce of roughly 6.18 million.
The white-collar weight sits around Chicago. BLS counts 908,700 professional and business services jobs statewide; the two-state Chicago–Naperville–Elgin metro, which also takes in part of northwest Indiana, counts 820,200 in the same sector on its own, alongside 303,100 in financial activities. Law, accounting, consulting, insurance and trading firms produce documents, reconciliations and client correspondence at a volume that punishes manual handling. Manufacturing remains a large employer too, at 571,400 jobs statewide.
The Census Bureau’s counts round out the picture: 322,415 employer establishments in 2023, with about 5.66 million people on their payrolls, plus 1,120,413 nonemployer businesses — freelancers, owner-operators and single-truck carriers among them. Most Illinois companies are therefore small and mid-sized operators whose systems grew one purchase at a time, which is where connecting existing systems is most likely to pay back.
We have no Illinois projects to point to and will not pretend otherwise. What follows is reasoning from the state’s industry mix to the builds most likely to repay their cost.
Brokers, carriers and warehouses along the rail and interstate corridors spend hours matching rate confirmations, bills of lading, proof-of-delivery scans and accessorial charges before an invoice can go out. Wiring the TMS, email inbox and accounting system together — so a mismatch surfaces as an exception for a person to resolve rather than a discovery at month end — shortens the billing cycle.
A Loop law or accounting practice keeps its best knowledge in past memos, engagement letters and workpapers that nobody can find quickly. A knowledge system that searches and drafts from those documents, cites the source it used and leaves the judgment to the professional means finding a precedent takes a search rather than a hunt through folders.
Trading desks, insurers and professional firms handle material they are contractually bound to keep in-house. Running an open-weight model on hardware you control means staff get drafting and summarising help without that material being sent to a public AI service.
Manufacturers and food processors often hold scrap, downtime, lot and order data in separate machines, spreadsheets and an ERP that does not talk to either. A small data platform that pulls those sources together gives the plant manager and the owner the same daily view, and makes a late order visible before the customer calls.
Screening software, video-interview scoring and finger-scan time clocks are where Illinois employers meet BIPA and the Human Rights Act. A purpose-built internal tool can include consent capture, notice screens, a human reviewer on every decision and scheduled deletion, designed with those statutes in mind and confirmed by your counsel, instead of leaving those duties to a vendor default.
The Illinois statutes that most often reach an AI project are targeted ones: a biometric-privacy law that individuals can sue under, two employment laws aimed squarely at AI in hiring, and a data-breach statute with a security duty. Each is read below from the General Assembly’s own text.
Before collecting a fingerprint, face geometry, voiceprint or similar identifier, a private entity must tell the person in writing what it collects, why and for how long, and obtain a written release — which may now be an electronic signature — and it must publish a retention and destruction schedule. Anyone aggrieved may sue for $1,000 per negligent violation or $5,000 per intentional or reckless one, plus attorneys’ fees. The 2024 amendment treats repeated collection of the same identifier from the same person by the same method as a single violation.
It is a civil rights violation for an employer to use AI in recruiting, hiring, promotion, discipline, discharge or other terms of employment in a way that has the effect of discriminating on a protected basis, or to use zip codes as a proxy for a protected class. Employers must also notify employees when they use AI for those purposes. The Act defines AI to include generative AI and directs the Department of Human Rights to adopt rules on when and how notice is given.
An employer that has AI analyse recorded video interviews for Illinois-based positions must first tell each applicant, explain how the AI works and what it evaluates, and get consent, and it may share the videos only with those needed to evaluate them. On request it must delete the videos within 30 days. An employer that relies solely on the AI to decide who gets an in-person interview must report applicants’ race and ethnicity to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity each year.
A business holding Illinois residents’ personal information as the Act defines it — a name combined with, for example, a Social Security, driver’s licence or account number, medical or biometric data, or a username or email address with its password — must keep reasonable security measures in place and require the same, by contract, of anyone it discloses that information to. After a breach it must notify affected residents without unreasonable delay, and a breach touching more than 500 Illinois residents must also be reported to the Attorney General.
General information, not legal advice. Laws, regulations and their effective dates change; confirm how they apply to your business with your own counsel. Last reviewed 2026-09-26.
An Illinois project opens with the free audit, which is one call and a written audit, then a proposal with a fixed scope listing the deliverables, the exclusions and the cost. Once the paid build starts, the people who actually do the job share their screens and show us each step, spreadsheet and workaround, and from then on there is a check-in call every week, a progress board both sides can see, and early working software. Where a build touches biometrics, hiring or customer records, the design takes the statutes above into account from the start, so consent screens, notices and deletion jobs are planned in rather than retrofitted, and your counsel confirms they meet the law.
All of Illinois keeps Central Time, as do the Indiana counties on the Chicago metro’s eastern edge; our Pacific clock runs two hours behind. A 10am Central call is 8am for us, and a 3pm Central review is 1pm our time, so the whole Illinois business day from mid-morning onward is shared working time. Training sessions are held live on video and can be timed around second shifts and warehouse crews.
Remote: discovery, reviews and training over video, with shared documents and working software in between. Central Time statewide — two hours ahead of our Pacific clock.
The free technology audit is a call and a written audit, wherever you are, Southern California included. Outside Southern California, all of it runs over video.
Audit — free: a call and a written technology audit.
Build — from $4,900 per fixed-scope project.
Run — from $890/month for a hosted private model.
The same prices everywhere. See pricing.
Aidan Luchans founded Abrams & Luchanski in San Diego in 2024, and designed and built the Nexos Platform, a multi-tenant AI operations platform: AI agents, multi-step workflows with human approval, connections to roughly 90 business tools, and private knowledge search.
Aidan leads both the firm’s advisory work and Nexos’s engineering, so the person who scopes a project also builds it.
Because the work is remote, a manufacturer outside Rockford or a grain handler near Decatur gets the same process and schedule as a firm in the Loop.
The audit is free; a fixed-scope build starts at $4,900 per project, and a hosted private model from $890/month — the same in Illinois as in California. An AI agent costs more as it connects to more systems, or when it needs BIPA consent flows or hiring-law notices built in. After the free audit you get a fixed-scope proposal with the price for that build, so the number is agreed before any work starts.
Only with BIPA’s steps built in: written notice of what is collected, why and for how long, a signed release (an electronic signature counts), a published retention schedule and deletion on time. Where a design can reach the same result without biometric data at all, we will recommend that route. Confirm the specifics with your own counsel.
Public Act 103-0804 took effect, making it a Human Rights Act violation to use AI in employment decisions in a way that has a discriminatory effect or uses zip codes as a proxy, and requiring notice to employees when AI is used. If your process includes AI-scored video interviews, the separate Video Interview Act’s notice, consent and deletion rules also apply.
Yes: Nexos, an AI development company based in San Diego, meets clients in person only across Southern California, so Chicago and downstate Illinois work runs fully remotely, with discovery, reviews and training over video at hours set for Central Time. Every project runs on a fixed-price written scope starting at $4,900 per project, anything that handles biometrics or hiring decisions is designed with BIPA and HB 3773 in mind for your counsel to confirm, and progress is tracked on a shared board with a weekly check-in call.
Usually the paperwork that is keyed into two systems: freight documents into billing, orders into the ERP, intake forms into the CRM. Those jobs are frequent, rule-bound and easy to measure, and they rarely touch biometric or hiring data. Our audit ranks the candidates by return and effort before anything is built.
A short description is plenty. We reply within one business day.
Nexos works alongside Abrams & Luchanski consultants so technical solutions are designed around the business — not the other way around.