Tri-Cities AI Lab
Kingsport, Tennessee
Building serious, practical AI work here at home.
Dustin Lifford is an intelligence analyst and AI consultant based in Kingsport, Tennessee. He founded Tri-Cities AI Lab to bring serious, practical AI work to businesses across Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. It’s the kind of work that actually changes how a company operates, not the kind that ends up as a slide in a board deck.
His career has run on a single throughline: making complex information useful. Twenty-plus years in web development gave him fluency in the systems businesses actually run on: WordPress, WooCommerce, schema, custom integrations, the unglamorous plumbing that has to work. A move into open-source intelligence at Barrister Intelligence sharpened the analytical side, where he produces corporate structure reports, asset-tracing work, and litigation support deliverables for law firms that need a documented, defensible product instead of a Google search. AI tied the two together: the same rigor applied to a different toolset, with the same standard for what counts as finished work.
At Six Rivers Media, he serves as Director of Web Development and Services, supporting digital operations across a portfolio of regional news properties. Through Tri-Cities AI Lab, he works directly with SMBs, professional services firms, and regional organizations, translating modern AI from a marketing pitch into a tool that saves hours, reduces cost, and creates real competitive advantage at the local level.
What ties it all together is precision. Whether he's writing schema markup, building a forensic chain of custody, or architecting a multi-agent AI workflow, the details matter and he treats them like they do.