ANC Group: Building Trust in a Digital Age

By Ty Irwin, Greenville Business Magazine, Interviewing Craig Tobin

When no one is telling the story, it’s easy for people to assume the work is one thing: faster equipment, better software, and newer tools. With ANC Group, a Greenville-based information technology company, the real difference is quieter than that – built through relationships, expertise, and the insistence that technology should protect people and not replace them.

ANC Group’s Marketing Director Craig Tobin, who joined ANC Group in December 2024, did not come to the company with an IT background. He stemmed from design, storytelling, and the art of persuasion. Originally from Scotland, Tobin moved to the United States in 2018, and built his career across creative and marketing roles after studying computer animation and digital art in college. Over time, he learned the technical language because he needed to, not because it was easy. Tobin’s job is to translate what technology experts do into messaging that helps clients make decisions.

He learned how the hard way becomes the useful way – first through the job market pressures after the 2008-2009 recession, when many companies weren’t hiring, and then through years of working inside marketing teams to build credibility.

By the time Tobin ended up working at ANC Group, he understood a hard reality: in technology, trust is earned and isn’t automatic. It can’t be forced or faked. When ANC Group leaned into AI, adopting it as a tool rather than a replacement, Tobin recognized the principle and adapted.

In the past one to two years, ANC Group didn’t treat AI as a shortcut to shortcuts. Tobin described their approach as “using AI to accelerate tasks, while keeping humans as the final authority.” Although AI can generate information quickly, it still requires a human review. “AI outputs can become a liability if messaging goes out without the right checks,” Tobin shared. Those checks are ensuring messaging doesn’t go out without the correct brand voice and positioning. Tobin emphasized that people can “smell” when content isn’t real, and distrust can damage a company’s reputation faster than a slow marketing cycle ever could.

ANC Group’s pivot wasn’t “AI everywhere,” it was:

AI can help produce and reorganize
Experts can still validate
And, more importantly: people can stay in their seats.

Keeping the human element of their day-to-day operations and marketing efforts is critical to ANC. Their “team members are long-tenured professionals with 25+ years of experience,” and are continuously credentialed through certifications and vendor qualification processes. To ANC Group, this matters because, in cyber and infrastructure work, competence isn’t a one-time checkbox; it’s ongoing proof of expertise.

ANC Group is family-owned and locally based in Greenville, South Carolina. Tobin described ANC Group as priding itself on choosing visibility methods to foster real trust: showing up in-person, opening their doors, and hosting events that feel more like relationship-building events than sales pitches.

Looking ahead, Tobin described working toward ANC Group not only being a “household name” in the Upstate, but as being well-known across the country for not only their work, but also their community ties and involvement. Tobin highlighted interest in organizations connected to youth-focused groups and to partner with local organizations.

ANC Group’s core focus is education. They’re described as an industry expert since 1999 having tabletop-style preparedness services: helping businesses run “fire drills” for cyberattacks through role-playing, scenario planning, and preparing press statements to keep teams on the lookout for incidents. The stated goal is continuity: a playbook empowering companies to respond quickly, minimize damages, and protect financial data, personal data, and health information.

Cyber attacks often happen through routine human mistakes:

Clicking on a plausible email.
Returning from vacation or the holidays and casually clicking through inbox madness.
And reusing insecure passwords across systems.

All of which leaves the door wide open for cyberattacks. ANC Group’s approach to training incorporates real-life experiences. They send mock phishing emails, measure the results, review failure points, and retrain people to enhance technological alertness. As part of their education piece, they inform companies and organizations of the tactics that attackers use to gain entry, all the while, remaining undetected until it’s too late.

Tobin shared a behind-the-scenes scenario without naming the business directly. Basically, someone in the company clicked on something they shouldn’t have, with the link they clicked being disguised as some legitimate paper-working hyperlink, all the while, this assailant was just assuming the identity of a colleague working in their same company. “That one click enabled access to a cyber attacker,” he shared, explaining that scenarios similar to this one could be prevented with ANC Group’s assistance.

In other words, ANC Group’s growth mindset, from Craig Tobin’s perspective, isn’t about chasing technology trends, but it is about using modern technology to help clients feel protected, so that their customers can be safer, too.

https://www.greenvillebusinessmag.com/stories/anc-group-building-trust-in-a-digital-age,54321