City Brewing strengthens email security by building agentic AI capability

IT Director Bobbie Suhr leads team to build its first agentic AI to address a high-value security use case

City Brewing is one of the largest contract beverage manufacturers and beer brewers in the United States. From four production sites across the country, the company supports both major and emerging brands, producing beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, seltzers, functional water, and energy drinks.

At the frontline of IT initiatives at City Brewing is Bobbie Suhr, a technology executive with more than 20 years’ experience in IT strategy. With the strategic direction of City Brewing’s Chief Information and Transformation Officer, Eric Ensminger, Suhr leads the day-to-day execution of City Brewing’s technology agenda, including its emerging AI initiatives.

Suhr’s path into technology was unconventional. She began her career in accounting but developed a strong interest in technology during an ERP implementation. “Starting off in the business set me up to bring a different perspective to technology,” said Suhr. “I grew up in the business, and I have a very strong focus on that.” That business-first foundation and a risk-taker’s mindset shaped how she approaches emerging technology – including agentic AI.

Tackling a security bottleneck that traditional automation could not solve

Email security incident response had become one of City Brewing’s most stubborn operational gaps. Triaging suspicious email alerts took eight hours per alert, consuming over 100 hours each month. Because the process rested on a single team member’s expertise, the company faced a real service and security risk whenever that individual was unavailable.

Each alert required judgment and cross-system lookups, and rule-based automation could not handle the subtle distinctions between a legitimate sender and a genuine phishing attempt. Suhr recognized that agentic AI could solve these challenges – and prove what the technology could deliver for her team.

How a structured, hands-on approach became the turning point

Suhr turned to Info-Tech Research Group’s Develop Your Agentic AI Prototype Workshop, a two-week engagement designed to take teams from problem definition to working prototype. “The method that Info-Tech brought to this workshop is structured, logical, and easy to follow,” said Suhr. “My team and I loved the format.”

The early phase concentrated on rigorously defining the current state. “My team was a little hesitant about why we were spending so much time on the current state,” said Suhr. “However, I’m so glad we spent all that time because when we got to development, it went very quickly.”

The agentic solution in action

During the workshop, the team designed a working multi-agent system to triage and remediate email security alerts end to end. Unlike traditional automation, the system was built to interpret ambiguity with context-aware decisions and execute human-in-the-loop actions.

At the center of the solution was a Security Triage Orchestrator coordinating a set of specialized agents. These agents formed a fully orchestrated workflow, from pulling alert data and analyzing message history to executing remediation – replacing hours of manual triage with a coordinated, agent-driven process.

A business case for measurable transformation

With a working prototype validated through the workshop, Suhr’s team is now moving the solution into production. Based on early performance and current alert volumes, the team projects the following operational improvements over the next several months:

• Mean time to remediate projected to drop from 8 hours to ~60 seconds.
• Analyst cost per alert projected to drop from $41.25 to $0.02.
• End-user response coverage expected to increase from 5% to 100%.
• Remediation inaccuracies expected to reduce by over 70%.

Beyond speed and cost, the production rollout is expected to deliver structural improvements:

• The process will no longer be dependent on a single expert.
• Every alert will follow a complete, auditable lifecycle.
• The team will accelerate response without scaling headcount.

From a single workflow, the team anticipates reclaiming over 1,200 hours of analyst capacity annually and realizing approximately $400,000 in projected cost avoidance, based on current volumes of 30 alerts per day.

“With the knowledge my team gained through that workshop, they’ve already built another agentic AI solution for our finance team. Bringing agentic AI into my development team was such a game changer.” – Bobbie Suhr, Director of IT, City Brewing Company

From a working prototype to a robust in-house capability

The more significant outcome was a practical, repeatable methodology the team could own moving forward. “It was a light bulb moment for us that if you have a tightly scoped use case, you can build an agentic solution in a couple of days,” said Suhr.

Suhr’s team quickly capitalized on the new capabilities. “With the knowledge my team gained through that workshop, they’ve already built another agentic AI solution for our finance team,” said Suhr. “Bringing agentic AI into my development team was such a game changer.”

Practical solutions that build partnership and trust

Suhr has been an Info-Tech member across multiple organizations in her career, and her reason for returning is simple: “What I love about Info-Tech is that I can actually apply their solutions to my organization. The blueprints, research, and analysts all come together, and everyone on my team benefits. If you’re building things you haven’t done before – these solutions help you fast-forward, so you don’t have to recreate the wheel.”

Her team leverages other Info-Tech solutions including guided implementations, diagnostics, contract negotiation services, and two-day in-person Leadership Summits. She shared, “The Leadership Summit workbook helped us capture the key takeaways, and I walked away with a very tangible list of things to do when I got back to the office – and I actually did them. How many people can say that after a conference?”

“What I love about Info-Tech is that I can actually apply it to my organization. The blueprints, research, and analysts all come together, and everyone on my team benefits. If you’re building things you haven’t done before – these solutions help you fast forward, so you don’t have to recreate the wheel.” – Bobbie Suhr, Director of IT, City Brewing Company

What’s next for City Brewing

Looking ahead, Suhr and Ensminger are focused on two key priorities: formalizing City Brewing’s enterprise AI strategy and governance framework, while continuing to modernize the company’s core infrastructure.

Suhr’s advice to peers still hesitant about agentic AI is to build confidence alongside capability: “If you’re afraid, then do this workshop. It will help to dispel all those paper tigers you might be afraid of in this world of agentic AI. It’s a nice safe way to start.”

“If you’re afraid, then do this workshop. It will help to dispel all those paper tigers you might be afraid of in this world of agentic AI. It’s a nice safe way to start.”
– Bobbie Suhr, Director of IT, City Brewing Company