A manufacturing CIO lands in home services
West Shore Home, a Pennsylvania based home remodeling company headquartered in Mechanicsburg, named Brian Nabet as chief technology officer in early August. Nabet brings more than 25 years of IT leadership experience, most recently as CIO of Armstrong World Industries, the ceiling and wall systems manufacturer, where he led AI adoption and modernization initiatives. He reports directly to CEO and founder BJ Werzyn, a reporting line that puts technology decisions close to the top of the company rather than several layers removed. That direct line matters for a company that has grown quickly through geographic expansion and now needs its technology roadmap tied to the same person setting overall company strategy.
Nabet replaces Danny Fisher, who is not leaving the company but moving into a newly created chief systems officer role. That is worth noting on its own: West Shore Home is expanding its technology leadership bench rather than swapping one executive for another, a sign it sees enough surface area in its technology problems to justify multiple senior owners at once. Keeping Fisher on in a redefined role also preserves institutional knowledge of the platforms Nabet now has to unify, rather than handing that history to an outsider with no context on how the original systems were built.
Why a remodeler needs manufacturing grade AI experience
West Shore Home has built proprietary technology including Hawkeye, an AI powered computer vision tool used to measure remodeling jobs, along with a Schedule at the Point of Sale system that books work during the sales conversation itself. Nabet's stated mandate is to consolidate these and other platforms into one connected experience spanning front office, mid office, and back office operations, rather than leaving each tool to operate as its own island. Both tools were built to solve an immediate sales problem, and neither was designed with the other, or with whatever comes next, in mind.
Nabet described the priority as building a bridge across those layers, saying the goal is to "bridge front-office to mid-office to back-office capabilities and deliver them in a frictionless, more seamless fashion." He also emphasized that adoption cannot stop at field crews: "We're going to get this in the hands of people in procurement, in finance, people across our business," he said, pointing to a rollout that reaches well past the customer facing side of the company.
The multi tech chief C-suite is now standard
West Shore Home now runs three distinct technology chief titles at once: a chief data and AI officer in Eppie Vojt, a chief systems officer in Fisher, and now a chief technology officer in Nabet. That level of specialization inside a private, mid sized remodeling company would have looked unusual a few years ago. It looks routine today. A Deloitte report from May 2026 found that more than seven in ten companies now carry at least five technology leaders in the C-suite, and privately held operators outside traditional tech are increasingly part of that count rather than the exception to it.
That fragmentation forces clearer scoping of who owns what: data and AI strategy, core systems reliability, and customer facing technology integration each need a defined owner, or the company ends up with duplicated tooling and turf disputes instead of the speed it was hoping to buy by adding more senior technology roles in the first place. West Shore Home's decision to draw those lines explicitly, rather than leaving Nabet to sort out overlap with Vojt and Fisher informally, is itself a signal of how seriously the company is treating the risk of internal duplication as it scales.
What private, fast scaling operators can take from this
West Shore Home's growth pattern, a national remodeling roll up scaling physical operations quickly and backfilling enterprise grade technology leadership once the original systems stop keeping pace, is a repeatable playbook for operators in similar businesses. Nabet's manufacturing background brings specific experience in computer vision and AI modernization work that West Shore Home needs to make Hawkeye's measurement technology reliable as the company keeps adding new markets and crews, each with its own installers, suppliers, and local scheduling quirks that strain a system built for a smaller footprint.
For portfolio company operators watching from the outside, hiring a CTO from an adjacent but technically relevant industry, manufacturing AI applied to home services measurement AI, is a bet worth studying. It favors transferable AI operations experience over strict sector pedigree, and it suggests boards evaluating technology hires elsewhere should weigh the underlying skill set more heavily than a candidate's industry résumé. Operators scaling through acquisition in particular should note how deliberately West Shore Home is building layered technology leadership ahead of, rather than after, its next growth push.
The real test is adoption beyond the field crew
The harder half of Nabet's job is pushing these tools into procurement and finance rather than stopping once they reach the technicians measuring a job site. Most home services technology rollouts stall the moment they leave the truck, because the systems were built for field use first and back office use as an afterthought, if at all, leaving finance teams reconciling numbers manually long after the customer facing side looks state of the art.
Whether Nabet succeeds will show up in mundane places: quote cycle times, scheduling accuracy, and how cleanly the back office reconciles what the field crews report. None of that will generate press coverage the way the Hawkeye AI tool itself did when it launched, and it is exactly where CTOs earn or lose their mandate at fast growing operators like West Shore Home, long after the initial appointment headline has faded.
