A Gallup Institution, Built to Last: How T&R Market Is Modernizing Its IT with AI
- Arthur Igloo
- Jun 10
- 3 min read
For more than fifty years, T&R Market has been a cornerstone of Gallup, New Mexico.
What began as a small family store in the early 1970s has grown into one of the area's most beloved independent grocers — a place the Gallup and Diné community counts on for the freshest produce in town, a full-service meat counter, a bakery and deli, and specialties you simply can't find at a chain. Half a century in, it's still family-owned, still community-first, and still evolving.
That spirit of "keep getting better" is exactly why we got to spend a morning with Jeff Larson, IT Manager at T&R Market — and why his story is worth telling.
The kind of project that lands on a capable IT pro
Like a lot of thriving local businesses, T&R runs lean and smart, and Jeff is the person who keeps the technology humming across the operation. Recently the company decided to modernize the backbone of its day-to-day work by moving from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 — a smart, forward-looking upgrade for a growing, multi-location business.
If you've never done one, a Workspace-to-Microsoft-365 migration is a genuinely big project. Email, identity, licensing, file storage, calendars, devices — all of it has to move without dropping a single order or interrupting a single register. It's the kind of work companies normally hand to an outside consultant at a premium. Jeff is more than capable of running it; what he didn't have was a spare week to become a full-time migration specialist on top of everything else he does. So we showed him a better way.
AI as a deeply-prepared partner — not autopilot
There's a lot of noise about AI "replacing" people. That's not what this is. A migration like T&R's involves real decisions a human has to own. What AI can do — extraordinarily well — is be the always-prepared expert partner a one-person IT team rarely has access to.
We sat down with Jeff and set up Cowork (we use Anthropic's Claude desktop). In about ten minutes: install it, point it at a project folder, let it build itself genuine expertise on Microsoft 365 migrations, and give it the specifics of T&R's environment. Then we asked it to plan the migration with Jeff.
About fifteen minutes later, it had written a tailored migration playbook — sectioned, specific, and detailed enough to hand to a technician and say "follow this." A second pass produced a companion document covering the things that trip people up: a careful DNS cutover timeline, sensible licensing recommendations for a business T&R's size, how file storage should be organized (not just copied over), calendar and mail-rule gotchas, an end-user "day one" survival kit, and a top-ten list of pitfalls. It was, candidly, the kind of plan we'd have charged a client real money to produce by hand a year ago.
Jeff stayed in the driver's seat — and came out sharper
The best part wasn't the documents. It was that Jeff stayed in charge the whole time. Every time a real-world wrinkle came up, he simply told Cowork, and it folded the detail into the plan. It remembered the project across the session — and, thanks to a project memo it wrote for itself, it will pick up right where they left off next week, too.
By the time T&R's migration is done, Jeff won't just have a finished project — he'll know this material cold, because he effectively built the plan himself, with an expert at his elbow. The total cost of that expert partner? About twenty dollars a month, plus the hour we spent getting him set up.
Practical AI, for businesses that actually run on it
T&R Market has thrived for fifty years by being resourceful, community-minded, and willing to adopt the right tools at the right time. Watching Jeff take on a project bigger than any one person and turn it into something manageable is exactly what good AI looks like in 2026 — not science fiction, just a really well-prepared partner showing up on the day you need one.
That's the whole idea behind Arthur Igloo:
Practical AI, deployed by people who understand how a small business actually runs.
If you're a VoIP PBX Express or Arthur Igloo customer, sitting down to set up your first AI project like this is included, at no charge — the same way we sat with Jeff.
To the whole T&R Market family: thank you for letting us be a small part of your next fifty years.
Want a hand getting started on a project you've been putting off? Call us at (360) 515-2700 or email info@arthurigloo.com.