This week on Nerds News: AI agents are starting to show up on shop floors, and the question of whether to trust them is worth taking seriously. There’s also a gap in email authentication that most businesses don’t know about, a new industrial technology center from 3D Systems that raises a question for Northern Michigan, and a new scam-spotting feature coming to Chrome.
AI Agents on the Shop Floor: Cool Engineering, Real Questions
I read a piece from Industry Week this week on AI agents coming to manufacturing — it’s a little ahead of itself. But the core question it raises is worth sitting with: if an AI agent is making decisions at 2 a.m., do you trust it?
First, the distinction the article draws is actually useful. An AI assistant is a chatbot. You ask it things, it responds, maybe it does a task when you tell it to. An AI agent is different. An agent has context, has rules, has data behind it, and it makes decisions on its own — without you in the loop. That’s what we’re talking about.
For manufacturing, the concern is obvious. An agent that misreads a spec or reshuffles your production calendar at 2 a.m. doesn’t just cause a headache — it costs real money. Parts come out wrong. Schedules collapse. You wake up and nothing is working right.
I’m building one of these myself right now. A service coordinator agent — something that looks at the work across my whole team, checks skill sets, evaluates how urgent each issue is, figures out who should handle what and when, and notifies the customer on timing. Humans do that job today. I’m not always impressed with how humans do that job, because humans get pulled into things. The most urgent item in front of them becomes the most important thing in the world, and meanwhile three other things are quietly on fire.
An agent shouldn’t have that problem. It should be able to hold the whole picture at once.
My agent scored about 57% on its last test run against historical data. That sounds bad. But it told me exactly why — and the problem wasn’t the AI, it was some rules I’d put in that were steering it wrong. That’s actually the right failure mode. It’s fixable. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
The article’s practical advice for this week is solid, so I’ll pass it along with my own commentary:
- List every AI automation tool currently running in your business. If you don’t know what’s running, you can’t supervise it.
- Put one person on your team in the AI checkpoint role. Don’t let autonomous decisions just happen without a human reviewing the dashboard, at least while you’re still training the thing.
- Check with your vendors whether recent updates have added agentic or autonomous features. This one I want to underline. If a vendor quietly turns on autonomous decision-making without telling you — get a new vendor. That’s not a feature rollout, that’s a liability you didn’t sign up for.
We’re getting close to the point where agents can make sound decisions if they have the right data. The data part is always the hard part. But we’re moving in the right direction.
Authenticated Email Has a Gap You Should Know About
This one’s been making the rounds as a big revelation. Authenticated emails can still be faked. I’m not surprised. Let me explain what’s actually going on.
There are email authentication technologies called DKIM and DMARC. When set up correctly, they essentially sign your outgoing email so that the receiving server can verify it actually came from your domain — not from some bad actor spoofing your address. We set these up as part of our managed services work whenever we have the access to do it. They work. They’re worth having.
The gap is this: DKIM and DMARC protect your domain. They don’t protect your account. If someone gets into your actual email account — because you don’t have multi-factor authentication turned on, because there’s no monitoring watching for impossible logins — they don’t need to spoof anything. They’re sending from the real account. The email is legitimate. Every authentication check passes. And the message inside it is a fraud.
We run alerting systems that flag when an email account gets accessed from two different locations in a timeframe that doesn’t make sense — Traverse City in the morning, somewhere overseas an hour later, that kind of thing. Most businesses don’t have that. Most businesses also don’t have MFA turned on. Those two gaps together are how this plays out in the real world.
What to do this week, in order:
- Make sure DKIM and DMARC are configured on your domain. Start there.
- Get email account monitoring in place so impossible logins get flagged.
- Turn on MFA. I know I say this every week. Turn on MFA.
- Train your accounts payable team specifically. Don’t release a payment because you got an email. Don’t even release it because you called the number on the email and someone answered and sounded right — AI voice cloning is convincing enough now that this is a real attack vector. Call a number you already have on file from a previous invoice or your own records.
Secure email and email security are not the same thing. Your domain can be fully authenticated and your account can still be wide open. Both matter.
3D Systems Opens a Manufacturing Center, and I Have a Question for Northern Michigan
3D Systems, a company I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of before this week, just opened an industrial technology center in Colorado. The goal is to give manufacturers — including smaller operations — access to advanced manufacturing equipment, expertise, and training that would otherwise require a full R&D lab budget to touch.
My immediate reaction: where’s the Michigan version of this?
There probably is one somewhere in the state. But I’d love to see something like this in Northern Michigan. Traverse City should be asking how to get a facility like this here — whether that means going to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, talking to NWMCA, or finding a large manufacturer or aerospace company willing to sponsor a next-generation production and training facility that our local manufacturers could actually use.
The broader push toward domestic manufacturing reshoring is real, and I think it’s important. There’s no good reason we can’t build more of this stuff here. If any of you are in manufacturing and want to come on the show and talk about what advanced manufacturing techniques would actually move the needle for your operation, I would love that conversation. I’d learn a lot and I’d enjoy every minute of asking questions.
Quick Hit: Chrome Is Getting an AI Scam Spotter
Google is rolling a Gemini-powered feature into Chrome that watches the sites you visit and flags potential scams in real time. It’s a useful idea. The caveat is that the bad guys are always at the bleeding edge and the defensive tools are always following. That’s just the nature of this. But making the browser itself a layer of protection — rather than relying entirely on the user to notice something’s off — is the right direction.
It won’t catch everything. It’s one more layer, not a replacement for the others. But I’ll take it.
That’s the week. If you’re curious about the November 18th webinar, stay tuned — more on that soon. See you next time.
— Albert
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