Google is loading AI directly into Chrome, and for once, that is actually good news for your team right now, today, without doing anything extra.

The way it works is Chrome is watching the sites you visit as you go and warning you if something looks like a scam. We are talking about the kind of attack where a bad site tells you to copy a command and paste it somewhere on your computer. That is a real thing people fall for, and now Chrome is trying to catch it before your employee does something they should not.

The Bad Guys Are Still Ahead

I want to be straight with you: the tools the bad guys have are outstripping the tools the good guys have. That is just the reality. The bad guys are always at the bleeding edge, and everybody else is always following. You cannot get around that.

But that does not mean improvements do not matter. This one is free, it is already in Chrome, and if your team is already using Chrome, they get it. That counts for something.

What to Actually Do With This

Make sure your team is running Chrome and that it is up to date. That is really it for this one. You do not have to configure anything or pay for anything. The protection is just there.

And if you want to pair it with something that actually covers the bigger gaps, go back to the basics: DMARC and DKIM on your email, multi-factor authentication on your accounts, and some kind of monitoring that alerts you when your email gets accessed from two places at once. That stack will do a lot more heavy lifting than any single browser feature. But a free layer on top of that? I will take it.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Central Florida.

I had never heard of 3D Systems before I came across this story, and I will be honest, my first reaction was not about the company at all. It was about location. The center opened in Colorado. And my immediate thought was: where is the Michigan version of this?

There probably is one somewhere. But Traverse City should be asking that question out loud.

What This Center Actually Does

The idea is straightforward. 3D Systems opened an industrial technology center in the US specifically to expand domestic capacity for advanced manufacturing. The goal is to give manufacturers, including smaller operations, access to equipment, expertise, and training that would otherwise be completely out of reach for a company that cannot afford its own R&D lab.

That is the part that caught my attention. This is not just for the big guys. It is designed to pull smaller manufacturers into capabilities they could not touch on their own.

And it fits into something bigger. This is exactly what people mean when they talk about reshoring and strengthening US manufacturing. I think that is tremendously important. There is no reason we cannot build that stuff here, and this kind of center is one way to make that actually happen.

Why Northern Michigan Should Pay Attention

I will be straight with you: I do not know enough about advanced manufacturing techniques to tell you exactly which ones would matter most for businesses up here. That is something I want to learn. If any of you are in manufacturing and want to come on and talk through what you do and how you do it, I would love that conversation. I would ask a lot of questions and learn a lot.

What I do know is that having something like this nearby would be a real opportunity for local manufacturers to grow into next-generation production. Right now, if you want to go use their equipment and see what it could do for your operation, you are booking a trip to Colorado. It would be a lot better if we had it here.

What to Actually Do About This

If you are a manufacturer in Northern Michigan, here is where I would start:

• Go talk to NMLNMC or the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and find out what programs already exist around advanced manufacturing access.
• Talk to your industry association. There may already be grant opportunities or coalitions forming that you are not plugged into yet.
• Think about whether there is a larger company, maybe a big aerospace or automotive-level operation, that might sponsor bringing a high-end next-generation manufacturing training and production facility to this area. That kind of sponsorship is how these things get built.
• Ask yourself honestly whether the domestic manufacturing push is creating real opportunities for your size of business, and what you would need to take advantage of them.

The domestic manufacturing push is real. I hope it is creating opportunities for small businesses, not just the large ones. Getting connected locally is the fastest way to find out.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

AI agents are coming to manufacturing, and the question everybody needs to be asking right now is: can you trust one to make the right call at 2 a.m. when nobody’s watching?

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s where we’re headed. And I think we’re getting close to a point where the answer is yes, but we’re not quite there yet, and the gap matters a lot when you’re talking about production equipment, parts specs, and scheduling.

Assistant vs. Agent: The Difference Actually Matters

An AI assistant is basically a chatbot. You talk to it, it responds, it does what you ask. An AI agent is different. An agent makes decisions. It acts on its own, based on rules and data you’ve given it, without you asking it to do anything in that moment.

When I publish this, an agent is making a whole bunch of decisions behind the scenes. There’s a pile of information behind that agent so the decisions it makes are at least close to what I’d expect. That’s the idea. But in manufacturing, if an agent decides at 2 a.m. to change your production calendar, or starts pumping out parts to the wrong spec, that costs real money. That’s not a chatbot giving you a weird answer you can ignore. That’s a machine doing the wrong thing for hours before anyone notices.

I’m Building One of These Right Now, and It’s Humbling

I’m working on an AI service coordinator for my own business. It’s supposed to look at all the work my team has, who has what, how much, their skill sets, how urgent each issue is, how important the customer is, and then decide who handles what and when, and let the customer know how long it’ll be. Humans do that job right now, and honestly, I’m not that impressed with how humans do it. We get pulled into things. We forget. More important stuff pops up and we miss it.

An AI should handle that better. It should be able to stay on top of everything at once and flag when something needs attention. So I built it. I tested it against real historical data, with the human decisions as the gold standard. It scored 57%.

But here’s the thing I actually found useful: it told me why it scored so low. And it wasn’t the AI’s fault. It was rules I had put in that made it make those decisions. So we’re tweaking those. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

The point is, even in a relatively low-risk situation like mine, getting the data right and the rules right takes real work. On a shop floor, the stakes are higher.

What You Should Actually Do This Week

If you’re running any AI automation tools right now, or if your vendors have started rolling out features that sound like they’re doing things automatically, here’s where to start:

• List every AI automation tool currently running in your business. If you have any, I’d love to hear how it’s going for you.
• Put one person on your team in charge of being the AI checkpoint. Don’t let decisions just happen without someone reviewing them. Build a dashboard if you can, watch what it’s doing, and train it over time before you let it run loose.
• Check with your vendors on whether any recent updates have added agentic or autonomous features. If a vendor turned on autonomous features without telling you, that’s a problem. Find a new vendor.

I want to get there with AI agents making real shop floor decisions. I think we all will. I just don’t want to be the first one to find out what happens when it goes wrong.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Chicagoland.

This one doesn’t surprise me at all, but it’s worth talking about because a lot of business owners think they’re covered when they’re not.

There are technologies called DKIM and DMARC. As part of our managed services, when we have the access, we set those up on your email. What they do is authenticate your email system so that not just anybody can send emails that look like they came from you. It makes it harder for bad guys to fool your vendors or your customers by spoofing your domain. That’s great, and it works.

Why Authentication Alone Is Not Enough

The problem is this: if someone gets into your actual email account, none of that matters. The email they send is legitimate. It came from your real account, from your real domain. DKIM and DMARC look at it and say, yep, checks out. And it gets delivered. And it fools people.

How do they get in? Usually because there’s no MFA, no multi-factor authentication, and nobody’s watching the account. We run alerting systems that flag when an email account gets accessed from two different places at once, or accessed from one city and then a short time later from somewhere far away. If you check your email in Traverse City and then it gets checked in Bangladesh an hour later, something’s wrong and the system reacts. Most businesses don’t have anything like that.

So the bad guys get in, and now they’re sending emails from inside your legitimate, authenticated email account. The message inside that email may be completely fraudulent, but the email itself is real. It’s going to get delivered, and it’s going to fool people.

What You Actually Need to Have in Place

Start with DKIM and DMARC if you don’t have them. That’s the foundation. Then get an email monitoring system that watches for suspicious access patterns. Those two things together will take care of about 95% of your problems.

The remaining 5 to 10% comes down to your team, especially whoever handles accounts payable. Do not send a payment just because you got an email. Double-check it. And it’s even worse than that now, because you can’t just call the number on the email and assume you’re talking to the right person. The AI voice tools out there are convincing. You’ve seen what they can do with public figures, making it look and sound like someone it isn’t. They can do the same thing with the voice of whoever you think you’re calling. So verify through a separate channel, a number you already have on file, not one that came in the email.

Train your team. Make sure they know this can happen. We offer that training if you want to hand it off.

The short version: just because you have a secure email setup doesn’t mean your email is secure. Those are two very different things.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

AI virtual receptionists are now being aimed specifically at small service businesses, and honestly, I am not surprised at all. This is exactly where things are going.

What We Are Actually Talking About

An AI-powered virtual receptionist handles calls and scheduling for small businesses. Not enterprise companies with big IT budgets. Small service businesses. The kind of businesses I work with every day.

And there is an important distinction here. There is a difference between an AI that just answers a question when you ask it and an AI that actually does something on your behalf. A receptionist that books appointments, answers the phone, and keeps things moving without a human sitting there doing it, that is an AI agent doing real work.

Why This Makes Sense for Small Business Owners

Routine tasks are exactly what AI is built for. The real work is getting everything connected so the AI can actually do its job. Once that is done, you get to stop doing the stuff that was eating your time.

Missing calls costs you customers. Drowning in scheduling eats up time you do not have. If an AI can sit on top of that and handle it, that is a real win. And the cost is coming down to where small businesses can actually look at this without laughing.

Before You Jump In

My advice is the same as it is with any AI tool right now. Do not just turn it on and walk away. Put a person in the loop, at least at first. Train it on your actual business, your services, your customers, how you want things handled. Check what it is doing. The tools are good, but they need the right information to make the right calls, literally and figuratively.

If you are a service business and you are losing time to phone tag and scheduling chaos, this is worth a serious look. Just go in with your eyes open and make sure somebody on your team knows what the AI is doing until you trust it.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

A major dark web marketplace operator just got sentenced to 40 years in prison. Forty years. For facilitating hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal transactions and putting ransomware tools into the hands of criminals.

That is not a slap on the wrist. That is a career-ending, life-ending sentence, and honestly, good.

What This Person Actually Did

This was not some low-level hacker. This was the person running the marketplace, the infrastructure that made it easy for criminals to buy and sell ransomware tools and other illegal goods at scale. Hundreds of millions in transactions flowing through one place.

When your business gets hit with ransomware, there is usually a whole supply chain behind it. Someone built the tool. Someone sold it. Someone ran the platform where the deal happened. This prosecution went after one of those platform operators, which is the right move.

Why This Actually Matters

Law enforcement going after the enablers, not just the people pulling the trigger, is a big deal. It is harder to prosecute and takes longer, but it does more damage to the criminal ecosystem than catching one ransomware attacker at a time.

Forty years sends a message to everyone else running one of these platforms that this is not a victimless white-collar situation. You are going to prison for a very long time.

For small business owners, this is just a reminder that the tools being used against you are not coming from nowhere. There are organized operations behind them, and those operations are starting to face real consequences.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

I have a client that makes electric motors right here in Traverse City. Bay Motor Products. Great company, been doing it a long time. So when I see a story about the electric motor sector taking off, it gets my attention fast.

The demand for electric motors is surging, and it is not just the big players that stand to benefit. Small manufacturers are well positioned to pick up real business from this shift if they move on it.

Where All This Demand Is Coming From

EVs, HVAC upgrades, industrial automation. All of it needs electric motors, and a lot of it. The push to expand domestic manufacturing has been building, and I think that is a good thing. We are actually making stuff again. Hallelujah.

Industry watchers are calling this a strategic moment for firms to look hard at whether their current capabilities line up with what the electric motor supply chain actually needs. That is worth taking seriously, because supply chain openings like this tend to close fast.

What Makes Electric Motor Manufacturing Different

This is not just cutting metal or injecting plastic into a mold. From what I can tell, electric motor manufacturing is a very specific process. Lots of small components, sheet metal pieces, wire wrapped around things. It takes real skill and real knowledge to do it right.

That matters because skilled people are not everywhere. I used to do work for a company that made robots and had to use electric motors. They picked up and moved to Tennessee, where they promptly went out of business because Tennessee did not have the skilled workforce they needed. Michigan has those people. Northern Michigan especially. Do not move your company away from that.

What to Do If You Are in Manufacturing

If you make things that require motors, or if you are a supplier that could fit into this supply chain, now is the time to look around. AI tools are actually helping manufacturers find new customers and new places to sell, so that part is getting easier. Search for electric motor manufacturers or tier one suppliers in your region and reach out to their procurement teams.

And if you are in the area and want a direct connection, reach out to me and I will put you in touch with Andy at Bay Motor Products. Great guy, great products, and he has been at this a long time. Worth a conversation.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

This story caught my attention because it is exactly the kind of thing that happens when your business is already in crisis mode and you are desperate to get your data back.

The owner of a Florida-based ransomware remediation company, a firm called Monster Cloud, is facing federal fraud charges. The scheme was pretty straightforward once you see it. He would come in and tell victims he had the technical expertise to recover their data without paying the ransom. So let’s say the ransomware demand was ten grand. He might charge the victim eight thousand, tell them he’s cleaning it up himself, then go to the attackers and negotiate it down to five. He pockets the three thousand dollar difference and never actually does what he told the client he was doing.

Why This Works on Panicked Business Owners

When ransomware hits, your business is bleeding. Every hour matters. You are not in a great position to carefully vet the company you just called for help. That is exactly when someone like this walks in, sounds confident, and you just hand them the keys.

And here is the part that really gets me: he could have probably made decent money just doing legitimate remediation. He clearly had the skills to pull this off. But instead he ran a fraud operation and now he is looking at federal charges. Not a great career move.

Paying the Ransom Is Not the Whole Problem

Whether you pay through a middleman or directly, paying to get your data back does not mean you are clean. If the ransomware software is still sitting on your systems, they will just encrypt you again. The remediation, actually finding and removing whatever got in, is the part that matters most. That is what you are really paying for, and that is what you need to make sure actually happens.

There is also a real legal risk to paying ransoms directly. The FBI does not look kindly on you sending Bitcoin to what could be an international fraud organization or worse. So do not make a habit of it.

The other thing worth knowing is that the attackers themselves usually do return your data when paid. They have a business model to protect. If word got out that they took the money and gave nothing back, nobody would ever pay them again. That does not make them trustworthy people, but it does mean the ransom payment side of this usually works as advertised. The recovery side is where you can get burned.

Vet Your Recovery Vendor Before You Need One

The best advice I can give you comes out of this story directly: find and vet a recovery vendor now, before anything happens. When your systems are down and your data is locked, you do not have time to research anybody. You will just call whoever comes up first in a search and hope for the best. That is how you end up with a Monster Cloud situation.

• Ask for references from actual clients who went through a ransomware incident with them.
• Understand exactly what they will do technically, not just what they will negotiate.
• Make sure remediation, actually cleaning the infection off your systems, is part of what they are promising.
• Be skeptical of anyone who leads with “we can get your data back without paying the ransom” and then cannot explain how.

If you want help figuring out who to trust for this, reach out and we can talk through it.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Central Florida.

People are impersonating CEOs and other important people inside Microsoft Teams meetings. Not just with text or chat messages. With audio and video. You can be looking at somebody who looks like the boss, talks like the boss, sounds like the boss, and it is not the boss. It is a criminal.

That is the problem Microsoft is trying to address, and the way they are doing it is actually pretty smart.

What Microsoft Is Actually Building

Microsoft is not building their own deepfake detection tool. What they are doing is opening up a portal inside Teams so that third-party deepfake detection software can plug in and do its job. Think of it as a gateway. The tools come in, provide you the service, and you pay the tool vendor, not Microsoft.

Honestly, I think that is the right call. Microsoft has too much going on to keep up with how fast this technology moves. The third-party tools are going to be better at this than anything Microsoft could build and maintain on their own.

The one thing I will be watching is how many third-party tools flood that marketplace. It is going to be very easy for developers to spin these up, and you could end up with a lot of noise before the good ones rise to the top.

Who Actually Needs to Pay Attention to This

If your business uses Teams for vendor negotiations, contract conversations, or any situation where someone might be asked to approve a payment, this matters to you. That is exactly the scenario these criminals are targeting. They get on a call, they look and sound like someone you trust, and they ask you to move money.

The technology that generates these fake video feeds is not perfect yet, and that is where a useful trick comes in. The AI systems that create these fake faces struggle when a hand moves in front of the face. If something feels slightly off on a video call, ask the person to put their hand in front of their face and touch their nose. If the video feed goes wonky, if the face distorts or breaks, you are probably not talking to who you think you are talking to.

It sounds almost too simple, but it works right now because the video generation AI cannot handle that kind of occlusion cleanly.

What to Do While You Wait for the Tools

Use that hand-in-front-of-the-face test any time something feels off. Trust that instinct. If a call feels slightly weird, it might be.

Beyond that, do not approve payments or make major decisions over a Teams call without a secondary confirmation through a completely different channel. A quick text or a phone call to a number you already have on file goes a long way.

I will be keeping a close eye on which third-party tools come through that Teams portal as they become available. If you want to know what is worth using when the time comes, reach out and I will point you in the right direction.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

The Department of Energy is accepting applications right now for programs that support small manufacturers. Money is out there. I wanted to see how hard it actually is to find it, so I tried the new federal portal the Trump administration just launched called America.gov. It is supposed to pull together all the government websites and funding opportunities into one AI-powered place. I went live and tested it on the spot.

What America.gov Actually Did

I copied the DOE application program right out of my notes and dropped it into America.gov. It thought about it for a second, then gave me a link to something called the Exchange, a DOE funding opportunities page. Sounds great. Except when I clicked it, the page had moved. The Exchange had been consolidated somewhere else, and I had to create a new account just to get to the right spot.

The AI should have caught that. It should have followed that redirect and said, hey, that link is dead, here is where you actually need to go. It did not. It handed me a link to a dead page that eventually got me to the right place, but only after I did the work myself. If I had just typed DOE application portal into Google, I honestly do not think I would have gotten there any faster.

Once I got through all that, there was a button for new funding opportunities. So the money is findable. It is just not easy.

The Reality of Federal Funding

Here is my honest take on how federal funding works. For every dollar you give the government in taxes, they keep about fifty cents. Then they make you do forty-five cents worth of work to get five cents back. That is the deal. The money is real, but the process is real too, and it is not light work.

America.gov did not help with the hard part, which is actually searching through the opportunities and filling everything out. It got me to the door. That is about it. If you are a manufacturer and you want to pursue this, you need to be prepared to dig in.

If You Manufacture Things, Pay Attention to This

Federal manufacturing support programs have expanded. That is worth knowing. If you are a small manufacturer, there are programs out there designed for companies your size. The DOE is one place to look. I would also tell you to search for the Visa Foundation’s US Small Business Growth and Innovation Program, because that one is open for applications too and does not require you to fight through a government portal to find it.

A few practical things if you want to chase the DOE opportunity:

• Go to America.gov and search for DOE funding opportunities, but expect a few extra clicks to get to the actual Exchange site.
• You will need to create an account on the consolidated Exchange to access and search current openings.
• Look for the new funding opportunities button once you are in.
• If you want help figuring out whether any of this applies to your business, reach out and we can work through it together.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Chicagoland.