Good morning, friends — happy to be here with you on a Thursday; this week we’re covering the electric motor manufacturing surge that’s quietly opening doors for small domestic suppliers, a Teams deepfake detection update that’s more interesting for what Microsoft didn’t build than what they did, a cautionary tale about a ransomware recovery firm that was playing both sides of the table, and a live test of the federal government’s new America.gov portal to see whether it actually helps you find funding.
Let’s get into it.
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The Electric Motor Boom Is Real, and Northern Michigan Is Positioned for It
Automation World is calling this a strategic moment for firms to assess whether their current capabilities align with the electric motor supply chain. That’s consultant-speak for: there’s a gap, and somebody’s going to fill it.
EVs, HVAC upgrades, industrial automation, and yes — robots — all need electric motors, and demand is surging across all of them at once. The push to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity is real, and for once, small manufacturers aren’t just watching the big players collect the upside. Supply chain openings like this tend to close fast, though. If you’re a manufacturer or a tier-one supplier in this region and you haven’t been talking to motor manufacturers about what they need, that conversation is worth having this week, not next quarter.
What makes electric motor manufacturing interesting from a process standpoint is that it’s not stamping or injection molding. You’re assembling lots of precision components — laminated steel, wound wire, tight tolerances — and the skill set required is different from general fabrication. Northern Michigan has those skilled people. That matters more than most economic development reports give it credit for.
Alert readers who are in manufacturing or supply chain: AI is actually useful here for prospecting. Finding electric motor manufacturers and tier-one suppliers in your region, identifying procurement contacts, drafting outreach — that’s a legitimate use case where the tools earn their keep.
Teams Deepfake Detection: Microsoft Did the Smart Thing (For Once)
Microsoft announced that Teams is getting deepfake detection. The headline sounds like a feature. The reality is more interesting.
What Microsoft actually built is a portal — a gateway inside Teams that lets third-party deepfake detection tools plug in and do their job. They didn’t build their own detection engine. They built the door and said, come on in.
Honestly? That’s the right call. The deepfake arms race is moving faster than any single vendor can track, and Microsoft has enough on its plate. Third-party tools that specialize in this are going to be sharper, updated more frequently, and more competitive on price. The tradeoff is that you’ll have another vendor to evaluate and another subscription to manage — but that’s a better problem than relying on a detection tool that’s already six months behind the threat.
Why does this matter for your business specifically? If your team uses Teams for vendor negotiations, payment approvals, or any conversation where someone’s identity carries real financial weight, you are already in the threat model for this. Criminals are impersonating executives and vendors on video calls — not just in text or email. You can be looking at someone who looks like your CFO, sounds like your CFO, and is asking you to wire money. It’s not your CFO.
Here’s a low-tech trick worth knowing right now, before any software is deployed: 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. Current AI video generation struggles badly with hands obscuring faces. The image will go wrong in a way that’s immediately obvious — the face distorts, the illusion breaks. It’s not a perfect test, but it costs nothing and takes five seconds.
The third-party tool ecosystem for Teams deepfake detection is going to get crowded fast. Evaluating which ones are actually worth deploying is exactly the kind of thing worth getting ahead of.
The Ransomware Recovery Firm That Was Playing Both Sides
The owner of a Florida-based ransomware remediation company — Monster Cloud — is now facing federal fraud charges. The scheme, once you see it, is almost elegant in a deeply irritating way.
A business gets hit with ransomware. Monster Cloud shows up and says: don’t pay the ransom, we have the technical expertise to recover your data, we’ll handle it for less. Client pays Monster Cloud. Monster Cloud goes to the ransomware operators and negotiates a lower payment. Pockets the difference. Never actually performed the remediation they claimed to be doing.
So the client paid for a technical recovery. What they got was a middleman negotiation with criminals, marked up, with the markup kept secret.
A few things worth noting here. First, this is exactly why you want a vetted incident response vendor before something happens, not while your business is down and you’re panicking. Vetting a vendor under pressure is how you end up with Monster Cloud. Second — and this is important — even a legitimate ransom payment doesn’t clean your system. If the ransomware payload is still sitting on your machines, you’ll get encrypted again. Payment and remediation are two separate problems, and conflating them is how you get burned twice.
Third: the FBI takes a dim view of businesses sending Bitcoin to international criminal organizations, even when those businesses are the victims. Ransomware groups are sometimes sanctioned entities. Paying them can create legal exposure for you, not just the criminals. It’s not a reason to never pay — sometimes it’s the least-bad option — but it’s a reason to have a conversation with someone who knows the current sanctions landscape before you do.
Forty years in prison for the dark web marketplace operator who was enabling ransomware tools, by the way. That was the last story of the show. Not a great career outcome.
Federal Funding and a Live Test of America.gov
The Department of Energy has funding opportunities open for small manufacturers right now. The Trump administration also launched a new AI-powered portal called America.gov, designed to consolidate federal funding information into one searchable place.
I tested it live on air. The short version: it found the right agency, generated a link to the DOE funding exchange, and that link was dead. The exchange had moved. To be fair, following the redirect got me to a page where I could actually search for funding opportunities — so it wasn’t a total loss. But the AI should have followed that redirect itself and surfaced the live page, not the stale one. That’s a solvable problem, and maybe they’ll fix it. Right now it’s a tool that gets you closer to the right place faster than a cold Google search would, but it’s not doing the hard part, which is helping you actually navigate the application.
The Visa Foundation also has a US Small Business Growth and Innovation Program accepting applications. Worth searching for if you’re a small business owner looking for non-federal options.
The money is out there. The work to get it is real, and the portals are imperfect. But if you’re a manufacturer and you haven’t looked at what’s currently open, it’s worth an hour of your time.
Have a great week, everyone. See you next Thursday.
— Albert
Questions about anything we covered today? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with your business in mind.
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