Good morning, and happy Thursday — we’ve got a solid mix of topics this week: on-device AI agents hitting the manufacturing floor; a WatchGuard firewall vulnerability that’s actively causing ransomware infections and needs your attention; a Windows 11 update that finally fixes the scrambled-desktop bug Microsoft quietly introduced; and a quick look at small business credit cards getting better in 2026. Let’s get into it.
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AI agents on the shop floor — and why small is actually fine here
A UK engineering firm called 42 Technology has released an on-device AI agent designed to live directly on top of manufacturing equipment. Instead of shipping your machine data up to a cloud data center somewhere, a small AI agent sits right next to the machine and processes data there. The article is from Manufacturing Management, and it’s squarely aimed at manufacturers — so if you run a shop floor, pay attention.
Now, I want to be honest with you about what these agents actually are. They’re not the big, context-aware models you’d use to write a proposal or analyze a contract. They’re small. They’re running on $800 to $1,200 computers. And within those constraints, they’re not going to be programming your next CNC operation or making high-stakes decisions. Don’t expect that.
What they are good at is interpreting a steady stream of machine data — cycle times, quality measurements, tolerances — and doing something useful with it. Flagging anomalies. Sending alerts. Making the kind of pattern-recognition calls that straight workflow rules just can’t make. A hard-coded rule says “alert me if this number goes above X.” An AI agent says “this combination of readings is trending toward a problem I’ve seen before.” That’s a real difference, and it’s worth something on a production floor.
The other thing that makes local AI genuinely interesting for manufacturers is the security angle. If you’ve got data you don’t want leaving the building — and a lot of my manufacturing clients do — an agent that never touches the cloud solves that problem cleanly. No data center. No API calls going out. The intelligence stays on-site.
For context on what’s possible: I’ve been doing some research on this, and Apple has a device in the $10,000–$12,000 range that can reportedly run something comparable to Claude Opus 4 locally. That’s a serious AI in a box. The $1,000 shop-floor version isn’t that — but it doesn’t need to be. For monitoring a machine and surfacing the right alerts to your team, it doesn’t need to be Opus 4. It needs to be consistent, fast, and local. And that’s achievable right now.
If you’re a manufacturer and this is making you curious, reach out. I’ve been thinking about how to replicate this kind of setup using tools I already work with, and I think there’s a real path to doing it for less than what a specialized vendor would charge.
WatchGuard firewall vulnerability — calm check, quick fix
WatchGuard is one of the most common small-business firewalls out there, and there’s a remote code execution vulnerability in it right now rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS severity scale. That’s about as high as it goes. Attackers are actively using it to deploy ransomware.
One quick note on ransomware, because I think it’s worth saying plainly: the first generation encrypted your data and held it hostage. Today’s version does that and exfiltrates your data before encrypting it — meaning they’ve already copied it out before you even know something’s wrong. The threat isn’t just “pay us or lose your files.” It’s “pay us or your customers’ data goes public.” Average cost to a small business is somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000. That’s the real number.
The practical question right now is simple: is your WatchGuard management interface reachable from the open internet? This is a pattern we keep seeing in these situations. The management interface gets left exposed, and that’s the door attackers walk through. It should not be open to the web. At minimum, if it has to be accessible remotely, put it behind a VPN. MFA alone isn’t enough here.
If you have a WatchGuard and you’re not sure what your exposure looks like, that’s a five-minute conversation. Call your MSP. Call me. Let’s just check it.
Windows 11 scrambled your desktop — September update fixes it
Alert readers may have noticed their wallpaper and display configuration resetting randomly over the past few weeks. No warning. No explanation. Just a different-looking desktop when you sat down in the morning.
That was a Windows 11 bug, and the September update fixes it. Credit where credit’s due — Microsoft did eventually patch the thing they broke. The fix is in the September cumulative update, so make sure it’s installed.
This is also a good moment to repeat something I say constantly: leave your computer on overnight. Updates install when the machine is on and idle. If you shut down the moment you’re done for the day, those patches never land. We can push updates to managed machines, but even then the computer has to be on to receive them. Leave it on. Let it update. Reboot in the morning if you need to. That’s the whole workflow.
Quick hits: Dynamics 365 AI and small business credit cards
Microsoft is rolling out new AI automations in Dynamics 365 this fall. If you’re running Dynamics, you’ll get a guided, low-lift path to turn on agentic AI features through Copilot. Nothing you need to act on immediately, but worth knowing it’s coming.
On a completely different note — small business credit cards are apparently getting better in 2026. Forbes is reporting improved rewards and lower fees. I find the whole credit card economy fascinating in a slightly baffling way: the card companies extract money from vendors and hand some of it back to buyers, while keeping their cut in the middle. It’s a strange machine. But if you’re running business expenses through a card anyway, you might as well be getting something back. If you haven’t looked at your card’s terms lately, it might be worth a few minutes to shop around.
That’s the week. Good to be with you — see you next Thursday at 10 a.m. live. Come join us and bring your questions.
— Albert
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