Happy Thursday, folks — Albert here, Chief Nerd at ACS, coming to you surrounded by moving boxes and big news; the SBA just cracked open a $50 million grant pool for small manufacturers, ChatGPT quietly handed Team plan users a massive storage upgrade, Microsoft Copilot grew a new limb inside Teams, QuickBooks Desktop 2023 is still dying and I’m still going to keep telling you about it, and a fresh Windows 11 update is blue-screening Intel 12th and 13th gen laptops on wake.
Let’s get into it.
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$50 Million in SBA Manufacturing Grants — Yes, Your Shop Qualifies
The U.S. Small Business Administration just opened the Manufacturing Growth Fund Grant Program, putting $50 million on the table for small manufacturers. Grants run from $25,000 to $500,000 and are earmarked for workforce training, equipment modernization, and production technology upgrades.
The eligibility bar is low enough that most of you reading this clear it: U.S.-based manufacturer, 500 or fewer employees, operating for at least two years. That’s it. The application window opened June 2nd and closes July 15th, so you’ve got roughly 43 days left. If you get an award, funds have to be used within 18 months.
Now, I have to say it because I always say it: this is your money making a round trip through Washington. You paid it in, now you have to spend time and energy to get a portion of it back. I hope the math works out for you. But unlike the SBA loan programs, which I have opinions about, this is a grant — no repayment, no debt, no SBA putting you in a hole. That part I actually like.
The URL they finally published: SBA.gov/manufacturing-growth-fund. Go start your application. If you’re a manufacturer and you’ve been sitting on a wish list of equipment upgrades, this is the moment to dust that list off.
ChatGPT Team Plan Just Got 10x the Storage — Use It Right
The ChatGPT Team plan quietly bumped file storage from 5 gigabytes to 50 gigabytes, same price. That’s a real upgrade, and it opens up some genuinely useful workflows — but I want to be very clear about what this is and what it isn’t.
What it’s for: working storage during active projects. You’re running a job, you’ve got process documents, specs, reference files — throw them in, let the whole team’s chat session query against them. Instead of someone digging through a 40-page procedure manual to answer a question, they just ask GPT and it pulls the answer from your document. That’s actually a solid use case, and the larger storage pool makes it more practical for real project work.
What it is not: a backup. Not a file server. Not a place to put anything you’d be upset to lose. I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT’s file storage to be there tomorrow morning with the same reliability I’d expect from, say, your actual backup system. If a file only lives in ChatGPT, it’s not backed up — full stop.
The plan runs $20 per user per month. For a small team using it actively on projects, that’s reasonable. The shared knowledge base angle is the most interesting part to me: document your processes once, let the team chat with the document. That’s a legitimate productivity move for a shop that’s trying to get consistent on how things get done.
Copilot in Teams Now Assigns Tasks After Meetings — Mostly Good News
Microsoft is rolling out a new Copilot capability inside Teams called “Actions.” The pitch: after a meeting ends, it automatically generates a recap, drafts follow-up communications, and creates assigned tasks.
The meeting recap piece I’m genuinely enthusiastic about — it’s been in Teams for a while now and it works. It listens, builds an outline of what was discussed, and it’s good enough that I’ve used it in sales meetings and found it legitimately useful. That feature is included in standard Microsoft 365 Business plans, so if you’re not using it, you’re leaving something real on the table. Quick math: five-person team, three meetings a day, 15 minutes each to write up what happened — that’s 45 minutes a day you’re handing back to your people.
The task assignment piece is where I get a little skeptical. The assigned tasks are going into Microsoft Planner, and I’ll be honest with you — I don’t know many small shops that are actually living in Planner. It’s not intuitive, there are too many other tools doing the same job, and if your team isn’t already working out of Planner, a Copilot-generated task list sitting in there is just a tree falling in an empty forest.
The follow-up email generation is the part that made me wince. These AI tools are natively chat. Teams is a chat platform. And Microsoft’s answer to “how do we surface action items” is… another email? Credit where credit’s due: it takes real commitment to look at a chat-first product and decide the output should be more inbox clutter.
Anyway. The broader Copilot situation is still what it’s been: a layer of features and integrations sitting on top of an LLM, spread across a dozen different surfaces with no single place to find all of it. New capabilities are shipping in waves — this is roughly the third wave — and the feature list is genuinely growing. It’s just not organized in a way that makes it easy to know what you have. That’s a Microsoft problem they haven’t solved yet.
QuickBooks 2023 Desktop: 57 Days Left, Windows 11 Blue Screens, and a Tax Scam Worth Knowing
I’m going to keep saying this every episode until July 31st, so let’s get it over with: QuickBooks Desktop 2023 dies on July 31st. Payroll stops. Bank feeds stop. You’ve got 57 days. Do not wait until July 29th to start this migration, especially if you’re running payroll — every QuickBooks upgrade has the potential to surface something unexpected, and you want time to deal with it before a payroll run is on the line.
On the Windows side: the June Windows 11 update is causing blue screens on machines with Intel 12th Gen (Alder Lake) and 13th Gen (Raptor Lake) processors when they wake from sleep. Those are the most common CPU generations in business laptops purchased between 2022 and 2024, so this affects a real chunk of the installed base. Alert readers will notice this is not the first time we’ve talked about an update breaking something — it’s more like the fourth or fifth episode in a row. That’s not going to change. Security patches have to go out; we don’t delay on those because the alternative is worse. When something breaks, we fix it. If your laptop is waking up to a blue screen, your data is fine — the machine is just crashing on wake. Let us know and we’ll get it sorted.
Quick hit worth flagging: there’s an active IRS phishing campaign targeting small business owners around the June 16th tax deadline. It’s sending fake IRS e-file confirmation texts. The IRS does not text you. If you get a text claiming to be from the IRS, delete it, don’t click anything, don’t reply.
One more heads-up: Microsoft is rolling out an update this week that replaces the classic Teams chat panel with the new Business Chat (Copilot) interface. Nothing will break, but the layout is changing, and nobody ever loves that on a Monday morning. Just be aware it’s coming.
That’s the week. Stay sharp out there, and I’ll see you in the next one. — Albert
Questions about anything we covered today? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with your business in mind.