IT insights, cybersecurity tips, and tech news for Utah businesses
The email shows up on a Tuesday morning. It looks like it’s from the CEO. The name matches. The tone is right. Even the signature looks familiar. “Hey — can you help me with something quickly? I’m in back-to-back meetings. Need you to handle a vendor payment. I’ll explain later.” The new employee pauses.
While you’re firing up the grill or sitting in beach traffic, someone else is getting to work. They’ve been planning for this. They know which businesses will be running on skeleton crews and which alerts will go unanswered. They know that at most small businesses, the “IT person” is the one who gets called when the printer breaks, not someone actively watching a security dashboard at midnight. They also know that the window between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning is 72 hours of quiet.
Picture walking up to a house and lifting the welcome mat to find a key underneath. It’s convenient, predictable and exactly where someone with bad intentions would look first. Most businesses treat their passwords the same way.
The proposal looked great. It was polished, professional and exactly the kind of document that makes a business look like it has everything under control. Then the client called. The market research cited in section two — the statistics that anchored the entire recommendation — didn’t exist. The AI had made them up. Not vaguely, not accidentally, but confidently and in detail. There’s a name for this. It’s called a hallucination and it happens when you hand a capable, enthusiastic, completely unsupervised tool access to your work and assume it will figure things out. Sound familiar?
It’s Monday morning. You’ve got coffee. You’ve got a plan. This is the week you’re finally going to get ahead. You walk through the door. Before you set your bag down: “The printer’s not working again.” Not the old printer. The new one. The one that was supposed to fix the printer problem.
Remember blowing into Nintendo cartridges to make them work? That was our version of IT support. Cartridge won’t load? Blow on it. Still won’t load? Blow harder. If that failed, you smacked the console. We thought we were pretty good at technology. But your kid? They’ve never had to fix anything by hitting it.
Spring cleaning usually starts with closets, but for most businesses, the real clutter isn’t just on a rack. Sure, it might be on a server rack, but it could also be sitting in a storage room or a back office, or even in a pile labeled “we’ll deal with that later.”
