IT insights, cybersecurity tips, and tech news for Utah businesses
Instead of asking: "What can we automate with AI?" First ask: "What in our business actually needs to work better?" Because automating an inefficient, inaccurate, or unprofitable process doesn't solve the problem. It may simply allow you to do the wrong thing faster. Before you automate, evaluate!
Every year around late June, we get the longest day of the year—more daylight, more usable hours, and at least in theory, more time to get things done. But most business owners don’t experience it that way. Even with extra daylight, the day tends to fill up just as quickly as any other. Meetings run long, unexpected issues pop up, and before you know it, you’re at the end of the day wondering how you ran out of time again.
School’s out, which means for many people the workday doesn’t look quite the same as it did a few weeks ago. Maybe you’re starting earlier so you can wrap up sooner. Maybe you’re working from home more, with a little extra background noise—Brutus barking, Johnny Jr. crying—and fewer stretches of uninterrupted time.
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.
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.
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?
