93. Stop Wasting Payroll: How A $2,500 AI Automation Creates $80K in Revenue

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/ A viral AI "skill" promising Apple's design secrets came loaded with keyloggers, prompt capture, and an API rug pull. Josh found it before it found him. Most people won't. In this episode of UnHacked, Justin Shelley, Mario Zaki, and Joshua Holloway go free-form on the week in AI, and the week was wild. A new open-source tool can reverse engineer nearly any software product, and Adobe's entire suite was replicated within days. Lawsuits are coming, but nobody knows the legal ground rules yet. Meanwhile, Josh walks through a real-world discovery: a popular AI skill shared to hundreds of thousands of followers contained embedded keyloggers, captured every prompt, and was built to pull API keys and ship them off. His team now runs every skill through NVIDIA's Skill Spectre sandbox before it touches a production system, and he explains how you can too.

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ Bryan Lachapelle - https://www.b4networks.ca/ Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/ Should you host your own AI so sensitive client data never leaves your building? Five security pros weigh cost, risk, and trust.

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ Bryan Lachapelle - https://www.b4networks.ca/ Is AI taking jobs? Three IT owners say they're seeing slower hiring, not layoffs, and early-career workers feel it most. Justin Shelley, Bryan Lachapelle, and Mario Zaki have been getting heated feedback on their AI clips, mostly distrust and fear. In this episode they start with whether hardware-level AI containment is realistic (Bryan's concern: hardware can't be changed once it's built, and a flaw makes it obsolete), then get into what they're actually seeing in their own businesses. Mario hasn't let anyone go, but he's hiring fewer technicians than the one or two he used to add each year. Bryan knows law firms that aren't hiring another law clerk. Data centers are pulling construction workers away from housing, and employers still can't fill the openings.

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ Justin knows nothing about football. He's using AI to run his fantasy team anyway, and he's currently winning. That's just where this episode starts. After two weeks of warning listeners about AI risk, Justin Shelley and Mario Zaki flip the script this week to talk about how AI is actually making their lives better right now, no tinfoil hats required. Justin walks through how he joined a fantasy football league with zero knowledge of the game, screenshots his lineup into AI every week for instructions, and is sitting in second place for points with the best playoff odds in his league heading into week three. Mario shares how he used AI to build a complete website and backend booking system for his family's shore house rental in under a week, including e-signature contracts, automated text messaging, and tenant management tools that used to require hiring a developer. The two also dig into how AI is changing IT troubleshooting, cutting down the need to memorize thousand-page technical manuals and speeding up how fast MSPs can actually solve problems for clients. From there, the conversation moves into where AI is headed next: full self-driving cars people already trust with daily commutes, at-home robots for chores nobody wants to do, and AI-assisted diagnostics that could catch cancer and other diseases before symptoms ever show up. Justin closes with his honest take on the "AI is coming for our jobs" fear, and why he believes automation elevates workers into better work instead of leaving them behind.

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/ One AI tool's price jumped from a fair quote to 10x more overnight. Is AI fear-mongering designed to keep you locked in? Every week there's a new AI headline promising the end of the world. Models "escaping" sandboxes, CEOs quitting to warn everyone AI is too dangerous, calls to slow down before it's too late. Justin Shelley, Mario Zaki, and Josh Holloway put their tinfoil hats on for episode 104 and ask the question nobody in the AI industry wants to answer: who actually benefits from all of this fear? The conversation gets real fast. Justin shares a tool he's been using where the base price stayed reasonable, but the AI component quietly went from a quoted price to 1,000% more once it left beta. Josh breaks down how AI-driven demand has tripled server prices in under a year and stretched lead times from days to months, and shares a story about a client who was sold an 8-year-old server as brand new. Mario explains why bringing AI models in-house still doesn't pencil out financially for most small businesses, even though the appetite to escape subscription pricing is growing fast. The theory they land on: the same companies telling you AI is too powerful to control might also be the ones most threatened by you running it yourself. If self-hosted, open-source AI models let businesses skip the subscription treadmill, then scaring the public into demanding regulation is a convenient way to make sure that option quietly disappears. Whether you buy the conspiracy or not, this episode will change how you read the next AI doom headline. What you'll learn: Why the "we need to slow down AI development" argument falls apart the moment you follow the money How one AI vendor's price jumped from a reasonable quote to 1,000% more once it left beta The real story of a client sold an 8-year-old server as "brand new," and how to make sure your IT provider never does that to you Why AI-capable server prices have tripled in under a year, with lead times stretching from days to months The theory that scary AI headlines are less about safety and more about keeping businesses locked into subscriptions instead of running AI in-house New episodes drop every week with real, unfiltered conversations about the technology and security decisions actually affecting small business owners. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Worried about where your data lives, who controls it, and what happens if a vendor you rely on gets breached or jacks up their prices? That's exactly the kind of risk Phoenix IT Advisors helps small businesses get in front of. Visit PhoenixITAdvisors.com to schedule a consult and find out where your business actually stands.