Astute Technology Management

The cost of building AI is dropping faster than organizations can govern it. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Imagine your HR teams spin up models or agents to help them analyze resumes. One on level, they’re moving quickly to solve a specific problem, which seems worthwhile.

However, collectively, when each department is doing something similar, this tangle of ungoverned AI bots has a very different effect.

Data becomes mismatched, maintenance becomes harder, and data of various types gets tangled together and exposed to public AI tools. The costs compound fast.

If you’re going to embrace AI, you need to think it through first.

Are you deploying AI at the perimeter of the organization, or do you want AI to fundamentally change how you operate at the foundation? Those two approaches require dramatically different strategies.

There’s a lot of excitement about AI, but businesses owe it to themselves to slow down and be strategic, so that enthusiasm doesn’t become confusion or regret twelve months down the road.

When a construction hazard arises, every moment that workers go without guidance is critical.

AI might be able to help close that window.

New York’s Turner Construction has developed a mobile-accessible AI safety assistant that allows field teams to ask plain-language safety questions and receive responses grounded in their own established Environmental Health & Safety standards.

The tool, SafeT Coach, can evaluate uploaded jobsite photos to identify potential hazards, prioritize risk levels, and recommend controls in real time.

Turner Construction is now releasing the app to the public after it logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, trade partners, and field teams.

Best of all, it’s free to use, which makes it a great way for construction firms in our area to evaluate AI in real-world construction scenarios, without having to spend a ton of money.

New data ranks manufacturing as one of the weakest sectors when it comes to digital resilience.

Could your manufacturing firm withstand or recover from a cyber incident or other downtime event?

Unfortunately, the gap between manufacturers and other industries has widened as threats grow more sophisticated.

Here are some other interesting insights from the report:

📌 Just 10% of manufacturing organizations monitor risk more than quarterly.

📌 47% of organizations think that digital resilience should reside within a single business function, when the reality is it’s an enterprise-wide effort that spans people, processes, and technology.

📌 92% of manufacturers faced cyber-related threats last year, while 62% faced internal failures.

With the right strategic partner in your corner, you don't have to struggle with these issues.

We understand that cybersecurity feels expensive, but there's another way to look at it.

Budgeting for security isn’t just about how much you’re spending; it’s as much about how well you’re spending.

Businesses, both large and small, waste thousands of dollars chasing the latest tools, without taking the time to decide if those tools integrate with their existing defense and stop the threats that they’re dealing with.

If you approach security this way, costs can certainly spiral out of control.

When you take the time to evaluate your business, identify your specific weaknesses, and then align your defenses with those weaknesses, you not only trim unnecessary costs, but those costs become easier to rationalize.

Once you have the right strategy in mind, cybersecurity becomes more than just another cost to absorb; it becomes a targeted investment with definable metrics and key performance indicators.

Something your whole organization can understand and get behind.

It usually starts with good intentions: someone installs a new application to work faster.

But then, the software doesn’t quite work as expected, or something new comes along, or everyone simply forgets about it.

The term “shadow IT” can refer to any IT device or application that connects to your network. We’ve talked about unauthorized mobile devices in the past; we even wrote a blog about it (see below).

The orphaned applications deserve their own mention, however, because they’re even more insidious and harder to detect than hardware. Even a simple browser extension can lead to compromised credentials, as the “ShadyPanda” campaign of last year demonstrates.

The solution is vigilance. Automated network scans can help uncover unmapped applications. Network traffic analysis can also help detect unauthorized activity.

Blog post: https://www.astutetm.com/2025/03/building-cybersecurity-culture/

Weak passwords sank a 158-year-old transportation company after hackers guessed their way inside and encrypted their data.

What’s become clear is that the solution can’t just be the responsibility of your staff. History has taught us that they will eventually choose the path of least resistance or make a mistake.

It’s up to business owners to take charge of the situation.

👉 Have you deployed a centralized password management system yet?

👉 Have you implemented role-based access so staff can only access what they need to do their jobs?

👉 Are you regularly auditing employee access logs to find inactive accounts and strange behavior?

Passwords are still a huge security vulnerability, despite the constant warnings for security professionals. It’s time for businesses to take the threat seriously.

What is business email compromise? Why should your business care?

Business email compromise of “BEC” is a highly targeted form of attack where criminals impersonate trusted figures, like an executive, vendor, or colleague.

What separates it from other attacks is that it doesn’t exploit your technology; it targets people with messages that seem important and authentic, so they do the hackers' work for them.

Think that sounds ridiculous? In 2019 hackers convinced a Toyota parts supplier to wire $37 million to a fraudulent account. Over 2 years, fraudsters swindled Google and FB out of over $121 million, by posing as Asian-based vendors.

The list goes on and on.

Defending against these attacks requires combining MFA with secondary communication channels, dual authorization for large financial transactions, and specialized security awareness training.

Vigilance is key!

Maximizing business uptime and efficiency must involve both IT and OT management. Here’s why:

Of course, properly maintaining servers, networks, and PCs is important. However, when an IT system goes down, the consequences are significant, but they can often be contained.

Employees may lose productivity, customer calls may get missed, and support tickets may pile up, but unless the downtime is catastrophic, these situations can be recovered.

Contrast that to when a production line halts, a facility loses power, or a safety-critical system fails. In those situations, the consequences extend beyond lost revenue into regulatory liability, equipment damage, and in some industries, direct risk to human safety.

We are talking about this because the stakes are rising as the boundary between IT and OT is disappearing.

As organizations modernize and IT and OT converge, a problem on the IT side can easily impact OT, turning what might be a simple downtime event into something much more serious.

Imagine a ransomware attack cascading directly into your OT systems, or a network misconfiguration that disrupts industrial controllers.

Digitization can bring huge benefits, but keeping a complex digital infrastructure running smoothly requires a holistic view.

This anecdote might seem extreme, but businesses in the U.S waste software budgets all the time.

A recent report from service operations company Freshworks surveyed 700 business professionals and found that software complexity drains an average of 7% of annual revenue.

Across the U.S. economy, it adds up to nearly $1 trillion annually.

👉🏼 $1 out of every $5 spent on software is wasted on failed rollouts and shelfware.

👉🏼 Employees juggle 15 different tools and 4 communication channels on average.

👉🏼 They lose nearly 7 hours per week to fragmented systems and clunky processes.

The problem isn’t just that companies bought the wrong tools, it’s that nobody was asking the right questions before they bought them.

That’s exactly the gap that a virtual chief information officer (vCIO) or the right managed services partner can help you close.

Are autonomous factories the answer to rising labor costs and workers who are less excited about to hard labor?

For warehouse owners who want to embrace autonomy but are unsure, let’s fill you in on a key fact: A truly autonomous facility isn’t just about hardware or investments, it's about the data infrastructure underneath it.

Facilities that see the best outcomes have mature, automation-ready data that’s clean and ready to work in real time. Without it, autonomous systems can’t perform intelligently; they’re just expensive hardware following static instructions.

Smarter robots are only part of the answer. The infrastructure supporting them is the other half, and you can lay that foundation before any major new investments with some simple steps today.