89. Your AI Is Lying to You (And You'd Never Know): How to Prompt Smarter Before It Costs You

How Vibe Coding Cut a 4-Hour Task Down to 10 Minutes | UnHacked Ep. 94

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ [https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/] Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ [https://www.mazteck.com/] Bryan Lachapelle - https://www.b4networks.ca/ [https://www.b4networks.ca/] Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/ [https://7thdi.com/] Mario Zaki's sales rep used to spend three to four hours building a single proposal. After vibe coding a custom platform, it takes ten minutes. That's a 24x productivity gain for roughly $500 in development costs. This episode kicks off UnHacked's vibe coding series, and Mario walks through exactly what he built, what it replaced, and what it saved. Two automations take center stage. First, an onboarding and offboarding portal that connects directly to Microsoft 365, pulls live license data, provisions users, assigns SharePoint permissions, configures shared mailbox access, and auto-adjusts monthly invoices. What used to take 45 minutes of technician time, plus days of email back-and-forth, now takes three to five minutes with built-in safeguards against the mistakes that eat even more time. Second, a proposals platform that lets his sales rep select predefined line items, auto-calculate pricing across three service tiers, attach the SOW and MSA, and export a polished document for e-signature. No more broken templates, no more math errors, no more 9 PM phone calls to fix formatting. Justin, Bryan, and Josh dig into the ROI math, the security considerations of building custom apps (by default, AI generates applications with no login and five to ten glaring holes), and the mindset shift that happens once you start seeing results. Mario describes how after his first few wins, he started hearing his technicians talk about a repetitive task and immediately thinking, "I can probably automate that." The panel also previews next week's episode, where Josh shares a construction estimator that replaced a $125,000 salary. The core message is urgent. Bryan puts it bluntly: if your competition automates before you do, they will reduce their overhead and you will not have a choice. It will be Blockbuster versus Netflix. What you'll learn: * How Mario automated MSP onboarding from 45 minutes to 3-5 minutes by building a custom portal that integrates directly with Microsoft 365, auto-provisions licenses, and adjusts billing automatically * How a custom proposals platform cut proposal generation from 3-4 hours to 10 minutes while eliminating math errors and broken document templates * The real cost of development: approximately $10 in AI tokens plus roughly an hour of an owner's time, yielding a 24x productivity gain * Why AI-generated applications ship with no authentication and multiple security holes by default, and why security has to be the first thing you plan for * How to identify automation opportunities in your own business by listening for tasks that are repetitive, error-prone, or dreaded by your team New episodes every week breaking down cybersecurity, AI, and digital resilience for business owners. Subscribe so you don't miss the rest of the vibe coding series. Ready to explore what AI automation could do for your business? The team behind UnHacked offers free 30-minute consultations to help you identify your highest-ROI automation opportunities and build them securely. Visit unhackmybusiness.com, pick any episode, and fill out the consult request form underneath the video player.

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

Hosts: Justin Shelley | https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com [https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/] Mario Zaki | https://www.mazteck.com/ [https://www.mazteck.com/] Joshua Holloway | https://7thdi.com/ [https://7thdi.com/] What if your IT provider handed you $80,000 in revenue capacity without firing a single person, adding a single client, or changing your prices? That's not a hypothetical. That's exactly what Mario Zaki did, and in this episode he shows the math. Mario walks through two AI-powered automations he built for his MSP, Mazteck IT: a custom onboarding and offboarding platform that slashed a 45-minute manual process down to one click, and a license automation system that eliminated an entire month of repetitive January work for one of his technicians. Combined, those two tools freed up nearly $22,000 in labor time. Apply the standard multiplier for what an employee should generate in gross revenue, and you're looking at $80,000 in top-line capacity, built for somewhere between 5 and 10 hours of setup time. Then he mentions, almost as an afterthought, that he also built an on-site agent that briefs technicians the moment they walk through a client's door. Open tickets. Recent issues. Unresolved problems. All of it, right there, before the tech even says hello. Justin's reaction says everything. The group also gets into the real security stakes behind all of this: why ghost licenses are a compliance problem, not just a billing headache; why vibe coding is genuinely exciting and genuinely dangerous at the same time; and why the cat-and-mouse game of cybersecurity didn't start with AI and isn't going to end with it. This is the transitional episode of the Unhacked AI series. Integrations are wrapping up. Vibe coding starts next week. If you can't identify one process in your business right now that AI could automate, this episode will find it for you. Visit https://unhackmybusiness.com/ [https://unhackmybusiness.com/] to request a free consult. If we can't 10X your productivity, you don't pay.

92. The Automation That Pays for Itself in a Week (And Why Security Can't Be DIY)

Hosts: Justin Shelley | Phoenix IT Advisors: https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ [https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/] Mario Zaki | Mazteck IT: https://www.mazteck.com/ [https://www.mazteck.com/] Joshua Holloway | 7th Di Technologies: https://7thdi.com/ [https://7thdi.com/] What if the alerts your IT system already generates every single day could automatically turn into $50,000 in new annual revenue and $200,000 in delivered client value, in about 10 seconds? In Episode 92 of UnHacked, Justin, Mario, and Josh dig into the nuts and bolts of AI integrations and prove the concept live. Justin pulls back the curtain on a real automation he built using an MCP server (Model Context Protocol), his PSA, and an AI agent. The result: noisy RMM alerts that used to slip through the cracks are now converted into plain-English, ROI-backed hardware opportunity proposals that actually mean something to a business owner or CFO. He walks through the math on a single hard drive alert showing a $554/year productivity loss and a $1,385 two-year risk exposure against a $220 fix. That is the kind of conversation that gets a client to say yes. Mario shares how his AI agents Marcus and Maximus are integrated directly into Microsoft Teams and connected via read-only access to his PSA, letting his entire team ask real-time questions about open tickets without touching a report. He also drops a bombshell: by automating his onboarding, offboarding, and license review processes with AI, he saved nearly $40,000 in a single year. Josh brings the compliance and security perspective, reminding everyone that charging ahead without a plan is exactly how you end up in an emergency meeting trying to figure out what you broke. His checklist is simple: one integration at a time, read-only access, and make sure you cannot accidentally delete production data. The big theme running through all of it? Use AI to use AI. Do not start with the technology. Start with the problem you need to solve, then figure out how to fix it. And before you build anything, talk to someone who knows what they are doing. Free consultation (no strings attached): https://www.unhackmybusiness.com/ [https://www.unhackmybusiness.com/]

91. Your AI Integration Is a Lit Match Over a Gas-Soaked Hay Pile

Hosts: Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ [https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/] Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/ [https://www.mazteck.com/] Bryan Lachapelle - https://www.b4networks.ca/ [https://www.b4networks.ca/] Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/ [https://7thdi.com/] You've heard "just make it read-only" and figured you were covered. You're not. In Episode 91 of UnHacked, Justin, Mario, Bryan, and Josh pick up their ongoing AI series and get into the real-world security risks hiding inside AI integrations — the ones that don't show up until something goes wrong. Bryan takes the hot seat this week and walks through what happened when he connected Claude to his accounting software through Xero's MCP server. Spoiler: the data it can access tells a hacker exactly who your best clients are and how much they're paying you. That's not a read-only problem. That's a target. The crew also digs into why "read-only" is only safe at the start, why there's no Control-Z once your AI does something you didn't intend, and why your endpoints are now the biggest vulnerability in your entire security stack. Plus, Brian shares what happened when he tried connecting Claude to DocuSign — and what almost worked. Key takeaways from this episode: * Before you add any connector, understand exactly what it's accessing and whether it launches with guardrails in place (Josh) * If you're not using an integration, disconnect it. Less footprint, less risk. If you're not gonna use it, lose it. (Mario) * Your employees are already using personal AI accounts with your company data. Put a policy in place and give them a sanctioned tool before shadow IT does it for you. (Bryan) * Stop using public AI tools for business. Ditch them and get a secure platform — because everything you put into a free tool, you lose. (Justin) This is Part 2 of the team's multi-part AI series: basic chat setup, integrations (that's right now), and vibe coding is coming next. The series follows a crawl-walk-run framework designed to help business owners actually implement AI without burning it all down. Not sure where to start? Go to unhackmybusiness.com, click any episode, and use the action cards below the player to ask a question or request a free consult.

90. Clone Yourself With AI: The Integration That Saves 1.5 Hours a Day (and $26K a Year)

Hosts: Justin Shelley – Phoenix IT Advisors | https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/ [https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/] Mario Zaki – Mazteck IT | https://www.mazteck.com/ [https://www.mazteck.com/] Bryan Lachapelle – B4 Networks | https://www.b4networks.ca/ [https://www.b4networks.ca/] Joshua Holloway – https://7thdi.com/ [https://7thdi.com/] What if you could reclaim 1.5 hours every single day — without hiring anyone? In Episode 90 of UnHacked, Justin, Bryan, Mario, and Josh skip the theory and get into the actual mechanics of AI integration. Josh walks through exactly how he connected Claude's Co-Work feature to his Microsoft 365 mailbox — read-only, locked down, no full system access — and now starts every morning with a fully automated inbox triage, calendar summary, and prioritized action list waiting for him at 7:55 AM. That's just the beginning. He's also built a system that scans every five-star support ticket, drafts a personalized, SEO-optimized Google review request, and parks it in his drafts for a human review before it ever goes out. Result? One Google review for every five emails sent — and a 20% conversion rate he didn't have before. The guys do the math live: 1.5 hours a day × $68/hour (fully burdened) × 5 days × 52 weeks = $26,520 back in your pocket every year. And that doesn't count the new business the Google reviews are driving. But it's not all upside — they also talk about what happens when you give AI too much access (spoiler: someone accidentally bought a $3,700 training course on their own credit card), and why "less access = more control" is the security rule you can't afford to skip. Ready to try it yourself? Download the step-by-step setup guide at unhackmybusiness.com, find Episode 90, and follow along.