Build an AI Agent to Replace 6–24 Hours Per Week of Manual Email Work (Safely) Ep. 95

Build an AI Agent to Replace 6–24 Hours Per Week of Manual Email Work (Safely) Ep. 95

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/] A real AI agent watched a bid inbox, parsed attachments, filed everything, and cut 6 to 24 hours a week of manual work. Here is how they kept it from going off the rails. In this episode, Justin Shelley, Bryan Lachapelle, Mario Zaki, and Joshua Holloway break down what “vibe coding” looks like when it is tied to an actual business bottleneck, not a demo. Josh shares a real client build: an agent that monitors mailboxes, reads emails and attachments, moves files into a consistent folder structure, and extracts key data into Excel as a transitional step toward a dashboard. They also get candid about the risks. Models change, context breaks, and agents can misinterpret plain language. The group talks about guardrails, narrow task design, approvals, and why you should hard-code what you can so AI only handles the parts that truly need AI. There is also a practical hiring angle: instead of filling a $95K to $125K role that was open for 6 to 12 months, the company can potentially hire a more junior person who can work with the system, while the business uses the agent to move faster, reduce mistakes, and take on larger opportunities. What you’ll learn * How an “email + attachments” agent can save 6 to 24 hours per week by parsing bids, filing documents, and extracting data * Why consistency wins: how a repeatable folder structure made automation dramatically easier * How to add a “go or no-go” decision step using business criteria, with a human proofing loop * Why agents can degrade over time, and how to reduce risk with narrow prompts, hard-coded steps, and guardrails * A real warning story: how AI can accidentally propose super-admin access, and what to do instead Subscribe if you want practical, plain-English cybersecurity and AI systems that reduce risk and save real time, not hype. If you want help designing AI automations with the right security boundaries, or figuring out where AI can remove bottlenecks in your business without creating new risks, Phoenix IT Advisors can help. Schedule a consult at PhoenixITAdvisors.com. Links Episode: https://unhackmybusiness.com/episode/95 [https://unhackmybusiness.com/episode/95] https://PhoenixITAdvisors.com [https://phoenixitadvisors.com/] @UnHackedPodcast

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.