They were right. We had practices. We had a marketing constitution that governed how AI was used in content work. We had ongoing internal conversations about which tools were okay and which data shouldn’t go into them. But we hadn’t put it down in one document anyone could read and reference.

So we wrote one.

The full policy is available below. It’s a real document that real people on our team are now working from, and we’re sharing it for three reasons.

Most businesses using AI don’t have one in writing

Most companies using AI tools have not documented how they use them: which tools are approved, which data is off-limits, who reviews what before output goes anywhere, what gets disclosed to whom. That’s true even of companies whose marketing talks about AI being central to their workflow. We see the gap constantly when we help organizations think through their own governance.

The gap matters because the questions are getting asked. Clients want to know how their data is handled. Auditors and insurers are starting to write AI use into their questionnaires. Employees want to know what’s allowed. Without a written reference, the answers tend to be inconsistent across the team, which is the same as not having an answer.

Why we’re publishing it

Privacy policies and terms of service are linkable on most company websites now. AI use policies should be too. If you’ve been wondering what one of these actually looks like, or you’re sitting down to write your own and not sure where to start, the document is right here for you to read.

Read our AI Policy

A checklist if you’re writing yours

If you’re putting together your own AI policy and want a starting structure, we built a free checklist that walks through the major categories an AI policy should cover. It mirrors how we organized ours. Fill out the short form and we’ll send it your way.

→ Get the checklist

If you want help thinking through your own AI policy, or applying it to your specific operations, that’s the work we do.

Call us at 267-857-8066 or leave a comment below to talk it through. We will take an expert look at what you have been doing with AI and tell you honestly what we think.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

This week we’re catching up with our CEO and founder, Ilya Lehrman.

Claude and Copilot Helping to Make Strides in Development

Q: What are you doing differently than you were six months ago, and why

Six months ago, development was a continuous, onerous task for any team. inWorks LLC, in particular, is unique because none of our IT professionals went to school or have formal education in computer science, coding, or app development. However, it doesn’t slow us down. If anything, it helps our leaders and support professionals to approach roadblocks in outside-the-box ways that traditional IT and TSS specialists wouldn’t consider.

Thus, Ilya has transferred all of his rote Power Platform development to Claude and Copilot.

In practice, this means he relies on these tools to handle repetitive, rules-based build work, allowing him to focus his time on higher-value design decisions, problem solving, and oversight.

They’re better at it and faster, and I just need to make sure they get architectural decisions right and do the “dumb” developer work for me.

Why [do I do it]? It’s way faster, with better results.

What’s a project you’re currently working on that excites you?

Ilya is currently most excited about the Link Redirector project—a home-grown app for shortening URLs and creating secure one-time use links, all hosted in your own data center with encryption and minimal infrastructure cost.

Why Link Redirector?

• Security-first design: One-time-use links ensure that sensitive information is only accessible once, reducing the risk of credential exposure. If a link is clicked, it expires and cannot be reused, keeping secrets out of email or Teams threads.

• Internal hosting: All links are managed within the organization’s infrastructure, avoiding reliance on third-party services and maintaining control over data privacy.

• Branded experience: The tool allows for custom landing pages and branded templates, making every shared link a professional touchpoint.

As Ilya explains:

“If you share something by email, chances are it’s going to stay in that person’s mailbox forever. If somebody gets access to that mailbox, they get access to your secret that you shared with them. If you’re using link redirector, one-time password feature, your secret is safe because one, that link’s already invalid and two, it’s not just available in somebody’s email for people to scan when they’re, you know, compromising mailbox.”

Key Features & Use Cases

• One-time-use links: Perfect for sharing credentials or confidential documents—links expire after use, reducing risk.

• Shortened URLs: Convert long URLs into manageable, easy-to-share links for emails, documents, or print.

• Custom landing pages: Add branded messages or information gates before redirecting users to their destination.

• Usage visibility: Track when one-time links are used, confirming delivery and reducing uncertainty.

These features empower teams to securely share sensitive information, create onboarding or announcement pages, and manage link branding—all with minimal infrastructure overhead.

Martial Arts and Embracing Failure

Q: Who or what shaped how you approach your work? Could be a person, a book, an old job, anything.

Ilya points towards martial arts as a guiding light in how he approaches his work and life as a whole. He identifies martial arts as an ongoing journey that is informed more by his failures than his successes.

“Your work approach should reflect what you learn from others and from yourself, but also incorporate your own failure modes - that is, ways in which you know yourself to fail consistently. Understand that you can’t correct your failure modes through sheer will - you’re likely to just create more stress for yourself and fail more spectacularly later.

Instead, treat your failure modes as rocks in a river - flow past them, and maybe erode them over time such that they’re no longer obstacles.

Be patient with yourself, and by extension, with others. They are you, just in a different way.”

Appreciating the Spectrum of Personalities: Aaron’s Standout Client Rapport

Q: What’s something a teammate did recently that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself?

“Aaron had a homeIT visit and built rapport with our client in a way that my introverted self would have had a hard time doing. I definitely appreciate the spectrum of personalities that make up our team!”

This moment highlights how Aaron’s natural ability to connect with clients—especially during in-person visits—brings a unique strength to our group. While some of us may find it challenging to break the ice or build quick trust, Aaron’s approach demonstrates the power of authenticity and adaptability in client service. It’s a reminder that our collective success is built on the variety of strengths, temperaments, and perspectives each team member brings to the table.

IT: More Art Than Science?

Q: What’s something about how the industry talks about IT that you disagree with?

IT is often presented as clinical and dry—more science than art. But as Ilya points out, this is a misconception. While executives may picture IT as a world of brightly lit datacenters and lab-coated technicians, the reality is far more human, unpredictable, and creative.

“I find it odd as everyone in IT also knows that it’s messy and full of mysteries that naturally arise as the result of complexity and inclusion of human interaction and decisions over time. I think when executives picture IT they think of brightly lit datacenters and begoggled nerds in clean white labcoats; I picture it more like a damp basement with sparking spheres, dripping pipes, and an occasional zap with a whisp of smoke escaping into the ceiling, all constantly saved from disaster by ratnest-haired mad wizards in singed robes. The reality isn’t quite so disheveled, but if you start there you’d be a lot less surprised when things end up going wrong 🙂.”

This philosophy runs through inWorks LLC’s approach: ethical, human-centered, and built to last technically and culturally. It’s a call to see IT as a craft and to value the people who keep the sparks from turning into fires.

Thank You, Ilya!

Explore Past inPulse Interviews

Stay connected with the pulse of our organization by exploring previous inPulse interviews. Each week, we spotlight a different team member, sharing their achievements, perspectives, and advice. Whether you’re looking for inspiration, practical tips, or just want to catch up on what’s happening across inWorks LLC and Longview Farm, our inPulse archive is your go-to resource.

Browse the full collection and revisit highlights from team members past, and present in our inPulse tab!

Do you remember that noise? The one your computer used to make when it dialed up the internet — the hiss, the static, the rhythmic beeping that ended with “You’ve got mail.” If you’re old enough to remember it, the sound is probably already playing in your head.

As the youngest member of our team, I only caught the tail-end of dial-up before my family upgraded — and I wondered: why did it sound like that? Was the noise some kind of branding decision, a way to make the computer feel or sound like it was doing something?

The actual answer is more interesting. That sound was the modem talking, in binary, translated into audio, transmitted over the same copper telephone lines your grandmother used to call your aunt. When your computer dialed in, the modem on the other end picked up and the two of them started a conversation — what’s called a handshake.

They were introducing themselves and negotiating a data rate. Hi, I’m here. This is the speed I can support. Can you keep up? Okay, let’s talk at that speed instead. It was audible because it had to be. Phone lines carry sound, so if you wanted two computers to communicate across a phone line, you taught them to make noise.

Think of the old telephone switchboard operators. The ones in the black-and-white photos, headsets on, pulling cords from one hole and plugging them into another to move a voice from one line to the next. Your modem was doing roughly the same thing, just faster, and in a language you weren’t meant to understand.

There’s something genuinely charming about it once you sit with it. The internet, in its first widely accessible form, was two machines audibly figuring out how to be friends.

The same conversation revealed that not everyone in the room knew what AOL stood for. (America Online.) Or AIM. (AOL Instant Messenger.) These were acronyms most of us said constantly for years without ever stopping to ask what the letters meant. They were just the names of things: the rooms we hung out in after school, the way we got mail, the way we knew our crush had logged on because their screen name showed up in our buddy list. At some point, we stopped using them, and we couldn’t tell you when. The acronyms quietly got replaced by app icons, which got replaced by notifications, which now arrive on a screen that doesn’t ring, doesn’t beep, and never makes the sound of a handshake.

Sixteen years of watching this happen

Ilya started inWorks in 2010. That’s sixteen years ago, which sometimes feels short until you list what changed in between.

In 2010, business IT meant, quite literally, wires in walls. Server rooms with humming hardware, blinking lights, and a person whose job it was to know which cable went where. Email lived on a box you could touch. Files lived on a drive that was physically present in the building. If the box broke, somebody drove out and looked at it.

Then the cloud happened. The boxes moved off-site, the files lived somewhere nobody could point to, and the things people used to walk up to and unplug became abstractions. It happened in pieces, over almost a decade, until one day people realized they hadn’t physically touched or seen a server in years. The wires were still there, technically. They were just somebody else’s wires now, in somebody else’s building.

Now we’re watching it happen again. AI is the next layer. The thing that used to sit in a server room, then moved to the cloud, is now being augmented by models that draft, summarize, route, decide, and suggest. Some of the work that used to require a person at a keyboard for hours is increasingly happening in conversations between software and software — a different kind of handshake than the dial-up one, but a handshake nonetheless.

What stays the same

Every shift like this has an uncomfortable middle. There’s a period where the old way still works, the new way is unfamiliar, and nobody is quite sure how much to trust the change. People who lived through the dial-up-to-broadband shift remember that middle. People who lived through the on-prem-to-cloud shift remember it too. We’re in one of those middles right now with AI, and most of the business owners we talk to are somewhere inside it: experimenting cautiously, hearing too much hype, watching competitors do things that may or may not actually be working, trying to figure out what is worth investing in and what is a fad.

What stays consistent across all of these transitions is the question underneath them: do the people using this technology actually understand what it is doing, and do they have someone trustworthy to call when they don’t? That question was as important when modems were negotiating data rates out loud as it is right now, when an AI agent might be drafting a customer email on somebody’s behalf.

Sixteen years in, that’s still the question we build around. The tools change, the acronyms change, the wires move from the wall to the cloud to wherever they’re going next. The job of making technology actually work for the people doing the work has not really changed at all.

If you’re sitting inside one of these middles

That’s a conversation we have all day. We have been having it in different vocabulary for sixteen years, and we are happy to have it in whatever vocabulary makes sense for your business — wires, cloud, AI, or all three at once.

Call us at 267-857-8066 or leave a comment below to talk it through. We will take an expert look at what you have been doing with AI and tell you honestly what we think.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

There’s a quiet pressure that comes with working in technology: the assumption that you’ve personally solved every issue forever. That your laptop always behave, your tools always cooperate, and the universe never conspires against you ten minutes before a meeting starts.

The truth is more ordinary. We have IT issues too. A router decides to reset itself, a software update changes something nobody asked it to change, a headset gives out at exactly the wrong moment; in fact, our office printer is the bane of everyone’s existence. None of that is a failure of expertise. It’s just what working with technology looks like.

However, What separates a good IT operation from a frustrating one is whether or not everything that follows a problem feels predictable: you need a process.

Detection, classification, communication, resolution, closure — handled the same way every time, so the people affected aren’t also stuck managing the chaos.

Here’s how we think about it at inWorks LLC:

Classify before you communicate

The fastest way to turn a small problem into a big-feeling one is to communicate without context. So, before anyone sounds the alarms, we classify what we’re dealing with.

We use three levels:

• Critical — core operations or client-facing services are disrupted and immediate action is required

• Moderate — workflows are noticeably affected, but workarounds usually exist

• Minor — limited scope, low impact, temporary inconvenience

Classification shapes everything that comes after it: how urgent the response is, who needs to know, which channels carry the message, and how often we update. Skip that step and every issue starts to sound the same, which is when people stop trusting the alerts entirely.

Triage before you react

Once something is classified, the next question is whether it actually needs a response right now, or whether right now just feels urgent because the message arrived during the workday.

A lot of teams confuse the two. They treat every notification like an emergency, exhaust their attention, and then have nothing left for the issue that actually warrants it.

Triage means asking a few specific questions.

The answers determine how the next hour gets spent. Most issues don’t need an immediate fix, and almost all of them benefit from a careful response over a reflexive one.

Make sure the issue lives somewhere real

If a problem only exists in someone’s memory, in a chat thread, or in a vague intention to follow up later, it’s already lost.

A few practices keep that from happening:

A ticketing record for support work, so every request has an owner and a status regardless of how it came in — voicemail, email, referral, or someone catching us in passing.

A shared internal workspace where action items, decisions, and parking-lot ideas all live in one place. We use Microsoft Loop for this, but the tool matters less than the principle: a single source of truth that survives the meeting where it was created.

Two weeks later, when someone asks what we decided about a recurring issue, there’s an actual answer to point to instead of a guess.

Communicate in the right order

When updates about an issue go out, sequence matters as much as content.

Internal first, external second (if necessary). Our intranetValet team gets briefed before anything publishes, with a description, time frame, and context — so anyone who fields a follow-up question already knows the situation. Drafts get reviewed against a template we maintain for this purpose, then go out through the channels appropriate to the impact level.

Critical issues are posted immediately on the intranet, on Substack, and by email. Moderate issues go out within two to four hours. Minor issues are folded into a weekly digest.

Substack is part of how we communicate operationally, not just how we publish ideas. If someone subscribes to hear how we think, we want them to hear from us when something is actively happening too.

Close the loop, and learn

The last phase is something a lot of teams skip.

When an issue is resolved, we mark it resolved across every channel where we posted about it, and we send a final summary. For Critical and Moderate issues, we run an internal debrief afterward — what happened, what we’d do differently, what’s worth baking into the next version of the process.

This is where reliability compounds over time. Fixing a single issue helps once. Improving the system that produced it helps every time something similar shows up later.

“No issues” is unrealistic — Shoot for “no confusion”

Technology is too complicated and too interdependent for any team to operate without incidents. The realistic goal is making sure incidents don’t generate confusion on top of themselves.

If something breaks at your organization tomorrow, the question worth asking is where the truth about it would live. If the honest answer is “in someone’s memory” or “scattered across three chat threads,” there isn’t a system supporting the most vulnerable part of your workflow.

That’s something we can help with.

inWorks LLC is a technology and systems company helping small businesses, creatives, and growing organizations build infrastructure they can actually use. Founded by Ilya Lehrman, inWorks has spent over 15 years thinking carefully about how technology should serve people — not the other way around.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about how your organization handles incidents, communication, and the daily friction of technology that doesn’t cooperate.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

Technology should make life easier — not more stressful. That’s why homeIT offers two simple support plans so you can choose the level of help that fits your household. Whether you need occasional assistance or ongoing peace of mind, we’re here to keep your devices running smoothly.

Our Two Plans

1. Tech Comfort — Casual Assistance When You Need Us

Perfect for those who only need help from time to time.

• $240/year

Also available monthly at $25/month

• Co-Pay: $70 per visit

• Think of it like a doctor’s office visit: one simple payment whenever you schedule support.

2. Tech Harmony — Proactive Support to Prevent Problems Before They Arise

Ideal for families or individuals who want regular check-ins and preventive care.

• $600/year

Also available monthly at $60/month

• Co-Pay: $50 per visit

• We monitor and maintain your tech to stop issues before they start.

Both plans include expert, in-home or remote tech assistance for computers, Wi-Fi, smart devices, and more.

Not Ready for a Plan?

No problem. Per-use support is available at $105/hour with no commitment required. Distance-based travel fees apply, and we’ll give you a clear estimate before we begin.

Is a Plan Worth It? Here’s an honest look.

We know subscriptions are everywhere these days — so here’s a straightforward breakdown to help you decide.

A real example: One of our early clients was calling us twice a month for per-use support. Once they made the switch to Tech Harmony, they were saving money within a few months — and getting more consistent, proactive care instead of waiting until something broke.

The pattern is simple: if you’re calling once in a while, per-use works fine. Once you’re reaching out twice a month or more, a plan almost always costs less.

How to Get Started

• Call: 267-857-8059

• Scan: Use the QR code to learn more and sign up.

  

• Location: Proudly serving Chester County, PA and surrounding areas.

homeIT is here to give you the confidence that your devices are safe, secure, and ready for anything — whether you just need a quick fix or want proactive care all year long.

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It’s a fair question. And our honest answer is: the same way you decide to trust anyone.

You look at their record.

When we made the decision to build our AI-assisted workflows around Anthropic’s Claude, it wasn’t because someone ran us an attractive sales deck. It was because Anthropic has actually done things that cost them something.

They employ ethicists to shape how their models reason. They held back a model release until organizations had time to prepare. They turned down a Pentagon contract for surveillance and weapons targeting, and absorbed the pushback that came with it. That’s the kind of thing you only see when you’re actually paying attention to how a company behaves over time.

Is there a guarantee they won’t change? No. There are no guarantees anywhere — in vendor relationships, in partnerships, in anything that involves another organization making decisions over time. You either trust based on track record, or you don’t. The standard isn’t certainty — it’s accountability, and a track record worth examining.

What matter is how you build with it

Choosing a trustworthy AI provider is a starting point. The harder work is deciding what role AI plays in your organization — and what it doesn’t.

At inWorks, we’ve been deliberate about that boundary. Our founder Ilya Lehrman has thought carefully about where that line sits, and it shapes how we build.

AI handles the work that benefits from speed, consistency, and scale: drafting, summarizing, pattern recognition, first-pass analysis.

Humans handle the work that requires judgment, relationship, and accountability: decisions, client conversations, anything where the stakes are real.

This came from watching what happens when organizations skip that step. When AI output gets treated as final output. When speed gets confused with quality.

The multi-level businesses we work with can’t afford those mistakes. They don’t have the margin to recover from a trust breakdown with a client, or a process that scales the wrong behavior faster. So when we recommend AI tools or build AI-assisted workflows for clients, the first questions we ask aren’t about features. They’re about ownership: who reviews this, who’s responsible when it’s wrong, and what does the human in this loop actually do?

What we tell clients

When a client asks whether they should be using AI, the answer is usually: it depends on whether you’ve thought about what you’re handing off and what you’re keeping.

AI is genuinely useful for reducing friction in work that’s repetitive, high-volume, and well-defined. It’s less useful, and sometimes actively harmful, when it’s deployed in situations that require nuance, context, or care that the tool can’t provide. The mistake most organizations make isn’t adopting AI too slowly. It’s adopting it without a framework for where human judgment still has to live.

At inWorks, that framework comes down to three questions.

What is this tool replacing, and was that a good use of human time to begin with?

Who reviews the output before it touches a client or a decision?

And if this tool disappeared tomorrow, do we still understand the process well enough to run it manually?

If you can answer those three questions clearly, you’re probably building with AI in a way that holds up. If you can’t, you’re probably moving fast in a direction you haven’t fully thought through.

Why this matters more now than it did two years ago.

The AI landscape has shifted quickly enough that the decisions organizations make right now are going to shape their practices for a while. The tools are good enough that it’s easy to over-rely on them. The marketing around them is good enough that it’s easy to mistake adoption for strategy.

What doesn’t change, regardless of how good the tools get, is the underlying question of trust. Trust in the companies building the models. Trust in the processes your organization builds around them. Trust that the humans in your workflow are still doing the thing that humans need to do.

We chose the tools we use because the companies behind them have, so far, shown us a track record we can stand behind. We built our processes the way we did because our clients deserve workflows where accountability has a face.

That’s the standard we hold ourselves to at inWorks LLC. And it’s the standard Ilya would encourage any small business to ask of the technology they’re bringing into their work.

If you’re uncertain, that’s worth a conversation. We’re glad to have it.

inWorks LLC is a technology and systems company helping small businesses, creatives, and growing organizations build infrastructure they can actually use. Founded by Ilya Lehrman, inWorks has spent over 15 years thinking carefully about how technology should serve people — not the other way around.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about preventing your sensitive information from being exploited.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

Which is everyone.

What Anthropic Just Released — and Chose Not To

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic — the company behind the Claude AI we use internally — announced a frontier model called Claude Mythos Preview alongside a new initiative called Project Glasswing.

The unusual part of the announcement was what Anthropic chose to do with the model after building it: restrict it entirely from public release, citing the risk the model poses if it ends up in the wrong hands.

During internal testing, Mythos was placed inside a secured sandbox and given a straightforward task — find security vulnerabilities in real software. Over several weeks, it identified thousands of critical flaws across every major operating system and every major web browser, including vulnerabilities that had existed undetected for decades. A 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. A 17-year-old remote code execution flaw in FreeBSD that grants unauthenticated root access. A 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg. Each found and fully exploited by the model without human involvement after the initial prompt.

What gave Anthropic pause was a separate test. Researchers asked Mythos to attempt to escape its controlled container — to see whether it would stay within its defined boundaries. It didn’t.

Anthropic’s response was to form Project Glasswing, a restricted program giving 40 vetted organizations — including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto Networks — access to Mythos exclusively for defensive work: scanning critical software and patching vulnerabilities before they can be weaponized.

Anthropic committed $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations to support the effort.

They’re also privately briefing government officials, with the message that large-scale cyberattacks are considerably more likely in 2026 as a result of these emerging capabilities.

What This Means for Organizations That Aren’t Tech Giants

The vulnerabilities Mythos found were already there. They’ve been sitting inside the software stacks that power email systems, firewalls, operating systems, and browsers — some of them for nearly three decades. The reason they hadn’t been exploited at scale is that finding them required years of specialized human analysis. That analysis gap has functioned as an informal layer of protection.

AI tools at the Mythos level compress that timeline dramatically. Anthropic noted in their announcement that the cybersecurity capabilities emerged not from specialized training, but as a downstream consequence of general improvements in reasoning and autonomous code execution — the same improvements being pursued by every major AI lab. Equivalent capabilities will proliferate, likely faster than most organizations are prepared for.

For small and mid-sized businesses, the practical exposure isn’t primarily about being targeted by nation-state actors or sophisticated criminal groups.

The more immediate concern is that as these capabilities become more accessible, the barrier to running automated vulnerability scans against unprotected infrastructure drops significantly. Organizations running outdated software, reusing credentials, or relying on a single point of protection will find themselves increasingly exposed.

The Infrastructure Model That Addresses This

• Reducing the number of systems and tools in use limits the attack surface.

• Single sign-on paired with multifactor authentication means that a compromised credential doesn’t open a path to everything else.

• A password manager with unique credentials per account eliminates the lateral movement that makes a single breach catastrophic.

• Proactive patching closes known vulnerabilities before they become entry points.

None of this is exotic. The reason it matters now is that the cost of skipping these steps — which has always been real — is becoming more visible and more immediate. Organizations that have been working through a structured, proactive IT model are in a meaningfully better position to weather what’s coming than those who’ve been treating security as a deferred problem.

How We’re Responding

We’re tracking Project Glasswing’s vulnerability disclosures as patches go public and integrating what we learn into how we approach infrastructure reviews, patching schedules, and risk conversations with clients.

We’ve also been using Claude directly in our development and support work — it genuinely accelerates our ability to review code and surface issues. Using these tools thoughtfully, and staying ahead of how they’re evolving, is part of how we stay useful to the businesses we support.

Our operating principle hasn’t changed: good IT infrastructure should run quietly in the background so the people depending on it can stay focused on their work. The Mythos announcement didn’t rewrite what good IT looks like. It made the consequences of avoiding it harder to defer.

If you’re a small business owner sitting with this, the most practical question to ask is whether your current setup would limit the damage if a vulnerability in one of your systems was discovered and exploited — or whether a single point of entry could cascade into something much larger.

If you’re uncertain, that’s worth a conversation. We’re glad to have it.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC safeguards your data, business information, and account credentials through decades of cyber security experience.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about preventing your sensitive information from being exploited.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

As experts, If you downloaded the new White House app, we’d recommend removing it.

Regardless of political reasons — For security ones.

Last week, independent researchers at atomic.computer published a detailed reverse-engineering of the official White House iOS app.

Here are the three findings that concern us most:

1. The app runs live code from infrastructure with Russian origins.

The app uses six separate embedded browsers (WebViews), each loading live, modifiable JavaScript from a company called Elfsight — a widget provider with Russian origins.

The architecture is a two-stage loader: the app loads an initial script, which then reaches out to Elfsight’s servers to pull down additional code and execute it on your device.

If Elfsight’s server were ever compromised — or if the company were compelled to modify its response — arbitrary JavaScript could execute inside the official White House app on every user’s device.

That’s not a theoretical risk, it’s a structural issue baked into the design.

2. Location tracking is compiled in — and can be turned on remotely.

The app ships with ten separate location-tracking frameworks totaling over 2.4MB, including one specifically called OneSignal Location — despite containing no maps, no local events, and no feature that requires knowing where you are.

The researchers confirmed that GPS tracking is not currently active. But the code is there. The location capability can be activated remotely through a server-side configuration controller — without a user update.

3. The behavioral data collection is extensive.

Even without GPS, the app collects more than most users would expect. The OneSignal SDK built into the app includes over 24 server request types — tracking session duration, notification influence, time spent, network type, device type, in-app message engagement, and custom behavioral events.

This is described as standard SDK behavior. Standard doesn’t mean appropriate for an official government app with no disclosed data policy.

There’s more in the full analysis — including code loaded from a random developer’s GitHub account that, if compromised, could push arbitrary malicious code to every user of the app.

The researchers also note that the production build contains development artifacts — including a localhost URL pointing to a developer’s own machine — that suggest this app was not built with standard security review practices.

Why we’re flagging this

We work with people, businesses, and enterprise organizations every day who trust the tools they install — and who don’t have a security researcher on staff to reverse-engineer what those tools are actually doing. That’s part of why we exist.

The lesson here isn’t unique to this app. It’s a reminder that every piece of software you install on a business or personal device is a decision — and that “official” doesn’t mean “secure.”

What we recommend

If you installed the White House app, remove it. If you’re not sure what apps on your team’s devices might be collecting, that’s worth a conversation with your IT support provider.

And if you’re curious what else might be running quietly in the background on your business systems, we’re always happy to take a look.

Source: Security Analysis of the Official White House iOS App, atomic.computer (March 27, 2026)

This incident underscores how modern attacks increasingly rely on trust, familiarity, and belief. Knowledge is power, and your knowledge will protect you.

With over 15 years of IT support experience, inWorks LLC has helped organizations navigate these shifts in real time—preventing incidents before they escalate and saving companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential losses.

When something feels off, having a consistent checkpoint matters. inWorks serves as a reliable place to verify suspicious messages and support clear, informed decisions about what’s safe to trust.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC safeguards your data, business information, and account credentials through decades of cyber security experience.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about preventing your sensitive information from being exploited.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

This week, we are getting to know Leeanne, our newest member and graphic design Intern!

Fun Fact about Leeanne, she loves to travel! She can always be found in the sun, near a beach or on the water!

Leeanne’s Road to Our Team:

Q: How did you end up working with our team?

A few months ago, we started internally tossing around the idea of an intern program. Jessi used her contacts to the West Chester University Art Department to fish around for some interested and promising students. Leeanne was picked by the head of her department to meet with Jessi, and the rest is history!

Always Learning

Q: What’s something you’ve learned recently that surprised you?

Leeanne is getting the invaluable experience of learning how her degree functions and serves her in the real world industry. In meetings with the team, she is constantly surprising herself with the amount of knowledge she has about Graphic design as well as how much she is still learning.

School V.S the real world is similar and different in so many ways which is intimidating but also exciting.

The Importance of Feeling Heard

Q: Is there a recent collaboration or moment of teamwork you’d like to highlight?

Leeanne recognizes the teamwork that takes place in our weekly internal meetings. She values the team’s reception to her thoughts, ideas and feedback. She admits that it feels intimidating coming into a new working environment, but she feels seen and heard at inWorks LLC and loves the positive vibe!

Adventures into the Industry

Q: What’s one thing you’re hopeful or curious about right now?

Leeanne is hopeful that she will gain a career in the graphic design industry! She struggled with discerning what it was she wanted to pursue, but now she has found something this is passionate about, good at, and makes her enjoy work!

Thanks for sharing your insights, Leeanne!

Team - tune in next week for another inPulse ⭐

Rather than exploiting software vulnerabilities, this campaign relies on impersonation, user trust, and legitimate tools already built into the Microsoft ecosystem.

Overview of the Attack

Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team reported a voice phishing (vishing) campaign in which threat actors pose as IT support personnel and contact users through Microsoft Teams.

The attack typically follows a structured sequence:

• An attacker initiates contact through Microsoft Teams, presenting themselves as IT support

• The user is informed of an issue requiring immediate attention

• The attacker directs the user to grant remote access using Microsoft Quick Assist

Once access is granted, the attack progresses:

• The attacker gains control of the user’s device

• Activity shifts from social engineering to direct system interaction

• The user is guided to a malicious website

• A spoofed login form is used to capture corporate credentials

• Additional malicious payloads are downloaded onto the device

This approach does not rely on breaking security controls directly. Instead, it uses legitimate access granted by the user.

Key Characteristics

Use of Trusted Platforms

Microsoft Teams is widely used for internal communication, making it a credible channel for impersonation. Messages received through the platform may appear routine, especially in organizations where IT support regularly communicates with employees.

Abuse of Legitimate Tools

Microsoft Quick Assist is a built-in remote support tool designed for legitimate troubleshooting. In this case, it is used to establish initial access without requiring external malware at the outset.

Transition to Hands-On Activity

After access is granted, attackers move beyond conversation and begin interacting directly with the system. This includes navigating the device, directing user actions, and initiating downloads.

Credential Harvesting

Users are directed to spoofed websites designed to resemble legitimate login portals. Entered credentials are captured and can be used for further access within the organization.

Broader Implications

This campaign reflects a broader category of attacks that focus on behavior rather than technical exploitation.

Several trends are evident:

• Collaboration platforms as entry points: Tools like Microsoft Teams are increasingly targeted because they are central to daily operations

• Blending legitimate and malicious activity: The use of built-in tools reduces the likelihood of immediate detection

• Reliance on real-time interaction: Attackers guide users step-by-step, reducing uncertainty and increasing compliance

These attacks can be difficult to identify because they often resemble normal support interactions.

Potential Impact on Organizations

If successful, this type of attack can lead to:

• Unauthorized access to internal systems

• Exposure of corporate credentials

• Installation of additional malware

• Lateral movement within the network

The combination of valid credentials and direct device access can allow attackers to persist within an environment beyond the initial point of entry.

Risk Reduction Considerations

Organizations reviewing this type of threat may consider:

• Restricting inbound communication from unmanaged or unknown Microsoft Teams accounts

• Using allowlists for trusted external domains

• Reviewing policies around remote access tools such as Quick Assist

• Providing guidance to employees on how to verify support requests

User awareness remains an important factor, particularly in recognizing unexpected or urgent requests delivered through familiar platforms.

Closing Note

This incident underscores how modern attacks increasingly rely on trust, familiarity, and real-time interaction, rather than solely on technical vulnerabilities. As collaboration tools continue to play a central role in daily operations, they are also becoming a more common vector for social engineering-based threats.

With over 15 years of IT support experience, inWorks LLC has helped organizations navigate these shifts in real time—preventing incidents before they escalate and saving companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential losses.

When something feels off, having a consistent checkpoint matters. inWorks serves as a reliable place to verify suspicious messages and support clear, informed decisions about what’s safe to trust.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC safeguards your data, business information, and account credentials through decades of cyber security experience.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about preventing vishing and phishing attacks from taking advanatge of your organization.

For ongoing insights on current events in tech, cyber security, and protection best practices, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

Last week, we checked in with Jocelyn—our favorite marketing specialist! Read below.

Advice for Canva Users

Q: If you could share one “pro tip” from your week with the team, what would it be?

Jocelyn’s pro tip for this week is related to working in Canva! As the primary marketing person for inWorks LLC, she spends a lot of time in Canva and has become quite familiar with the platform.

“If you are trying to move multiple elements of your graphic at the same time, instead of grabbing each one individually and rearranging them with the right spacing, hold shift and click on each element you want to move — and you can move them at the same time!”

Social Media Launch

Q: What’s a moment from your work this week that felt especially satisfying or meaningful?

For those who might not know, Jocelyn works for our startWorks members as a marketing consultant. This week, she started a new project for one of the clients - a hair salon - on Instagram. Within a couple of days, the client’s account had reached 4750% more accounts and amassed 1033% more views than average.

“It is always satisfying to succeed at something, but even more so when it benefits someone else. It reminded me that I am skilled at what I do and how lucky I am to do something I love!”

See one, Do one, Teach one

Q: When do you feel most confident in your role—and what helps you get there?

Jocelyn gains confidence from guiding others. The principle of “see one, do one, teach one” is a guiding force in both her personal and professional life—the best way to learn something is to see it done, do it yourself, and then teach someone else.

Collaboration with WCU

Q: Is there a company initiative or internal campaign you’re excited about?

Jocelyn is excited about our new internship program. The company has its first official graphic design intern from West Chester University, and Jocelyn has been assigned as her mentor! She’s honored to facilitate the intern’s introduction into their professional field.

⭐ Thanks for reading inPulse! Stay tuned for more.

This week, we checked in with Leah!

Leah supports internal operations and client experience by maintaining SharePoint resources, coordinating onboarding, documenting processes, delegating routine tasks, and managing client onboarding, communications, branding audits, and virtual gallery initiatives.

Getting Back Into the Groove

Q: If you had to give your week a headline, what would it be?

Leah had recently picked up a position working at the marketplace within the Philadelphia Flower Show last week! In all of the fun, she was missed in some of her weekly meeting and project developments. Therefore, she finds that she spent the first half of her week reviewing her missed meetings and reorienting herself back into the INW/LVF headspace.

Year of Dreams Artists

Q: What’s a small win from this week that made a difference?

Leah’s favorite part of her role as a Gallery Coordinator is connecting with artists. This past week, she was able to meet with a prospective 2026 artist in her home studio as the lead for the first time!

Technical Language and Role Development

Q: What’s a small win from this week that made a difference?

Spotlight on: Ricky!

Leah highlights Ricky as an incredible mentor. She emphasizes his patience, dedication to professional growth, and the importance of questions. She mentions that everyone at INW is aware of how great of a leader and mentor Ricky is, which is true!

If you didn’t know, Leah has an incredible bunny named Cow. Here are some photos!

🌟 Thanks for tuning in to this week’s inPulse

Tune in next week as we continue to highlight the people that make inWorks LLC move in harmony.

Planning an Amazon run? 🛒✨ Start with Our Link and you’ll quietly support our work while paying the exact same price

Last week, we checked in with Jeremy Mattson—the guy who helps us stay on track financially! Read below.

‘Tis the Season of Tax Prep

Q: Are you working on any project (or has any wrapped up recently) that you’re proud of?

Jeremy has been working hard on streamlining tax prep for this season, as well as sustainability tracking for INW’s small business clients. He recently finished a project that aligned financial data with sustainability metrics, which made reporting clearer and more useful for decision‑making.

Strength in Problem-Solving

Q: When do you feel most confident in your role—and what helps you get there?

Problem-solving at work gives Jeremy confidence in his role - especially when a client or teammate asks a complex question that he can break down into something manageable. Having clear expectations, good documentation, and open communication with the team are essential to helping Jeremy stay focused and confident during the week.

Improved Financial Reporting

Q: What’s something happening in your department that you think other team members should know about?

The accounting/bookkeeping department has been focusing their effort into improving processes and consistency, especially around reporting and documentation. According to Jeremy, this is setting up the business to be more efficient during busy periods, while making it easier for team members to step into new roles or collaborate across departments.

Ingredients for Satisfaction

Q: What does a good workday look like for you lately?

“A good workday usually includes making steady progress on focused tasks, solving at least one meaningful problem, and having a few positive check‑ins with teammates or clients. Ending the day knowing I helped move something forward—no matter how small—always feels like a win.”

⭐ Thanks for reading inPulse! More to come—stay tuned.

A title change happens.
A phone number changes.
A new marketing banner needs to go out.
A legal disclaimer needs to be added.

Suddenly someone is chasing down ten, twenty, or fifty people asking them to update their signatures manually. Different devices format things differently. Branding drifts. Old information lingers in email threads for months.

It’s a small operational issue that quietly creates a lot of friction.

Why Email Signature Management Becomes a Problem

Most organizations handle signatures individually. Each employee manages their own settings in Outlook or their email client.

That creates a few common challenges:

• Branding becomes inconsistent

• Updates require manual effort from every employee

• Marketing banners or announcements are difficult to deploy

• Signatures behave differently across desktop, web, and mobile

• Legal disclaimers are hard to enforce consistently

For companies trying to maintain a professional brand presence, this becomes an ongoing maintenance task.

Our New Partnership with CodeTwo

To help solve this, inWorks LLC is now an official partner of CodeTwo.

CodeTwo provides a centralized email signature management platform designed specifically for Microsoft 365 environments.

The solution — CodeTwo Email Signatures for Microsoft 365 — allows organizations to manage signatures in one place and automatically apply them to outgoing email.

No manual updates required from individual employees.

What This Means for Businesses Using Microsoft 365

With CodeTwo in place, organizations gain:

Centralized signature management
Update signatures once and apply changes across the entire company.

Consistent branding
Every email sent from your organization reflects the same formatting, contact information, and visual identity.

Automatic marketing banners
Promote events, announcements, or services directly in your email signature.

Reliable cross-device formatting
Signatures remain consistent across Outlook desktop, Outlook web, and mobile devices.

Server-side signature application
Signatures can be applied automatically within Microsoft 365, ensuring consistency even when emails are sent from mobile devices or third-party clients.

Why We’re Offering This to Our Clients

At inWorks, we focus on operational improvements that remove small but persistent sources of friction for businesses.

Email signatures are a perfect example.

They represent your brand in every conversation your team has. A centralized system protects that brand presence while saving time on administrative updates.

Through our partnership with CodeTwo, we can now help clients:

• Plan their signature structure

• Deploy the system within Microsoft 365

• Design branded templates

• Manage updates moving forward

Interested in Exploring It?

If your organization currently manages email signatures manually, this solution can simplify the process and create a more consistent brand experience.

We’re happy to walk through how it works and whether it makes sense for your environment.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC brings structure, clarity, and dependable business operations solutions oversight to organizations of all sizes through our partnerships with other platforms

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about using CodeTwo as a email signature builder, company image aligner, or a marketing tool.

For ongoing insights on best practices, non-traditional marketing tools, and building sustainable business systems, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

Kicking off our 2026 updates, last week we got caught up with our CEO, Ilya!

A Process That’s Starting to Hum

Q: What’s something you do now that feels smoother than it did a month ago?

For Ilya, billing has always been a part of his role that he did not particularly enjoy. However, we’re happy to report that there have been recent incremental improvements to the process that make this task feel less painful overall.

The Power of a Smooth Migration

Q: Has anything wrapped up recently that you’re proud of?

Ilya worked on an IT migration project earlier this month. He is proud of how successful the migration was (zero issues!), from planning to communications with the client. As a result, this project generated additional business for power platform development and workflow!

Speaking Up in a New Environment

Q: What’s a piece of advice you’d give to someone new joining the team?

“It's okay to feel a little lost and to ask for directions. Coming into a new environment is always overwhelming, and you should expect to take some time to get oriented - it is much easier to do that if you ask lots of questions.”

When Curiosity Meets Positive Drive

Q: Is there someone on the team you’d like to recognize or celebrate?

Ilya's shout out this week is for Jocelyn (marketing specialist)! She has been a consistent positive force to work with one-on-one as well as in a team setting. Ilya appreciates her exploratory energy and approach to new topics/technology, such as using AI as a learning enhancement tool.

Choosing Practices That Replenish

Q: What’s something outside of work that’s been quietly fueling your creativity?

We all need to find things to fuel our souls. For Ilya, rediscovering his love of playing music has been a recent development.

“I've picked up guitar again and started looking at some music production tools that I used to play with, back when I had spare time. I've also decided to get back to glass fusion.”

Additionally, Ilya has been doing a weekly 24 to 36-hour broth-based fast that he calls “Brothday" for 40 weeks now. This functions as a nice reset for his mind and body. He even started a "fasting primer" book on history, culture, benefits, and pitfalls of fasting, with help from AI.

⭐ Thanks for reading inPulse! More to come in the upcoming weeks.

Two of the most recognized platforms are FreeTaxUSA and TurboTax. Both file returns electronically. Both use official IRS forms. Both follow the same tax laws.

Yet an increasing number of filers—especially those with moderately complex returns—are choosing FreeTaxUSA.

Here’s why.

1. Significantly Lower Cost Structure

FreeTaxUSA’s pricing model is straightforward:

• Federal filing is typically $0—even for itemized deductions, investments, or self-employment income.

• State returns carry a flat, modest fee.

TurboTax often advertises free filing. However, many common situations—such as freelance income, investment activity, or rental property—trigger paid upgrades.

For professionals managing cash flow carefully, that difference matters.

For most filers with anything beyond a basic W-2, FreeTaxUSA frequently ends up costing far less.

2. Fewer Mid-Process Upsells

Predictability builds trust.

FreeTaxUSA is clear about what is included at each tier before you begin. The platform does not routinely interrupt the filing process with upgrade prompts when new forms appear.

TurboTax is known for prompting users to move into higher-priced tiers when certain income types or deductions are detected.

3. Same IRS Forms. Same Calculations.

Both platforms:

• Use official IRS forms

• Follow current federal and state tax regulations

• Perform automated calculations

Choosing a lower-cost option does not reduce the legitimacy or accuracy of your return.

The difference is largely pricing strategy—not compliance standards.

4. Better Value for “Non-Simple” Returns

Many professionals do not have what software companies define as a “simple return.”

FreeTaxUSA includes, at no additional federal cost:

• Itemized deductions

• Capital gains and investment income

• HSA contributions

• Rental property income (Schedule E)

• Self-employment income (Schedule C)

These same scenarios commonly require paid upgrades in TurboTax.

For freelancers, consultants, real estate investors, and side-business owners, that pricing distinction can be significant.

5. Straightforward Interface

TurboTax is highly polished and visually refined. For some users, that guided design feels reassuring.

FreeTaxUSA takes a more direct approach. The interface is clean, text-forward, and less promotional in tone.

Professionals who prioritize efficiency often prefer a platform that feels procedural rather than sales-oriented.

6. Optional Support—Only If You Want It

FreeTaxUSA offers paid Deluxe and Pro Support tiers that include audit assistance and access to live support.

The key distinction: support is optional.

You are not automatically placed into a higher tier simply because your tax situation includes additional forms.

For self-directed filers who occasionally want reassurance, this creates a balanced model between full DIY and full-service accounting.

A Broader Consideration: Pricing Transparency and Control

For business owners and professionals, software decisions are rarely about a single transaction. They reflect broader values:

• Cost predictability

• Transparency

• Control over workflow

• Reduced friction

When evaluating tax platforms, many filers discover that FreeTaxUSA aligns more closely with those priorities. Both platforms are legitimate. Both are widely used.

The question becomes less about brand recognition and more about which pricing model and user experience align with your working style.

Our consensus? If the IRS knows how much you owe in taxes, and they are still making you guess — you might as well get the most tax bang for your tax buck.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC brings structure, clarity, and dependable financial oversight to small businesses and growing organizations through proactive accounting and advisory services.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about monthly accounting support, financial reporting, and long-term business clarity.

For ongoing insights on accounting best practices, operational finance, and building sustainable business systems, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical guidance designed for founders, operators, and leadership teams.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

Leadership asks whether the intranet is “working.”
You can pull analytics.
But the numbers don’t seem to answer the question.

Recently, at intranetValet, we felt urged to run usage reports across Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to determine what was active versus dormant. The question is always practical — leaders want to know what is being used and what isn’t.

Organizations need a structured, recurring intranet activity summary that translates platform data into operational insight.

For operations directors, internal communications teams, and nonprofit leaders navigating politically complex environments, that distinction matters.

Why Monthly Reporting Matters

One-time analytics pull answers a momentary question. A monthly summary creates institutional awareness of your tools.

Consistent reporting reframes your intranet as an essential piece of infrastructure (which, it is). These insights shift conversations into budgeting for useful infrastructure, establishing online governance, and keeping people accountable for intranet activity.

Separating adoption issues from design issues

Is your low intranet engagement a user issue? Or is your intranet inaccessible, poorly designed, or simply dead?

Monthly reporting helps you test these questions.

For example:

• Are the most visited pages compliance-driven or mission-driven?

• Did traffic spike after a leadership announcement and then drop?

• Are certain departments consistently absent from collaboration metrics?

• Are new Teams being created without sustained activity?

When you compare trends month over month, patterns emerge. And patterns lead to targeted decisions — navigation changes, governance updates, training interventions, or content restructuring without guessing.

A Managed Reporting System for Leadership

At intranetValet, we provide structured monthly intranet usage reporting designed for management teams, executives, and operational leaders who need clarity.

We translate activity across Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams into a concise, executive-ready summary that answers the questions leadership actually asks:

• Is the intranet being used?

• Where is collaboration increasing or declining?

• Are we building structure — or sprawl?

• What requires attention before it becomes a problem?

We offer a recurring operational brief that connects platform activity to governance, adoption, and organizational behavior.

For executive teams, this provides visibility.
For operations leaders, it supports decision-making.
For technology stakeholders, it creates measurable accountability.

If Your Leadership Team Cannot Clearly Answer How Your Intranet Is Performing

If your organization would benefit from structured, recurring insight into intranet engagement, collaboration trends, and governance signals, intranetValet can implement a monthly reporting system that makes your digital workplace observable and actionable.

Clarity at the system level changes how organizations operate.

If you are ready to manage your intranet like infrastructure — not storage — let’s start the conversation.

Learn more about how intranetValet brings structure, clarity, and measurable oversight to your organization’s Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams environment.

📞 Call 267-857-8066 to start the conversation about implementing structured monthly intranet usage reporting and governance support.

For ongoing insights on intranet strategy, adoption, and digital workplace infrastructure, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for executive-level guidance built for operations leaders and growing organizations.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

If you have, you are certainly not imagining it. It’s called the Gartner Hype Cycle.

At its core, the Hype Cycle is a way of describing how new technologies tend to be adopted over time — emotionally, organizationally, and practically. Almost every emerging technology follows the same rough path:

1. Innovation Trigger
   A breakthrough or idea appears. Early demos look promising. Few people are using it, but excitement builds.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
   Headlines explode. Vendors overpromise. Leaders expect instant transformation. Reality hasn’t caught up yet.

3. Trough of Disillusionment
   The cracks show. Projects stall. Tools don’t magically fix broken processes. Many people give up here.

4. Slope of Enlightenment
   The technology doesn’t disappear — it gets quieter. Practical use cases emerge. Expectations normalize.

5. Plateau of Productivity
   The technology becomes boring — and that’s a good thing. It’s stable, useful, and integrated into real work.

We care about the Hype Cycle because most tech failures aren’t technical failures. They are instances of inflated expectation. When organizations adopt tools at the peak without the systems, support, or clarity to sustain them, chaos follows.

With that lens, let’s look at three very current technologies — and where they realistically sit on the curve.

1. AI-Native Development Platforms

(Hovering near the Peak of Inflated Expectations)

AI-native development platforms are tools built to work with AI at every stage of software creation, using human intent and oversight to guide AI-generated code and workflows.

AI-native development platforms promise something incredibly appealing:

“Build software faster, with fewer people, using AI as a built-in collaborator.”

Instead of writing every line of code manually, developers can describe what they want, refine outputs, and let AI handle repetitive or boilerplate work. In theory, this lowers costs, speeds up development, and makes software creation more accessible.

The promise is real, but the hype is high.

What’s often missing from the conversation is that software is more than code. It’s decisions, tradeoffs, maintenance, documentation, and long-term responsibility. AI can accelerate parts of the process, but it doesn’t replace:

• Clear requirements

• Thoughtful architecture

• Ongoing ownership

• Governance and security

Many teams adopt these platforms expecting immediate efficiency gains, only to discover they’ve created systems that are harder to understand, harder to debug, and harder to maintain.

Why this matters:
AI-native platforms are powerful when paired with strong systems thinking. Without that foundation, they amplify confusion instead of reducing it.

The organizations that will benefit most are the ones using AI to support human judgment.

2. Multi-Agent AI Systems

(Sliding toward the Trough of Disillusionment)

Multi-agent AI systems are setups where instead of one AI doing everything, different agents may plan work, carry out actions, check results, or refine outputs. These systems are designed to handle more complex workflow. When used thoughtfully, multi-agent systems can improve efficiency in narrow, well-defined use cases — but they still require human guidance and clear structure to remain reliable.

Multi-agent systems are exactly what they sound like: instead of one AI doing one task, you have multiple AI “agents” working together, each responsible for a role — planning, executing, checking, refining.

On paper, it looks like digital teamwork.

However, when practiced it can become complicated.

Coordinating multiple agents introduces new challenges:

• Who’s responsible when something goes wrong?

• How do you validate decisions made by autonomous systems?

• How much oversight is required to keep things reliable?

A lot of organizations jumped into agent-based systems hoping they’d replace large chunks of human labor. Many are now realizing that managing AI agents still requires people, structure, and ongoing care.

This doesn’t mean agentic AI is a dead end. We’re leaving the fantasy stage and entering the reality stage.

Why this matters:
Multi-agent systems work best in narrow, well-defined environments — not as general replacements for teams or workflows. The hype suggested autonomy. The reality demands stewardship.

3. Preemptive Cybersecurity & AI-Driven Defense

(Climbing the Slope of Enlightenment)

Cybersecurity has traditionally been reactive:

• Something breaks

• Something gets breached

• Everyone scrambles

Preemptive cybersecurity flips that model.

Using AI, behavioral analysis, and pattern recognition, these systems aim to identify risks before damage occurs — unusual logins, abnormal access patterns, or system behavior that doesn’t match the norm.

Unlike many AI trends, this one is becoming quietly practical.

Organizations are using these tools to:

• Reduce response time

• Catch issues earlier

• Lower the emotional and operational cost of emergencies

There’s still complexity here — AI can produce false positives, and attackers adapt — but expectations are becoming more realistic.

Why this matters:
This technology succeeds because it aligns with how people actually work. It supports human decision-making instead of replacing it, and it acknowledges that prevention is more sustainable than constant recovery.

The Real Takeaway: Tools Can’t Function Without Context

The Gartner Hype Cycle is about recognizing that timing, expectations, and support systems matter just as much as innovation.

At inWorks LLC, we don’t chase trends. We focus on:

• Clarity over novelty

• Stability over spectacle

• Systems people can actually live with

The most successful organizations aren’t the first to adopt new technology — they’re the ones who adopt it with intention, at the right moment, with the right support.

Join the Conversation

What is the most frustrating technology solution you have tried?
Share your experience in the comments.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC builds systems that support real work.

📞 Call us at 267-857-8066 to start the conversation and explore how inWorks LLC can help you and your business.

For ongoing insights on technology strategy, productivity, and system optimization, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical thought leadership designed for growing organizations.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

It usually starts with something like this:

“We know we should be doing more marketing… but it already feels overwhelming.”

What’s striking is that the overwhelm rarely comes from ideas.
It comes from everything that surrounds them.

Planning. Drafting. Rewriting. Repurposing. Scheduling. Reviewing. Measuring.
Then doing it all again the next week.

Marketing doesn’t break people because it’s creative.
It breaks them because it’s endless.

The Problem Isn’t Effort — It’s Structure

At inWorks LLC, we’ve spent more than 15 years designing and supporting technology systems for real people doing real work. Across IT support, home technology, and intranets, we’ve learned a consistent truth:

When systems lack structure, people absorb the friction.

Marketing is no different.

Without clear workflows, guardrails, and shared understanding, marketing becomes reactive. Everything lives in people’s heads. Consistency depends on energy levels. And even good teams feel like they’re always behind.

Why We Started Applying AI Carefully

Like many organizations, we didn’t approach AI because we wanted to move faster or publish more. We approached it because we wanted marketing to feel more sustainable.

So instead of asking, “What can we automate?”
We asked:

• What work is truly repetitive?

• Where do humans need to stay firmly in control?

• What guardrails protect voice, ethics, and trust?

• How do we make this support people instead of extracting more from them?

The result wasn’t a tool stack or a prompt library.
It was a system.

A System, not a Shortcut

The AI-supported marketing system we use at inWorks is built around a simple idea:

AI can support strategy, planning, drafting, and repurposing —
but humans remain responsible for meaning, judgment, and care.

This same thinking shapes the marketing behind startWorks, where sustainability, clarity, and structure are core values. No hustle culture. No pressure to perform. Just systems that make it easier to show up consistently and honestly.

The goal isn’t to remove humans from marketing.
It’s to remove unnecessary strain.

Sharing the System (Without the Hype)

We’re hosting a free, educational webinar to walk through how this system works in practice:

Marketing Automation Without Losing the Human Touch

This session isn’t about tools, trends, or “AI hacks.”
It’s about:

• Reducing repetitive marketing work

• Designing ethical guardrails

• Building workflows that hold up over time

• Keeping people — not platforms — at the center

We’ll talk through how the system is structured, how it runs week to week, and where automation helps versus where it shouldn’t.

If you’re part of a small team, managing marketing alongside everything else, or simply tired of starting from scratch every week, this may resonate.

Webinar Details

📅 February 9, 2026
⏰ 1:30 PM EST
💻 Live on Microsoft Teams
🎟️ Free with registration

All registrants will receive the recording at no charge.

👉 Register for the webinar

At the end of the session, we’ll briefly share how similar systems can be adapted for other organizations or applied to different semi-automatable processes — but the primary focus is education and clarity.

Marketing doesn’t need more urgency.
It needs better support.

We hope this conversation helps move things in that direction.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC builds systems that support real work.

📞 Call us at 267-857-8066 to start the conversation and explore how inWorks LLC can help you and your business.

For ongoing insights on technology strategy, productivity, and system optimization, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical thought leadership designed for growing organizations.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn

Something breaks. A deadline is looming. A workaround gets the job done and the business keeps moving. From the outside, it looks like adaptability; the team doing what they need to do to keep things running.

But over time, those small decisions begin to shape how work actually happens. And that’s where the real cost shows up.

When Temporary Fixes Become Permanent Behavior

Most teams don’t intentionally build fragile systems. They respond to pressure, and never circle back. If it isn’t broken, you shouldn’t fix it, right?

The problem is rarely the workaround itself. The problem is when the workaround becomes the system.

Once temporary fixes harden into everyday operations, they quietly change how people experience their work.

The Compounding Costs Teams Rarely Measure

Workarounds don’t usually fail loudly. They fail slowly.

Here’s what they create over time:

• Time lost to inefficiency — Simple tasks take longer than they should. Work depends on specific people instead of clear systems. Progress becomes fragile.

• Employee frustration and burnout — Teams compensate for broken processes with extra effort. Cognitive load increases. Confidence drops.

• Risk that compounds quietly — Security gaps, data loss, compliance issues, and operational failures grow unnoticed until they surface as emergencies.

None of this feels urgent at first. Which is why it’s easy to ignore.

Why “Just Making It Work” Isn’t Resilience

Short-term fixes are often framed as grit or flexibility; In reality, they’re a form of technical debt.

Technical debt is any decision that trades long-term stability for short-term relief. The interest is paid later—in outages, stress, missed opportunities, and constant firefighting. Soon, what seemed quick and cheap upfront has real, costly, monetary consequences.

Stability Is What Enables Growth

There’s a common belief that stable systems are something organizations invest in after they scale. However, the opposite is true.

Stability is what allows growth to happen without breaking people or processes.

Clear, well-designed systems reduce decision fatigue. They make work predictable. They create space for creativity, focus, and meaningful contribution.

A Better Question for Leaders

Instead of asking how much longer a workaround can last, try asking: What is this workaround protecting us from fixing?

Treat every workaround as a signal, pointing you towards a missing structure, unclear ownership, or system that was never designed for real-world use.

Addressing those gaps respects the people who rely on these systems every day.

Our Key

At inWorks LLC, we believe technology should support people. Resilience isn’t built on patches. It’s built on foundations that can actually hold.

Organizations that prioritize ethical, accessible, and well-governed systems create environments where work can happen without chaos.

Join the Conversation

What is the most frustrating technology solution you have tried?
Share your experience in the comments.

Learn more about how inWorks LLC builds systems that support real work.

📞 Call us at 267-857-8066 to start the conversation and explore how inWorks LLC can help you and your business.

For ongoing insights on technology strategy, productivity, and system optimization, follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn for practical thought leadership designed for growing organizations.

Follow inWorks LLC on LinkedIn