Four stories from the week that matter to your business.

If you use Microsoft Word, Outlook, or Windows at work, you have probably seen Copilot, the AI assistant Microsoft has been building into its products. Reporting from TechCrunch this week surfaced language in Microsoft's own terms of service describing Copilot as provided "for entertainment purposes only." The company selling you an AI assistant for your business is telling you, in legal language, not to rely on it for business.

Read that again. Then take it as useful news rather than as a reason to panic. Copilot is not useless. It summarizes a long email well enough. It drafts a meeting agenda well enough. What it will not reliably do is the work that exposes you to risk: numbers that have to be right, legal language, customer information, anything a court might read back to you. The companies building these tools know their limits better than anyone. When the fine print tells you not to trust the output, believe the fine print, and keep a human eye on anything a mistake could cost you.

OpenAI added a subscription tier between its twenty-dollar ChatGPT Plus plan and its two-hundred-dollar plan this week. The new tier is aimed at heavy users who need more capacity for coding tools and high-volume work. For most small business owners, the twenty-dollar plan still does what you need it to do, and the new tier is not a reason to upgrade.

If you are not paying for ChatGPT at all, this is also not the week to start. Wait until you have a specific problem you need it to solve, then pick the cheapest plan that solves it. The most useful thing about pricing news like this is that it helps you answer the question readers actually ask: do I need to pay more? For almost everyone reading this, the honest answer is no.

The next story is not about AI, but it is about protecting your business, which is what the Almanac is for. Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen issued a warning this week about mailings from a company calling itself National Business Services, based in Washington, D.C. The letters look official. They threaten fines of up to twenty-five thousand dollars for missing labor law posters and similar compliance items. They are a scam dressed in letterhead.

The Secretary of State issued a cease-and-desist. If one of these letters is sitting on your desk, throw it away. If you are not sure what posters your business actually needs, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry website (erd.dli.mt.gov) tells you, and most of the required posters are free to download there. Five minutes of checking against the real source will save a hundred dollars or more paid to a company your state is already going after.

The Verge published a piece this week about a growing problem: people are starting to assume that human-made work is AI-generated. The piece floated the idea of creating labels for human work, similar to a Fair Trade logo on coffee. Whether or not the label catches on, the underlying shift is already here, and it matters for how you present your own work.

If you write your own emails, your own social posts, your own marketing, some of your customers may already be wondering whether AI wrote it. That is not a reason to stop writing. It is a reason to keep your voice personal, specific, and grounded in your actual experience. AI-generated text tends to sound smooth and generic. Your writing should sound like you, because it is you, and that is your competitive advantage before anyone needs to stamp a logo on it.