UW and Wyoming SBDC Network to Host Best Practices in AI Security and Risk Webinar July 8

Business owners are anxious about artificial intelligence (AI), and they should be. AI can genuinely cause problems, and being cautious about a technology you don't fully understand is the right instinct -- not a weakness.

The issue isn't that owners are afraid. The issue is that the fear is too vague to act upon.

Small-business owners, entrepreneurs and startups will have an opportunity to learn about best practices to keep their businesses AI-secure and avoid risk Wednesday, July 8.

Thayne Thatcher will lead a Wyoming Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Network webinar titled "Best Practices in AI Security and Risk" from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. To register, go here. The cost is $15.

The Wyoming SBDC Network offers business expertise to help Wyoming residents think about, launch, grow, reinvent or exit their business. The Wyoming SBDC Network is hosted by the University of Wyoming with state funds from the Wyoming Business Council and funded, in part, through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The webinar will break down the actual AI security threats to businesses into clear, jargon-free categories. For every risk, the webinar will cover what it really is; the realistic consequences; and how to fix it.

-- Data leakage: What happens when an employee pastes customer lists, contracts or financial sheets into a free chatbot? Find out who sees it; where it lives; and who gets sued.

-- Training contamination: Is OpenAI training its models on your data? The webinar will look at the hidden differences between free and paid tiers that most owners miss.

-- Accidental destruction: Attendees will learn why bad prompts are increasingly deleting rows, files or entire databases as AI gets more system access -- and how to keep a human in the loop.

-- Account and credential compromise: Attendees will learn how to guard against a new attack surface, including phishing attacks targeting AI logins and malicious prompts hidden in shared documents.

-- Dependency and outages: Attendees will learn the hidden risk of building critical workflows around a single vendor. What happens to your business if your primary AI tool goes down for six hours?

-- Compliance and regulations: Attendees will learn how AI tools quietly trigger massive data disclosure problems for businesses handling the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, financial or legal data.

Thatcher is the founder of IronForge Automations, a Wyoming-based AI automation consultancy that designs and implements practical, custom automation systems for traditional businesses, including manufacturers, contractors, architects and professional services firms. IronForge's work is hands-on by design: shop floors, back offices and operations rooms, not slide decks. Thatcher is a graduate of UW, where he received his bachelor's degree in marketing and entrepreneurship and completed his Venture MBA in fall 2025. He approaches AI as a business problem first and a technology problem second.

For more information, call Tyler Schanck, marketing, communications and database manager for the Wyoming SBDC Network, at (307) 343-0925 or email [email protected].