The Digital Dilemma · E45

You Have An AI Policy. Your Vendors Have A Free Account.

August 30, 2026 · 00:26:12

An executive questioned one number in one ad. The marketing agency's answer stopped him cold: we got the numbers from you. Inside a shared marketing folder sat an accounting spreadsheet someone had dropped there by accident, and for two months the agency's AI had been reading the whole folder and building campaigns from it. The AI saw their real costs and priced an entire product suite at roughly a ten percent markup instead of their normal margin. One ad ran. Nobody lied. Nobody was hacked. Somebody dragged a folder, and an AI nobody approved made pricing decisions in public.

Host Nick Dreyfus, VP of Business Development at i-NETT, argues that if your own house is in decent shape, your biggest AI risk is not your team. It is the vendors you trust most. You give your bookkeeper one hundred percent of your data. Your accountant, your marketing agency, your billing company, all of them are holding everything, and most businesses have never asked one question about what those vendors do with it in the age of AI.

In this episode: the clean kitchen problem, why a spotless AI policy tells you nothing about your supply chain. The two question email to send every vendor Monday morning, free. The move almost nobody makes: putting vendor AI work inside your environment, behind your own security, and offsetting the license against their bill. Why we've got Copilot, we're totally good is not the finish line when twenty years of file permissions say otherwise. And the money nobody discusses: in client environments we have audited, do it yourself AI agents commonly cost three to five thousand dollars a month to run, usually because they are doing way too much thinking on a model that is too expensive for the task. Built right, the same agent often runs at a fraction of that.

Questions answered: Which of my vendors are running my data through AI right now? What am I allowed to ask them? What does a real AI policy cover? Why do most AI projects show no return? What should an agent actually cost to run, and who is watching it after it ships?

Start here, and it costs nothing. Send every vendor who touches your data two questions: are you using AI on any of our data, and if so, what guardrails and security do you have around it? Everything in this episode was preventable. All they did was not ask a couple of questions.

Nick is not an attorney and this is not legal advice. Vendor obligations depend on your contracts, so bring them to your counsel.

Tags: AI policy, shadow AI, vendor risk, AI agents, token costs, Copilot, AI readiness, managed IT, MSP, cybersecurity, CEO, CFO, small business, San Diego, The Digital Dilemma, Nick Dreyfus, i-NETT

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You Have An AI Policy. Your Vendors Have A Free Account.

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