AI in Practice: How to Adopt AI Without the Data Security Risks

Most AI webinars only show you the wins. This isn't that.

On May 21, Kyle Paalman and Pete Terryn spent an hour with a room full of business leaders walking through nearly four years of real AI implementation: what worked, what didn't, and what they'd do differently.

Kyle is President of NuWave Technology Partners. Pete is Chief AI Officer at Prescott. Between them, they've built AI into daily operations, watched a well-funded project fail on a terms-of-service clause, and had their own I.T. team push back on their own AI rollout.

Here's what they shared.

AI has changed. What we do with it has, too.

Pete's enthusiasm for AI started early. He found his first internal email about ChatGPT dated December 2022, barely a month after OpenAI made it public.

"I'm a sci-fi kid," he said. "I lived long enough to see all these movies that I watched as a kid… they're becoming a reality now."

He started evangelizing language models across the NuWave team. Technicians use them to troubleshoot issues. Leadership uses them as thought partners for planning. Sales are using them to refine outreach.

What's changed in the last year isn't the enthusiasm. It's the shift from language models to agentic AI. You used to ask the AI a question, and it responded. Now the AI does the work on your behalf.

Every morning, an agent scans competitors' websites and social channels, flags promotions, new offerings, and office openings, then delivers a briefing to an inbox. It runs autonomously. NuWave built it for their own sales team.

"It's a great way to leverage AI to work on your behalf," Pete said.

Kyle shared a less successful example from a year earlier: an attempt to build a Co-Pilot agent that would coach a sales intern through cold-call practice. "Not all of that vision came true," Kyle admitted. Microsoft's terms of service blocked Co-Pilot from acting as the employee's manager.

After four years of implementation, sometimes you get wins. Other times you get walls.

One Client’s Workflow Story

A Michigan manufacturer was spending more than ten hours every week on a manual workflow:

• Taking certificates of authenticity from their vendors

• Hand-keying the data into their own letterhead and program

• Then passing them along to their own clients

Their I.T. lead was burning hours just keeping the workflow limping along.

They'd already spent months and significant money trying to solve it on their own using OCR technology. It hadn't worked.

"Because that would shift when they get it from different vendors, they were unable to make those adjustments," Pete said. The OCR kept breaking on document variations that the team couldn't account for.

AI handled it. NuWave built an end-to-end workflow automation that eliminated the manual work entirely. Ten-plus hours a week came back to the team for higher-value work.

That's the hours saved. But there's a bigger point: until AI matured to where it is now, that problem didn't have a real solution. The technology finally caught up to the problem.

Two companies, one offer.

When you're solving an AI problem, you don't want your network engineer moonlighting as an AI strategist. And when you're securing your infrastructure, you don't want your AI consultant guessing at your firewall.

NuWave's wheelhouse is the I.T. foundation:

• Network infrastructure

• Cybersecurity

• End-user support

• The systems your business runs on

Operational efficiency, custom AI solutions, workflow automation — that's Prescott's lane. Two dedicated practices, each built around a specific skill set.

Kyle explained the decision to structure it that way. "It was important to us that we really spun that component out of NuWave," Kyle said. "It's a different skill set, different people, different talent."

You get both. Neither is a side project.

AI data security isn't a marketing claim. It's a fight.

"You would think, with me running operations, that I could make things happen in the organization," Pete said. "But when I started asking for AI access to more and more tools within our ecosystem, I got a lot of pushback."

That's exactly how it should work, and Pete was thankful for it.

What data is the tool accessing? Read or write? What do the permissions look like? Who gets access to what gets aggregated? These are the questions every AI deployment should survive before it goes live.

That internal accountability shaped how NuWave and Prescott now approach every client engagement.

The conversations every business is having right now showed up throughout the security discussion:

• Leadership wants to deploy AI on company devices

• Employees are asking AI to access their email and calendar

• Shadow AI, as people install tools without approval

NuWave addresses these proactively and applies the same scrutiny it survived internally.

The Q&A: what attendees wanted to know

The hour could have gone longer. Here's what was on people's minds.

What's the biggest AI security mistake companies make?

Buying a stack of Microsoft Copilot licenses and turning everyone loose. By default, Copilot starts indexing everything each user has access to: SharePoint, OneDrive, and shared folders. Kyle added a real example: a shared folder where one employee dropped personal information, and now anyone with Copilot access could surface it with the right keyword search.

Pete called it the single most common mistake he sees. "Lack of a plan. If you don't sit down and be intentional about your AI implementation, you're already exposing yourself to some risk."

Which AI tools are worth paying for?

Pete's rule of thumb: use the free version until it stops doing what you need, then jump to the $20/month tier. That's where most users will plateau for a long time. The $100–$200 tiers buy more tokens and earlier access to frontier models, but the average user won't notice the difference.

Is AI going to replace our jobs?

Both Pete and Kyle were emphatic. "We are not going to replace people with AI," Pete said. The goal is to grow the company faster than the team, keeping headcount stable or expanding it more slowly than revenue. That makes the business more profitable while protecting roles. They repeat that message at every quarterly meeting.

What's next.

Your network is the foundation everything else runs on. NuWave makes sure it's secure, stable, and ready for what comes next.

If you're ready to map your AI opportunities specifically, Prescott's AI Assessment interviews your key stakeholders, identifies your highest-value AI opportunities, and delivers an AI strategy document and policies framework you can act on.

AI is the destination. A secure network is the road.