Speaking & Education

Practical learning grounded in real-world experience.

Technology, AI and cybersecurity become more useful when people can connect them to decisions they actually need to make.

My workshops focus on practical application: understanding the situation, examining the available evidence, and helping participants build approaches they can continue using after the session ends.

AI & Better Decisions

Understand the market before creating for it.

These workshops use AI as a tool for discovery, analysis and decision-making rather than simply as a content-generation engine.

Career Market Discovery

Read Your Job Market

Using AI to Make Better Career Decisions

Most job seekers begin with a single posting and immediately start creating: rewriting a résumé, generating a cover letter or preparing an application. This workshop starts earlier.

Participants use AI to investigate a body of current job postings, identify recurring requirements and market patterns, and compare those findings with their own experience before deciding where and how to compete.

Key idea: Creation follows understanding.

Small Business Market Discovery

Before You Start the Business

Using AI to Test the Market

A business idea often moves quickly from inspiration to creation: a name, logo, website, business plan and marketing. This workshop puts discovery first.

Participants use AI and publicly available information to investigate customers, competitors, offerings, demand signals and potential differentiation before making significant investments of time or money.

The objective is not to have AI decide whether a business will succeed. It is to make the decision with better information and identify what still requires direct human validation.

Key idea: Understand the market before creating for the market.

Cybersecurity & Small Business

Make technology risk practical.

Cybersecurity can become abstract very quickly. These sessions focus on recognizable risks, practical decisions and the actions small organizations and employees can actually take.

Cybersecurity Awareness

Cybersecurity Starts With People

Practical Cybersecurity for Small Businesses and Employees

Many of the risks small organizations encounter begin with ordinary decisions made by ordinary people.

This workshop makes cybersecurity practical through recognizable situations involving phishing, passwords and multi-factor authentication, guest Wi-Fi, devices, sensitive information, vendors, backups and what employees should do when something does not look right.

The goal is not to turn employees into cybersecurity specialists. It is to help people recognize risk, understand their role and make safer decisions.

Key idea: Better security begins with better everyday decisions.

Focused Small Business Session

Is Your Guest Wi-Fi Putting Your Business at Risk?

A practical look at one commonly overlooked area of small-business cybersecurity

Guest Wi-Fi is convenient for customers, visitors and employees, but poor configuration or weak separation can create unnecessary business risk.

This session uses guest Wi-Fi as a practical entry point into network separation, access controls, employee and personal devices, passwords, routers and access points, sensitive business systems, and the questions business owners should ask whoever manages their technology.

Key idea: Convenience should not create unnecessary access to the business.

A Common Approach

Understand before you act.

Across career decisions, business ideas and technology risk, the subjects may be different but the underlying discipline is similar: define the decision, discover relevant evidence, analyze what it suggests, validate assumptions, compare options and then decide what to do next.

Define → Discover → Analyze → Validate → Compare → Decide → Act

AI can accelerate discovery and analysis and identify patterns people might otherwise miss. It can also misunderstand evidence, make assumptions and produce confident answers that are not supported by the underlying information.

AI identifies patterns. Human judgment determines what those patterns mean.

Additional Available Programs

Practical entry points for AI and workplace technology.

Not every audience needs a full decision framework. These programs are designed for people who want a practical introduction to current tools and their responsible use in everyday work.

Introductory AI

AI Basics

A Practical Introduction to Generative AI

A hands-on introduction for people who are new to AI. Topics include what generative AI is and is not, prompting fundamentals, practical workplace use cases, and responsible use with attention to privacy, accuracy and verification.

Microsoft Copilot

Excel with Microsoft Copilot

Practical AI-Assisted Spreadsheet Work

A practical look at using Copilot with Excel for formula assistance, understanding unfamiliar spreadsheets, data cleanup, analysis, trends and reporting. Examples emphasize realistic small-business and workplace scenarios rather than simply teaching Excel features.

Additional speaking and facilitated discussions

Sessions can also be developed around technology leadership, AI governance and readiness, IT service management, organizational resilience, and technology vendor or managed-service-provider relationships.

Connect

Interested in a workshop or discussion?

Programs can be adapted for community education, professional associations, small-business groups and organizational audiences. If you are exploring a workshop, facilitated session or speaking topic, I would be glad to discuss the audience, objectives and format.

Contact Mark