As usual, the biggest mistakes happen on a Friday. I just spent my entire afternoon firefighting after a client decided to soft-launch their new chatbot today. Almost immediately, we noticed the bot was trained on a dataset that contained highly sensitive data, including internal passwords. How does this happen? It’s surprisingly simple. When you're dealing with big amounts of data, dangerous details slip through the cracks without clear guardrails. In this case, the client had stored sensitive internal records in the same table as public-facing FAQs. The AI, doing exactly what it was told, consumed it all. The Lesson: Even if the client hands you the data on a silver platter, do not trust it blindly. 1. Analyze first: Spend time auditing the source files before feeding the vector store. 2. Ask the hard questions: Explicitly ask, "Is there any PII or internal credential data in this dump?" 3. Involve the domain experts: Get sign-off from the people who actually use that data daily, they know what's hidden in there. Has anyone else survived a Friday deployment scare like this?

I want to take a moment to celebrate one of our students @Cosmina Balu who just blew us away with her progress. In just four weeks, she managed to build a fully automated system using Airtable and n8n. The salespeople use a UI to enter a certain campaign and then the n8n automation finds past customers from a database and uses AI to write personal upselling and reactivation emails. The emails are genuinely indistinguishable from something a human would write, warm, realistic, and effective. It’s amazing to see how quickly you can go from "learning a tool" to "building a business asset" when you have the right focus. Huge congrats on the execution!