Torch Designs

Most job applications are boring. This one can't be.

We're hiring a Digital Marketing Associate at Torch Designs in Lakeland, Florida. Writing, social, short-form video for TikTok, Reels, and YouTube, growing into SEO and Google Ads over time. Part-time to start, in person, with a path to full-time.

Since it's a marketing role, skip the standard application. Send a resume and a creative piece that markets you and tells us why you're the one. Show off a little.

If that sounds like your kind of challenge, send it to [email protected]. And if you know someone who'd be perfect for it, send them this.

As the parent company of Torch Ignited we want to make sure this one gets seen. If you run a small business and your team is using AI tools without a formal approval process in place, this post is worth two minutes of your time. The liability exposure is real and most business owners do not see it coming until it is too late.

You may have seen the news last week about Vercel, a technology company that got breached because one employee downloaded an AI tool and connected it to a work account. The attackers used that connection to walk right in.

It is a story worth paying attention to if you run a small business, because the same scenario plays out every day at companies of every size and the consequences for a small business are a lot harder to absorb.

Here is what most small business owners do not realize about an AI related breach. The damage does not stop at fixing the problem. If your employees are using AI tools that you have not approved and those tools are being fed client information, you may have a confidentiality problem with your clients on top of everything else. Your cyber insurance carrier is going to look at whether you had a policy in place governing AI use. If you did not, they may have grounds to deny your claim. And if you are in Florida, the state breach notification law does not care how the breach happened. The clock starts ticking either way.

The businesses that come through incidents like this are the ones that had the right guardrails in place before something went wrong. An AI acceptable use policy. A process for approving tools before they connect to your business accounts. A cyber liability policy that actually matches how your business operates.

This is not complicated stuff. It is just the kind of thing that feels easy to put off until it is not easy anymore.

If you are not sure whether your business is covered on any of these fronts, that is a conversation worth having now rather than later. It is what we do at Torch Ignited.

Torch Ignited is our AI and managed IT brand and the team there has been doing the hard work of staying truly current in a space that changes weekly. What they are sharing here about the state of AI expertise in the market is something we stand behind completely. If you are wondering who to trust for AI guidance, start by asking the hard questions about experience and credentials.

We spent some time recently at an AI "bootcamp" and honestly it was one of the more eye opening experiences we have had in a while, and not in a good way.

Here is what we are seeing out there right now. A lot of people are positioning themselves as AI experts. And because AI can make almost anyone sound polished and convincing, it is getting really hard to tell who actually knows what they are talking about and who is just using the technology to fake it.

We sat through recommendations that ignored some of the most basic risks of AI. Frameworks that sounded impressive but would fall apart the moment a real business tried to implement them. And tools being promoted without any honest conversation about what they cannot do or what security risks they carry.

Before you take AI advice from anyone, ask them about their actual experience. Not their pitch. Their credentials.

At Torch Ignited we have Kevin Farnsworth, a Solutions Architect with 28 years of software development experience who has managed large scale automation projects at the government level. We also have Colby Edell, a Florida Polytechnic University graduate who has co-authored two academic papers on AI and won recognition for an LLM project his team built for the Polk County Sheriff's Department, leading the backend development work himself from start to finish.

There is a lot of noise in the AI space right now. We would rather show you our work than just tell you we are good at it.

If you have questions about AI and what it actually means for your business, we are happy to have that conversation.