The Vendor
2023: Zoom users read the terms and feared they could permit AI training on customer content. The backlash hit - and Zoom publicly clarified and revised the terms within days. Your vendor's terms can change under you overnight - and the announcement arrives in an email engineered to be ignored.
20 minutes. Three vendor moments, a terms-reading lab, and 12 contract calls. A safety score with feedback on every decision.
Before you start
- One real incident, played as decisions - no slides, no lectures.
- About 20 minutes, one sitting - leave early and you start over.
- You make timed choices; your score changes with your decisions.
- You get a safety score with feedback on every decision - never a leaderboard, never your name.
- Your firm sees completion evidence - never your answers. Teammates never see your score.
- Finish and you get a certificate with a unique ID anyone can verify.
Free for everyone. All 18 drills are free - finish and you get a verifiable certificate.
Quietly changed in March. Took effect in July. Discovered in August.
The clause sat unnoticed for months. In August 2023, users finally read Zoom's updated terms and spotted language they feared could allow AI training on customer content. Once noticed, the backlash was immediate; within days the company published a clarified policy promising not to train on customer content without consent.
The lesson isn't about one vendor. The episode shows why AI-related contract language deserves review, not a routine click-through. SaaS vendors keep adding AI features to tools firms approved before those features existed - and the terms that govern your client data can change with them, in an update email easy to miss.
Third-party AI risk is your risk: what the vendor trains on, who its subprocessors are, and who pays when the AI is wrong are all contract questions - not product questions.
Thursday. Three vendors, three surprises.
You are Priya, ops and compliance lead at a 30-person firm. You read terms so nobody else has to - and today that matters.
YOUR SCREEN
On your desk: a 'we updated our terms' email, a CRM that grew an AI assistant overnight, and a free meeting tool procurement loves.
A vendor emails: 'We've updated our terms' - new clause allows training on your data 'to improve services.'
Your approved CRM turned on an 'AI insights' feature overnight - it's already reading client portfolios.
Procurement loves a free AI meeting tool. 'It's free - what's the downside?'
Flag the clauses that cost you.
Select every clause that is a risk clause - training rights, silent changes, liability caps, opt-out traps. Then check your work.
Make the contract call.
SAFETY
101
This certifies that
has completed Module 10 - The Vendor: their AI is your risk on with a safety score of /100 in of active time.
Safety score - diligence: how your decisions held up, graded 0-100.
Objective: Read vendor AI terms for training rights, silent changes, and liability.
Seat time ~10-25 minutes. Verify this certificate at aisafety101.com/verify.
Evidence on record: module completion, seat time, final score, and certificate ID. This certificate ID verifies in your firm's admin report. A team certificate issues when every enrolled employee completes the full curriculum.
Your one rule to keep: for vendor AI, check what data it uses, whether it trains on that data, who else receives it, how long it is kept, how it can be deleted, how material changes are communicated, and how responsibility is allocated if something goes wrong. Know what data goes in, what the vendor may do with it, who else gets it, how long it stays, and what changes without your approval.
Next: The Disclosure. You just learned to read what vendors promise. Next module, your own marketing makes a few promises of its own - and the SEC reads every word.