Back at the Mastercard Small Business Summit — and I Took All the Notes
Year two at one of my favorite events in NYC. Funding, AI, cybersecurity, lending, incredible vendors, and a keynote that stopped me in my tracks. Here’s everything I walked away with.
I’ll just say it — I look forward to this event every single year. The Mastercard Small Business Summit is one of those rooms where you walk in as one version of yourself and walk out with a notebook full of things you didn’t know you needed to hear.
This was my second year attending as BAM Digital Media, and the energy in the Flatiron District did not disappoint. Distinguished business owners on the panels. Amazing small business vendors. Real conversations. And food that had absolutely no business being that good at a conference.
But here’s what I keep coming back to every year: even as an educator — someone whose entire career is built on teaching others — I am always, always the student in these rooms. And I never want that to change.
Here’s what I took away.
What We Covered This Year
Funding & Grants
How to find money that doesn’t require paying it back — and how to position your business to actually get it.
Lending & Loans
What lenders are actually looking for and how to make sure you’re ready before you ever fill out an application.
AI for Business
How to use AI tools strategically across different parts of your business — not just for content, but for thinking.
Cybersecurity
The specific vulnerabilities small businesses face and the practical steps to protect yourself starting today.
My Notes — Straight From the Room
These are the things I wrote down because I knew I’d need them — and honestly, so will you.
- Dual authorizations on business accounts — require two approvals for transactions above a set amount. Simple protection most small businesses skip entirely.
- Positive Pay keeps criminals from rewriting your business checks. If you write checks, you need this. Talk to your bank today.
- Have I Been Pwned? (haveibeenpwned.com) — check if your email or business data has already been exposed in a breach. Free. Takes 30 seconds. Do it right now.
- Use credit monitoring for your business accounts — not just personal. Fraud hits business accounts just as hard and often goes undetected longer.
- AI agents are coming faster than we think — the prediction in the room was that the first billionaire to be made using AI agents will happen in the next 3 to 5 years.
- Use Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT for different parts of one project — each tool has strengths. Stop treating one as your only option.
- Be ready before you apply for a loan — know your numbers, have your documents, understand your business credit score. Lenders can tell who came prepared.
- Know when to hire out and when to do it yourself — your time has a dollar value. Calculate it, then decide.
The AI Conversation That Stayed With Me
I’ll be honest — I expected the AI conversation to be surface-level. What I got was one of the most practical breakdowns of AI strategy for small business owners I’ve heard.
The idea of using multiple AI tools for different parts of a single project is something I’ve been doing intuitively, but hearing it framed as a deliberate strategy clicked differently. Claude for deep thinking and writing. Perplexity for research. Gemini for document work. ChatGPT for brainstorming. They’re not interchangeable — they each have a lane.
The first billionaire made using AI agents will be created in the next 3 to 5 years.
— Summit panelist, Mastercard Small Business Summit 2026Whether or not you believe that timeline, the message underneath it matters: AI isn’t something to wait on. Small business owners who understand how to use these tools strategically right now have a real advantage over those who are still debating whether to start.
Cybersecurity Is Not Optional Anymore
This was the session that made me want to open my laptop mid-panel. The reality is that small businesses are targeted specifically because criminals know we often don’t have the same protections as large corporations.
The practical steps — dual authorization, Positive Pay, credit monitoring, checking Have I Been Pwned — aren’t complicated or expensive. They’re just things most of us never got around to setting up. That ends now.
- Set up dual authorization on business bank transactions
- Ask your bank about Positive Pay to protect against check fraud
- Check haveibeenpwned.com for any existing data exposure
- Enable credit monitoring on your business accounts
- Review who has access to your financial accounts — and revoke what isn’t needed
The Funding & Lending Reality Check
One thing I appreciated about this year’s panels was how direct everyone was. No fluff. No “it depends.” Real talk about what it actually takes to get funded — and why so many small business owners get turned down not because their business isn’t good, but because they weren’t prepared to apply.
The conversation around knowing when to hire out versus when to do things yourself was equally honest. Your time has a dollar value. If you’re spending four hours doing something a contractor could do in one, the math isn’t in your favor — even if paying feels uncomfortable in the moment.
Cassandra Freeman Closed It Out — and I Wasn’t Ready
Repeat. Reset. Reintroduce Yourself.
I am a huge fan of Cassandra Freeman — if you watch Bel-Air on Peacock, you know her as Aunt Viv, and she brings that same energy of warmth, authority, and realness in person.
Her closing keynote was the kind of talk that makes you want to go home and look at everything you’ve built with fresh eyes. She spoke about the power of not being afraid to start over, to pivot, to show up as a newer version of yourself — even when the world already thinks it knows who you are.
For anyone running a business that has evolved — or one that needs to — that message landed exactly where it needed to.
Why I Keep Coming Back
I have been creating content and running BAM Digital Media for over 14 years. And events like this remind me that no matter how much experience you have, there is always something to learn, someone to meet, and a perspective that shifts something in you.
The networking portion at the end of the summit was one of the highlights for me this year. Getting to share my digital literacy work with other entrepreneurs — people who immediately understood the need and the mission — was energizing in a way that’s hard to describe.
This is what professional community looks like. And I’ll be back for year three.
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See you at year three. 🧡