Small business owners in Hawaiʻi can unlock a working introduction to agentic AI on Wednesday, Oct. 21, in a free one-hour webinar from University of Hawaiʻi Maui College, running noon to 1 p.m. HST over Zoom with no technical background required. Per Maui Now, the session — titled "Agentic AI – What is it? How do you implement it? Risks and Rewards" — is the second in a three-part fall series on practical technology and cybersecurity guidance for local businesses.
What makes this one worth a small owner's lunch hour is the framing. Professor Debasis Bhattacharya, the event facilitator, told Maui Now that AI is moving "beyond chatbots that answer questions to agents that take action — from drafting emails and scheduling meetings to researching vendors and managing routine workflows on your behalf." The webinar promises both halves of that sentence: the time savings and the risks. Most small-business AI content you'll find online sells the first half and buries the second.
The session targets owners and sole proprietors stretching limited resources, which is exactly the audience agentic AI tools court hardest. If you want to read up beforehand on how automation platforms compare in practice, our Zapier vs Make trade-offs guide covers the documented differences, and our tools section tracks the wider field.
What the webinar actually covers
According to Maui Now, the agenda has five parts. First, a plain-language explanation of what an AI agent is and how it differs from a basic chatbot — the distinction that trips up most newcomers, since a chatbot answers while an agent acts on your behalf.
Second, a guided showcase of popular open-source tools, naming OpenClaw and Hermes specifically, with guidance on where each fits best. Third, workplace integration: how Google Workspace builds AI assistance into Gmail, Docs, and Drive for small-business customers. Fourth, and most unusually for this kind of session, security and risk management — practical guidelines for handling credential and data safety when you hand tasks to autonomous agents. Fifth, a live 10-minute Q&A after the key takeaways. For related coverage, see WatchGuard's Rai expansion shows where AI security tools are actually heading: fewer consoles, more agents. For related coverage, see WatchGuard's Rai expansion shows where AI security tools are actually heading: fewer consoles, more agents.
Why the security segment matters more than the tool demo
An agent that "takes action" needs permission to act. That means credentials, inbox access, file access, sometimes payment authority. The webinar's own title puts "Risks and Rewards" on equal footing, and the security segment — managing credential and data safety risks when delegating to autonomous agents — is the part a vendor-run webinar would likely compress into a slide. Here it gets a dedicated block, in a series hosted by UH Maui College, whose cybersecurity clinic was established through Google's Cybersecurity Clinics Fund, according to Maui Now.
The hosting structure explains that stance. The three-part series runs on $1 million in grant funding and wraparound support from Google's Cybersecurity Clinics Fund, which established the University of Hawaiʻi Cybersecurity Clinics. UH Maui College's clinic is one of 15 new clinics launching at higher education institutions nationwide through a collaboration between Google and the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics. That funding structure is why the risk material reads as structural, not decorative. We've covered how security vendors are moving in the same agentic direction in our WatchGuard analysis.
What this signals beyond Hawaiʻi
Community colleges teaching agentic AI to sole proprietors is a quiet shift in who delivers AI training. For years the default path was vendor documentation or a paid course. A grant-funded clinic teaching the same material — with the risk segment attached and a named professor accountable for it — offers small owners a second option.
The free price point matters too. Owners already juggling AI subscription decisions — whether a free tier covers the workday, as we examined for ChatGPT's free plan — can attend this without adding a line item. Registration is online, per Maui Now, and the session requires no technical background.
The honest limits of one hour
A 60-minute webinar with a 10-minute Q&A is an introduction, not an implementation plan. It can tell you what an agent is, name two open-source options, and flag the credential risks. It cannot configure anything for your specific business, and the Maui Now report doesn't say whether follow-up support is available after the series ends. The funding covers the clinics' launch, not necessarily your integration questions.
The evidence here is also one local news report of the event announcement. We haven't seen the slides, the tool showcase, or the security guidelines themselves. What the reporting establishes is the agenda, the date, the funding, and the host — enough to judge whether attending is worth an hour, which it plausibly is for an owner considering delegating routine work to software that acts on its own. We covered a connected angle in Which Claude tier for which work? A decision guide from Anthropic's own pricing page. We covered a connected angle in Which Claude tier for which work? A decision guide from Anthropic's own pricing page.
If you go, the most useful prep is thinking through which of your routine workflows you'd actually hand to an agent, and which credentials it would need to do them. Bring both lists to the Q&A. Ten minutes goes fast.
