Adversarial Use of AI, 2026 is a high-impact executive presentation designed for leaders navigating the Intelligence Economy. This talk reframes AI not just as a productivity engine, but as an expanding attack surface, unpacking how agentic systems, open-source proliferation, synthetic trust, and autonomous decision layers create new strategic risks across enterprise and national security environments. Through real-world scenarios and adversarial modeling, the session challenges executives to think like competitors, red teams, and nation-state actors before deploying AI at scale, delivering a clear framework for governance, resilience, and competitive advantage in an era where speed, narrative control, and system integrity determine who wins.

APIs are now the primary interface for modern digital businesses, concentrating identity, data, and control in a single layer, and making them a prime target for attackers. Across cloud, SaaS, and enterprise environments, adversaries increasingly exploit APIs for initial access, establish persistence using tokens or service identities, and move laterally through internal APIs and trusted service-to-service communication.    

This session breaks down the modern API-driven attack path using real-world incidents, explaining why API breaches so often escalate, why perimeter-based defenses fail to contain them, and how organizations can shift toward runtime detection and east-west containment. The focus is on resilience: limiting blast radius and keeping API incidents from becoming full-environment compromises.

News headlines show you the breaches at massive corporations, but it’s everyday organizations that face the most threats. Adversaries prey on the human psyche and use AI to advance their tactics and target the companies that keep our communities running.  For these companies, a ransomware or BEC attack isn’t just a stressful event—it’s the reason they can’t make payroll. This session explores how hackers plan to win, and why you don’t need a massive budget to fight back.  We’ll get into how Huntress brings cyber resilience through a powerful combo of purpose-built technology and human SOC expertise to stop threats before they cause damage—because organizations of ALL sizes deserve a fighting chance against attackers.

By 2028, Gartner predicts that 15% of daily business decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents — creating new risk surfaces with direct operational impact. CIOs must extend resilience practices to agentic AI by quantifying agent risk, capturing and monitoring agent activity, and preparing recovery playbooks that reverse unauthorized or harmful agent actions. This holistic approach ensures workflows remain intact, data integrity is preserved, and business continuity is upheld—even when AI agents misstep.

Join this session to learn:

 How to set resilience standards for AI agents to align with enterprise risk

 Proven strategies for detecting and containing rogue or unintended AI behavior

 Playbooks for rapid rollback and business continuity when AI disrupts workflows

Abstract
AI and new digital technologies will continue to shift the cybersecurity landscape in 2026. This session explores how modern tools can enhance detection, response, and decision making while introducing new risks tied to generative systems, data integrity, and fast moving threat innovation. Leaders will gain a clear view of how to adopt emerging technology in a responsible and strategic way that supports resilience and aligns with enterprise risk goals.

Key Takeaways
• How AI and emerging tech are reshaping core security functions
• The new risks created by generative models and evolving attack techniques
• Practical governance steps that support responsible AI use
• Examples of organizations pairing innovation with disciplined risk management

AI in the SOC: Accelerator or Attack Surface?
Explore how AI is reshaping both sides of the battlefield. Are security teams actually gaining efficiency, or just introducing new risks faster than they can manage them? This opens the door to talk about AI-generated threats, governance, model trust, and how to operationalize AI without losing control.

The Human Factor: Culture, Behavior, and the Insider Edge
Technology keeps evolving, but people remain the biggest variable. This session will dive into building a security-first culture, reducing risky behavior, and aligning employees with security goals without creating friction or fatigue.

 In today’s high-stakes threat landscape, technical expertise alone is not enough. The most effective cybersecurity leaders are those who can translate complexity into clarity, align stakeholders around risk, and inspire action across the enterprise. In this engaging fireside conversation, Peter Grimes, Founder and CEO of Legacy Thought Leaders, joins J.D. Miller to explore how storytelling has become a critical leadership skill for modern security executives.  Together, they will unpack how CISOs and security leaders can elevate their influence by crafting compelling narratives that resonate with boards, business leaders, and technical teams alike. From communicating risk in business terms to building a legacy of trust and impact, this discussion will provide practical insights on how to lead with authenticity, clarity, and purpose in an increasingly complex cyber world.

Fully autonomous pentesting promises speed but often sacrifices safety, credibility, and signal quality. This talk explains why autonomy without human control creates real risk, and outlines a better model: agentic execution with expert oversight that scales offensive security without breaking trust.

In this engaging panel, executive authors Pete Grimes and Janet Heins go beyond the written word to explore how cybersecurity leaders can elevate storytelling into a strategic leadership tool. Drawing from their experiences as authors and industry leaders, they will unpack how powerful narratives can influence boardroom decisions, humanize cyber risk, and bridge the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders. Attendees will gain insight into crafting compelling stories that resonate, drive action, and position security leaders as visionary communicators, not just defenders. This session challenges leaders to rethink how they share their message, turning everyday insights into impactful stories that shape culture, strategy, and outcomes.

“Assume Breach” Is Easy to Say, Hard to Execute
Most organizations claim to operate under an assume-breach mindset, but few truly do. Where does that philosophy break down in reality, detection, response, or leadership buy-in, and what does it actually look like to operationalize it day to day?

Burnout in Cybersecurity: A Risk to the Business
This one gets real quickly. Talent shortages are well known, but burnout is the quieter threat. How are teams managing alert fatigue, after-hours pressure, and constant escalation without losing their best people, or compromising security outcomes?

Attackers are no longer triggering alerts; they’re hiding in plain sight. This session shows how deception technology transforms attacker behavior into high-confidence detection signals. Learn how integrating deception into an Open Active XDR platform improves visibility, reduces noise, and enables faster, smarter response to real threats across modern enterprise environments

Cyberattacks are inevitable, but widespread damage doesn’t have to be. As cybercrime continues to outpace security investments, attackers exploit lateral movement to turn breaches into full-scale business disruptions. Learn how a breach containment approach, powered by micro-segmentation and real-time visibility, can limit the blast radius of attacks and protect critical assets.

The United States cybersecurity ecosystem is the most advanced in the world and it is growing faster than ever. Tens of billions in investment, thousands of vendors, packed conference calendars, flagship events drawing tens of thousands of practitioners, and professional communities forming at every level from grassroots chapters to global organizations. This talk takes a wide-angle view of that ecosystem, examining where the gaps are and making the case that community, the connective tissue binding it all together, will determine whether all of that momentum translates into a stronger, more resilient, and truly connected industry.