In-Person

Florida CIO Community

Executive Summit

November 10, 2026 | Le Méridien Dania Beach at Fort Lauderdale Airport

November 10, 2026
Le Méridien Dania Beach at Fort Lauderdale Airport

Collaborate with your peers

Get together with Florida's top CIOs to tackle shared business challenges and critical priorities facing your role today. Participate in this one-day, local program with peer-driven topics and interactive discussions with your true C-level peers.

Join your peers to discuss the most critical issues impacting CIOs today:

Lead Strategic Technology Alignment to Establish an AI Operating Model

Manage Costs Strategically to Maximize Business Value

Elevate Cybersecurity as a Core Driver of Business Value, Resilience and Growth

Florida CIO Governing Body

The Governing Body Co-Chairs shape the summit agenda, ensuring that all content is driven By CIOs, For CIOs®.

Governing Body Co-Chairs

Elvis Clemetson

SBA Communications
SVP & Global CIO

Chad Couch

JM Family Enterprises
CIO

Christina Shannon

KIK Consumer Products
Chief Information Officer

Luis Suarez

H.I.G. Capital
Chief Technology Officer

Christine Vanderpool

Florida Crystals Corporation
VP & Chief Technology Officer

What to Expect

Interactive Sessions

Hear from CIO practitioners and thought leaders on how they're solving critical challenges impacting your role today in Keynote sessions, and join smaller, interactive discussions with your peers in Breakout and Boardroom sessions.

Community Networking

Make new connections and catch up with old friends in casual conversations during dedicated time for networking designed to better acquaint you with your Florida CIO community.

Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Connect with like-minded peers in a private, one-on-one setting through Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

Agenda

Executive Boardroom Sessions

Securing AI Agents to Accelerate Innovation

AI agents and automation are transforming how work gets done, but they also introduce new identity and security risks. Traditional IAM approaches weren’t designed for this shift.  AI is moving fast and your identity strategy needs to keep up by building a secure foundation for agentic systems.

Join this session to discuss:

  • AI agents in the changing the identity landscape, and why it matters now
  • Strategies and trends around infrastructure access that accelerates innovation with guardrails 
  • The competitive business advantage of shifting to a modernized IAM approach that supports AI initiatives

Privilege, Integrity, Recovery — The New Rules of Enterprise Data Protection

As AI accelerates the creation and utilization of data, organizations face unprecedented challenges in securing their most valuable asset. Shadow AI, dark data, and the proliferation of distributed applications have rendered traditional data protection methods insufficient. In this evolving threat landscape, security leaders must adopt risk-based, adaptive strategies to safeguard innovation, ensure compliance, and maintain operational resilience.

Join this boardroom session to hear more about:

  • Unifying data protection and compliance across workloads
  • Ensuring regulatory compliance and business continuity through robust, future-ready solutions
  • Accelerating cyber recovery with AI-driven tools


What Leaders Wish Their Boards Knew

Misalignment between boards and technology leaders can leave organizations exposed to unseen risks and missed opportunities. Too often, critical decisions are made without a full understanding of IT and cybersecurity complexities—or the unique perspectives of board members. Bridging this gap requires clear communication, shared priorities and a tailored approach to stakeholder engagement.

In this session, executives will explore how to:

  • Identify the most common obstacles that hinder effective board oversight
  • Understand and adapt to the personas and priorities of their board members
  • Communicate technology and security issues in ways that drive alignment and action

 


Breakout Sessions

Rethinking Security for the Age of Agents

Agents are becoming the biggest opportunity in the enterprise, and the biggest adversary. They read your data and act under borrowed identities, at a speed no human review process was built to match. The old question in security was how to keep bad actors out. The new one is more complex: how do you create and manage the biggest risk in your own enterprise, the agents you deployed on purpose?
Join this session to hear about:

  • Establishing a framework where data, identity, and agent security operate as one system
  • Shifting from asking whether you can trust your agents to determining what access they can be trusted with
  • Balancing innovation and risk by creating visibility needed to understand agent activity

Leading Through Complexity — The New CIO and CISO Mandate

CIOs and CISOs are facing expanding responsibilities as organizations adopt AI, address cyber threats and modernize operations. Today’s leaders must not only manage a rapidly shifting risk landscape but also deliver meaningful strategic business value.

Join this interactive session to explore:

  • Balancing growth, innovation, risk, and resilience in a complex environment
  • Strengthening the CIO/CISO partnership to drive enterprise-wide impact
  • Making faster, more informed decisions amid uncertainty and continuous change



Securing the Future of AI Work

AI is redefining how work gets done — across people, applications and autonomous agents. Securing this new enterprise requires a fundamentally different approach. Organizations must use AI to strengthen protection, secure AI adoption and transform security operations with AI. These efforts should be built on unified data, robust runtime security, and a resilient, always-on architecture.

Join this session to learn about:
• Protecting with AI to anticipate threats and bring protection closer to the user
• Securing AI across GenAI, agentic applications and emerging AI workflows
• Operating with AI to simplify operations, accelerate outcomes and reduce complexity

The Agentic Security Workforce — Upskilling Teams for the AI Era

As AI transforms the enterprise, the future of cybersecurity is not about replacing people, but elevating them. Security roles are shifting from routine task execution to focus on orchestration, governance and outcome management. Brian Fricke, CISO at Auto Nation, envisions the next generation of security professionals acting as "agentic managers," directing AI agents that execute routine work.

Join this breakout session to explore:

  • Transforming cybersecurity careers for the AI era
  • Developing an agentic workforce
  • Designing a future-focused security operating model

Frontier AI Models — When Attack Speed Outpaces Operations

AI can now find and exploit a vulnerability in minutes — faster than any patch cycle or IT team can respond. For CIOs, this is a business risk, not just a security issue: the gap between attack speed and response speed can now disrupt operations. This is where autonomous remediation comes into play.
Join this session to learn:

  • Why the gap between attack speed and IT response is now a business risk
  • How automatic remediation cuts risk without more headcount or work
  • What this shift means for how you prioritize risk, budget and technology


Keynote Session

Governed Enablement — Translating AI Risk into Board-Level Confidence

AI is now a board-level priority - and a board-level risk - placing CIOs and CISOs in the spotlight to demonstrate active, measurable management of AI exposure. Organizations are translating governance into enforceable controls and transparent reporting, replacing stopgap blocking with runtime guardrails. What are strategies that CIOs and CISOs can take back to their own organizations to establish clear decision rights, provide actionable risk metrics, and foster confidence among executive sponsors and boards, all while enabling safe and scalable AI adoption?

Join this session to learn:

  • Establishing clear decision rights for accountable AI adoption
  • Replacing stopgap blocking with enforceable, runtime guardrails
  • Providing boards with transparent, actionable risk metrics


Gartner Keynote Session

Harnessing Agentic AI for Organizational Impact

As organizations dive deeper into AI, agentic technologies are already disrupting industries and redefining what’s possible. The challenge now is learning how to harness agentic AI to drive transformation, spark innovation, and achieve measurable ROI. Competing in an AI-driven ecosystem requires more than simply deploying new capabilities—it demands strategic integration and forward-thinking leadership.

Join this keynote session to explore:

  • Strategies for integrating agentic AI into your organizational design
  • How to navigate the buy-versus-build decision
  • What top AI companies are doing differently to achieve success



We look forward to seeing you at an upcoming in-person gathering

Gartner cares about the health and safety of our community. If you are feeling unwell, please refrain from attending the conference. At this time, Gartner does not have any health-related requirements in place for attendance. Should this change, we will follow up with updated guidance.

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Community Program Manager

For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.

Natalia Klein

Community Program Manager

239 839 8616

natalia.klein@gartner.com