Boston CISO Community
Executive Summit
December 3, 2026 | Renaissance Boston Seaport District
December 3, 2026
Renaissance Boston Seaport District
Collaborate with your peers
Get together with Boston's top CISOs 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 CISOs today:
Scaling AI and Digital Transformation Through Proactive Governance and Risk Management
Integrating Cyber Resilience into Core Business Strategy and Operational Excellence
Leveraging Security Insights to Unlock Growth, Efficiency, and Market Differentiation
Boston CISO Governing Body
The Governing Body Co-Chairs shape the summit agenda, ensuring that all content is driven By CISOs, For CISOs®.
Governing Body Co-Chairs

Javed Ikbal
Bright Horizons
VP/CISO

Jasvinder Khera
John Hancock
CISO

Brian McGowan
SharkNinja
CISO
What to Expect
Agenda
Executive Boardroom Sessions
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 discuss:
- 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
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 boardroom to discuss:
- 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
When Attacks Move at AI Speed, Is Your Response Ready?
Frontier AI is dramatically accelerating how quickly attackers can discover vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and launch attacks. As attack timelines compress from weeks to hours, CISOs must adopt new approaches that prioritize resilience and response speed over traditional defense models. The question is no longer whether organizations can patch every vulnerability quickly enough. The question is whether they can detect, contain, and recover from threats faster than attackers can capitalize on them.
Join this session to discuss
- Modernizing security foundations by reducing technology debt and strengthening resilience against AI-driven threats.
- Adopting agile governance and decision-making models that enable faster, more decisive incident response.
- Shifting from traditional defense strategies to resilience-focused approaches built for AI-compressed attack timelines.
Keynote Session
AI Authority Drift — Closing the Governance Gap
Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase. No longer limited to generating insights, modern AI systems are beginning to act — initiating workflows, interacting with applications, and making decisions at machine speed. As agentic AI systems become operational participants inside enterprise environments, this session explores how enterprises can safely scale AI by establishing governance across identity, authority, behavior, and data, while enabling innovation without introducing unmanaged risk.
Attendees will learn:
- How to control the authority, behavior, and data access of autonomous systems operating across complex digital ecosystems
- The emerging governance model, enacted through a real-time control plane, to address authority drift, misconfigured permissions, and unintended AI behavior
- A practical framework and architecture for governing AI at enterprise scale
Breakout Sessions
From Noise to Proof — Reinventing Vulnerability Management
Most security programs measure effort — not outcomes. CISOs patch thousands of vulnerabilities and deploy countless tools, yet real resilience depends on proving defenses actually work. Organizations are shifting from assumptions to evidence using autonomous pentesting to view environments through an attacker’s lens.
Join this session to come away with insights on:
- Prioritizing real attack paths and exploitable vulnerabilities
- Closing the find, fix, verify loop with measurable improvement
- Reducing attacker dwell time with offense informed detection
The Future of Out-of-Band Solutions
Maintaining visibility and control during a cyber incident is becoming a critical leadership priority. Out-of-Band solutions provide independent access and management capabilities that help organizations respond to disruptions, recover faster, and reduce operational risk. Explore how emerging OOB technologies are shaping the future of cyber resilience and business continuity.
Join this session to learn how to:
- Leverage Out-of-Band capabilities to maintain visibility and control during cyber incidents.
- Advance business continuity strategies to reduce operational risk and improve organizational resilience.
- Build a more resilient operating model that supports continuity during outages and attacks.
The AI Workforce Shift — What Cyber Leaders Must Do Next
As cybersecurity organizations evolve to meet increasing business and AI-driven demands, success depends on having the right people, skills, and structure. CISOs must navigate growing complexity while balancing operational resilience, talent shortages, and the need for new capabilities. By reducing role ambiguity, strengthening accountability, and aligning talent investments to business priorities, security leaders can improve team performance.
In this session you will learn how to:
- Build a scalable cyber workforce equipped to meet evolving business and AI-driven demands
- Prioritize clear roles, streamlined functions, targeted hiring, and strategic workforce planning
- Address challenges such as burnout, role ambiguity, and employee engagement
Gartner Keynote Session
How AI Changes the Operating Model
Accelerating changes to IT operating models. As technology becomes easier to build and deploy, creativity and problem solving become core competencies, and IT shifts focus from delivery efficiency to ongoing innovation. Organizations seeing the greatest impact are redefining ownership, breaking down functional silos, and creating new ways of working that bring business, technology, and risk leaders together around shared outcomes.
Join this keynote to explore:
- How AI is merging accountability for business, technology, and risk outcomes
- Why cross-functional teams are becoming the default model for delivering value at speed
- How trust is becoming a competitive advantage in a technology-driven enterprise
Gartner Boardroom Session
When Attacks Move at AI Speed — Is Your Response Ready?
Frontier AI is dramatically accelerating how quickly attackers can discover vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and launch attacks. As attack timelines compress from weeks to hours, CISOs must adopt new approaches that prioritize resilience and response speed over traditional defense models. The question is no longer whether organizations can patch every vulnerability quickly enough. The question is whether they can detect, contain, and recover from threats faster than attackers can capitalize on them.
Join this session to discuss
- Modernizing security foundations by reducing technology debt and strengthening resilience against AI-driven threats.
- Adopting agile governance and decision-making models that enable faster, more decisive incident response.
- Shifting from traditional defense strategies to resilience-focused approaches built for AI-compressed attack timelines.
Apply to Participate
Each application is carefully vetted to ensure members meet established criteria, preserving the quality of the network and enabling meaningful, peer‑level discussions among leaders from the world’s leading organizations.
Once you submit your application, a Community Program Manager will schedule a conversation to understand your priorities and interests and complete onboarding, including access to year‑round community events.
Location
Venue & Accommodation
Renaissance Boston Seaport DistrictCommunity Program Manager
For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.
