Denver CISO Community
Executive Summit
June 23, 2026 | Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center
June 23, 2026
Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center
Collaborate with your peers
Get together with Denver'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:
Adapting for Strategic Agility
Assessing Investment in and Financial Impact of AI
Managing Risk & Regulation Through Geostrategic Sourcing
Denver 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

Ken Athanasiou
VF Corp
Global CISO

Craig Buesing
Gates Corporation
CISO

Sam Masiello
The Anschutz Corporation
Enterprise CISO
What to Expect
Agenda
Executive Boardroom Sessions
Traditional ERP is Dead — What's Next?
Agentic AI is transforming work and prompting leaders to rethink traditional suites and modernization strategies. This boardroom will examine how agentic AI is unbundling ERP responsibilities, reshaping process orchestration and enabling smarter service layers.
Join fellow CIOs to explore:
• The rise of service layers, workflow engines and AI agents
• What’s replacing monolithic ERP models
• Key assumptions to challenge when evaluating vendor roadmaps
Forging Trust Infrastructure for the AI Era
AI‑generated content, models, and autonomous agents are scaling faster than traditional workloads, driving the need for a trust infrastructure built for AI and authenticity. At the same time, shrinking certificate lifecycles and the looming impact of quantum computing are increasing operational strain and making quantum‑safe strategies imperative.
Join this session to discuss:
- Strategies for PKI modernization that govern machine and AI identities at scale
- Preparing for post-quantum cryptography
- Prioritizing investments based on risk, severity, and timeframe
Designing Infrastructure that Accelerates Enterprise AI Outcomes
AI is reshaping how quickly organizations must deliver insights and where data and workloads need to live to support that demand. CIOs are finding that cloud centric strategies can drive new pressures around cost, latency, resilience, and sovereignty. Rethinking data and workload placement is becoming an essential lever in enabling better business outcomes.
Join this session to discuss:
- How data locality influences performance, resilience, and operational efficiency
- Where distributed or hybrid placements outperform single cloud approaches
- Ways to reduce technical debt while strengthening enterprise wide value delivery
Unifying Data Visibility — The AI Advantage for CISOs
CISOs are challenged by fragmented data landscapes, shadow IT, and the need for real-time visibility into sensitive information across different data estates including SaaS, cloud, and modern virtualization platforms. Manual discovery and governance processes can’t keep pace with today’s data sprawl, increasing risk and compliance exposure. Leveraging AI-driven data intelligence empowers CISOs to unify visibility, automate governance, and strengthen security posture.
Join this session to explore:
- Automating sensitive data discovery across environments
- Enabling continuous governance with AI insights
- Reducing risk through unified data intelligence
Breakout Sessions
Foundations vs. Frontiers — Debate Showdown
As technology and risk rapidly evolve, CIOs and CISOs must choose: reinforce core IT and security fundamentals, or pursue advanced capabilities?
During this interactive debate-style breakout you will:
- Hear how peer leaders set organizational priorities
- Broaden your perspective on key IT and security topics
- Join in through audience participation
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
Rethinking Security for Agentic AI — From Control to Orchestration
As AI agents startacting across business environments, data becomes the true control surface.These agents require broad access to data, identities, and business processes,creating new risk patterns as sensitive data and outbound actions converge atmachine speed. This is a control shift. CISOs must modernize their dataapproach to adopt agentic AI confidently while maintaining oversight.
Join thissession to explore how to:
- Detect emerging risk behaviors in autonomous AI
- Builda data-centric and intent-aware security model
- Establish the CISO as theorchestrator of scalable AI and business growth enabler
Activating Unstructured Data and Agents in the Enterprise
The shift from basic AI assistants to autonomous agents is reshaping the enterprise, turning passive tools into scalable workflows. Real advantage emerges when intelligence is grounded in an organization's unique, proprietary content — but only when that content is secured and governed properly. The priority becomes breaking down silos and establishing security frameworks that ensure agents operate on a trusted, compliant foundation.
Join this session to learn how to:
- Build a secure foundation for agentic AI without sacrificing speed or scale
- Govern content access so agents only reach what they should
- Balance innovation with risk as AI transforms enterprise workflows
The Adaptive Executive
The CIO and CISO roles demand constant evolution and vary widely from one organization or industry to the next. How can experienced leaders stay agile as their careers progress, while drawing on the unique strengths and experiences that shaped them?
This interactive conversation will cover:
- Growing technical, business and leadership skills in dynamic environments
- Building your personal brand and identifying growth opportunities
- Championing emerging leaders from diverse backgrounds
Gartner Boardroom Session
Optimizing IT Operating Models — Driving Value and Accelerating Growth
CIOs are under increasing pressure to deliver measurable value and must proactively evolve their IT operating models to drive enterprise objectives. However, a disconnect between a task-driven culture and an outcomes-oriented mindset can hinder sustained business growth.
Join this session to discuss with your peers:
- Assessing and realigning your IT operating model to support your organization’s digital vision and strategic goals
- Shifting from operational efficiency to models that boost business performance and enable enterprise-wide transformation
- Building stronger partnerships with business stakeholders and fostering collaboration for greater impact
Gartner Keynote Session
Strategy Wins When Culture Works
Technology leaders are driving a majority of organizational change, but even the strongest plans can fall prey to Culture. Success depends on how rapidly both IT and the organization can embrace new directions, own the change and implement new ways of working. When leaders intentionally shape Culture, they can turn it into a strategic asset that accelerates execution and strengthens performance across the enterprise.
Join this keynote to learn about:
- Strengthening culture to support strategic change
- Engaging peers and employees in new ways of working
- Balancing planning and execution with engagement and collaboration
Apply to Participate
Apply to participate in the Denver CISO Community Executive Summit.
Gartner facilitates exclusive, C-level communities by personally qualifying and understanding the priorities, challenges and interests of each member.
Our selective approach maintains the high quality of the network and ensures top-level discussions with peers from the world’s leading organizations.
Each application will be reviewed, and once your participation is confirmed, you will have access to year-round community programs.
Location
Venue & Accommodation
Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention CenterPlease find parking information below:
Valet- $48 (8hrs + and overnight)
Self-Parking-$33 (8hrs + and overnight)
A block of rooms has been reserved at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center at a reduced conference rate. Reservations should be made online or by calling 720-853-9020.
Deadline to book using the discounted room rate of $289 USD (plus tax) is June 1, 2026.
Community Program Manager
For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.
