2026 Symposium: Guest Speaker Lineup

For qualified IT, AI, and Cybersecurity professionals. Business email required for registration.

Details subject to change.

General Session Full Agenda

View Agenda: https://www.nthsymposium.com/schedule

Building Confidence in an Age of Uncertainty

Todd Burkhardt, Chief Executive Officer | Nth Generation

The future belongs to organizations that can turn uncertainty into opportunity. Join our CEO as he sets the stage for a day of practical insights and candid conversations, encouraging attendees to engage directly with Nth experts and partner leaders to gain perspective, ask tough questions, and uncover strategies for what comes next.

Technology at a Crossroads: IT, AI & Cybersecurity

Dan Molina, President & Chief Technology Officer | Nth Generation

The pace of change across AI, c

ybersecurity, and modern infrastructure is reshaping how organizations operate, compete, and manage risk. In this keynote, Nth's President & CTO will examine the most significant market developments of the past year, from the rise of AI agents and AI-driven security threats to evolving hybrid cloud strategies, governance requirements, and the growing focus on cyber resilience. Attendees will gain practical insight into the technologies, solutions, and strategies featured throughout the symposium that can help their organizations securely scale innovation, modernize operations, and turn emerging opportunities into measurable business outcomes.

Fireside Chat with Gartner | Hosted by Dan Molina

The Paradigm Shift: Agentic AI

K.C. Choi, Executive Partner and VP, Global CSO/CRO Advisory Practice | Gartner

The conversation has shifted from "What can AI do?" to "What work can AI do on its own?" Join Nth's President & CTO and Gartner's K.C. Choi for a discussion on the rise of Agentic AI, the investments accelerating its adoption, and the infrastructure, security, and governance considerations shaping the next generation of enterprise technology. Attendees will gain practical insight into where the market is headed and how technology leaders can prepare for what’s next.

AI Governance | AI Leadership Panel hosted by Dan Molina

• Paula Crowell, CIO | LA County Sanitation District

• George Khalil, CIO/CISO | City of Riverside

• Mike Sherwood, Senior Business Manager for State and Local Government | NVIDIA

Most organizations want to move faster with AI, but few have fully answered the questions of oversight, accountability, and risk. In this candid discussion, public-sector technology leaders share their experiences developing AI governance policies, managing stakeholder expectations, and creating guardrails that enable innovation while protecting their organizations, employees, and constituents.

The Agentic Enterprise: Build AI, Don't Chase It

Robin Braun, VP, AI Business Development, Hybrid Cloud | Hewlett Packard Enterprise

AI is rapidly evolving from experimentation to a core driver of business value. As AI agents and workloads become business-critical applications, organizations must move beyond deployment and focus on resilience, security, governance, and lifecycle management from day one.

This executive keynote explores how leading enterprises are building a foundation for scalable, cost-effective AI adoption. Learn how to control rising AI costs through smarter tokenomics, optimize infrastructure and GPU efficiency, and leverage intelligent data architectures and automation to maximize ROI. The session will also highlight the role of cyber resiliency, self-driving operations, and modern management platforms in ensuring AI initiatives remain secure, available, and business-ready.

Attendees will leave with practical insights for building a resilient, efficient, and future-ready AI strategy that enables innovation at scale, rather than constantly chasing the next wave of technology.

Fireside Chat with Vail, CO Town Manager | Hosted by Robin Braun

How the Town of Vail Pioneered America’s First Agentic Smart City with HPE and Partners

Russell Forrest, Town Manager | Vail, CO

How can a mountain resort town of 4,300 permanent residents safely manage peak surges of 30,000 daily visitors? In this fireside chat, Town of Vail Manager Russell Forrest shares the blueprint behind deploying the nation’s first HPE Agentic Smart City Solution.

Forrest will discuss how Vail broke down departmental silos and tackled critical municipal challenges—including rapid wildfire detection, expedited housing permits, and instant digital accessibility compliance—by leveraging HPE Private Cloud AI and NVIDIA software on a 100% renewable-powered local data center. Attendees will gain actionable takeaways on how Vail successfully utilized the HPE Unleash AI partner ecosystem (including Kamiwaza AI) to deliver a secure, scalable, and sustainable AI infrastructure without sacrificing local data governance.

Defending at Machine Speed in the Age of AI

Will May, Chief Revenue Officer | Arctic Wolf

AI is fundamentally changing the economics and speed of cyberattacks. Adversaries can now automate reconnaissance, scale attacks, and adapt in ways that challenge traditional security models built for a slower, more predictable threat environment.

In this new era, organizations need a new security strategy—one built not just around preventing attacks, but around business resilience: the ability to detect what matters, respond at machine speed, and keep the business moving forward.

This session will explore how the rise of AI-accelerated threats is reshaping cybersecurity and why organizations must rethink how they defend themselves. We’ll examine the shift from increasingly complex point solutions to an intelligent, outcome-driven approach powered by AI and human expertise.

Finally, we’ll look at how Arctic Wolf’s agentic SOC helps organizations defend at machine speed—combining AI-driven security operations with expert oversight to continuously detect, investigate, and respond to threats while strengthening resilience across the business.

From Shadow AI to Secure AI: Runtime Guardrails for the Modern Enterprise

Chris Prangley, Regional VP, West | Varonis

As organizations race to adopt AI, security teams are facing an unprecedented explosion of risk with "Shadow AI” in ungoverned agents, chatbots, models, coding tools, and productivity copilots that expose sensitive corporate data in real time.

Join this fast-paced, 15-minute keynote to discover how the cloud-native Varonis Data Security Platform delivers continuous runtime guardrails to stop AI-driven data exfiltration without halting innovation. You will learn how a data-first security framework automatically neutralizes exposures, giving you an actionable blueprint to master critical use cases like cloud data security, insider risk, compliance management, and ransomware prevention while securing the entire AI lifecycle.

From Risk to Guardrails: Securing AI at the Speed of Change

James Makil, Director, Information Security | Nth Generation

This session looks at how the threat landscape has evolved over the past decade, how AI is expanding the attack surface, and why the answer is not to avoid AI, but to build the right guardrails around it. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for managing AI risk through governance, access control, data protection, human oversight, and visibility.

AI, Trust & Cybersecurity: What Changes Now? | Cybersecurity Panel hosted by James Makil

• Jensen Penalosa, Assistant Special Agent in Charge | FBI

• Michael Tyner, Assistant Director Cybersecurity Operations | LA Department of Water and Power

• Neil Jadhav, Chief Information & Technology Officer | Gemological Institute of America (GIA)

• Jerry Craft, Principal Security Consultant | Nth Generation

AI is changing cybersecurity quickly, but how much of the threat landscape is truly new? This panel brings together perspectives from law enforcement, enterprise IT, critical infrastructure, and security advisory to explore how AI is changing attacks, defense, governance, and trust and whether organizations need entirely new security controls or simply stronger cybersecurity fundamentals.

For qualified IT, AI, and Cybersecurity professionals. Business email required for registration.

Details subject to change.