ANM Tech Day 2026

AI moves fast. But does that mean governance has to slow you down? Not anymore.

In this session, we will flip the script on AI governance: instead of a barrier to innovation, it's your biggest accelerator. You will walk away with practical frameworks for adopting AI responsibly — clear guardrails, risk-based controls, and repeatable operational practices your team can actually use.
Plus, we will pull back the curtain on how ANM is using AI internally and the governance strategies keeping us secure while we scale.

AI moves fast. But does that mean governance has to slow you down? Not anymore.

Your IT budget didn't shrink. Your dollar just doesn't go as far as it used to.

Software subscriptions, servers, storage, networking — costs are climbing faster than budgets across the board. And it's not random: vendor pricing power, AI-driven feature bundling, component shortages, and supply chain pressure are all working against you.

This session breaks down exactly why IT inflation is happening and, more importantly, what you can do about it. We will cover practical strategies to fight back: license rightsizing, portfolio rationalization, smarter contract negotiations, and hardware refresh planning that won't blindside your budget.
No doom and gloom, just a clear-eyed look at the pressures you're facing and the levers you can pull to impact the bottom line.

Identity is the new perimeter, and most organizations are building it without a blueprint.

This session maps out what a modern, resilient identity foundation actually looks like: Zero Trust principles, identity lifecycle management, privileged access, and seamless integration across cloud and on-prem environments. We will connect the dots between identity investments and the outcomes that matter most to your business: risk reduction, compliance, and long-term digital transformation.

You will walk away with a practical framework for designing an identity strategy that balances strong security with a frictionless user experience.

As enterprises race to deploy artificial intelligence, CISOs are confronted with a rapidly expanding and unfamiliar attack surface that spans AI applications, models, and a new generation of autonomous agents. This new frontier introduces complex threats, from sophisticated prompt injection and model poisoning attacks to agent memory manipulation and tool misuse. Unfortunately, traditional security controls are ill-equipped to handle these evolving threats.

This session cuts through the hype to provide:

• Practical CISO-focused lens to navigating the landscape
• Comprehensive visibility and robust security across the entire AI lifecycle
• Actionable framework to secure their organization’s AI ecosystem

The debate is real, and the answer isn't one-size-fits-all.

Integrated platforms promise simplicity and unified visibility. Specialized tools promise depth and best-in-class performance. But which approach is right for your organization? It depends on your risk profile, threat landscape, maturity level, and resources — and the wrong choice is expensive.
This session cuts through the vendor noise to give you an honest comparison of both approaches, including when a hybrid strategy makes the most sense. You will walk away with a practical framework for making your next cybersecurity architecture decision with confidence.

Identity is the new perimeter, and most organizations are building it without a blueprint.

This session maps out what a modern, resilient identity foundation actually looks like: Zero Trust principles, identity lifecycle management, privileged access, and seamless integration across cloud and on-prem environments. We will connect the dots between identity investments and the outcomes that matter most to your business: risk reduction, compliance, and long-term digital transformation.

You will walk away with a practical framework for designing an identity strategy that balances strong security with a frictionless user experience.

Your analysts aren't overwhelmed because they're not good enough. They're overwhelmed because the alert volume is inhuman. AI can fix that.

This session shows you how to put AI to work in your SOC: automating triage, enriching investigations, and filtering out the noise so your team can focus on the threats that actually matter. The result? Faster detection, faster response, and analysts who aren't burning out by Thursday.

But the winning playbook isn't full autopilot — it's human-assisted AI. We will show you exactly where AI should do the heavy lifting and where humans need to stay in control for context, judgment, and accountability. You will leave with practical first steps: targeting high-impact use cases, building solid threat telemetry pipelines, and training your team to supervise AI with confidence.

Zero trust isn't a buzzword anymore. It's the architecture your users, devices, and data depend on.

This session shows how Cisco Secure Access modernizes your security posture with a unified, cloud-delivered platform built for a zero-trust world. If you're still relying on Umbrella, you'll see exactly what you're leaving on the table — deeper visibility, AI-driven insights, and seamless access control across every user and device, everywhere.

You will walk away with clear migration strategies, best-practice deployment guidance, and the confidence to make the move to a modern zero-trust architecture.

Every stage of the customer journey is being reshaped by AI, and contact centers are ground zero.

This session shows you what that looks like in practice, not just in theory. Through live demos, you will see how modern contact centers are applying AI across both customer-facing and internal use cases to drive better experiences, sharper efficiency, and richer insight.

We will cut through the capability noise to show you what actually matters, where each tool fits, and how to translate AI features into outcomes your stakeholders will care about.

The relationship between AI and networking runs both ways — and understanding both sides is now a competitive necessity.

AI is transforming how networks are designed, operated, and secured. At the same time, AI workloads are placing unprecedented demands on the infrastructure that supports them. This session unpacks both directions: how AI-driven automation, predictive analytics, and intelligent security are making networks smarter — and what it takes to build a network that can actually handle AI at scale.

Whether you're a technical practitioner or an executive making infrastructure investment decisions, you will walk away with a clear view of emerging architectures, real-world use cases, and the operational strategies needed to get your network AI-ready.

This session covers everything from smart network design to day-to-day operations, with a focus on what's new and what actually works.

We'll walk through the latest technologies (Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7), hidden capabilities you may already own but aren't using, and the best practices that separate a reliable network from a frustrating one.
You will leave knowing what today's access points can really do and how to make sure you're getting full value from your infrastructure investment.

You can't fix what you can't see, and in a multi-cloud environment, most teams can't see nearly enough.

Traditional monitoring tells you something broke. Full stack observability tells you why, where, and what's about to break next. This session defines what true observability looks like in practice: unifying metrics, logs, and traces across every layer of your stack to give you real-time, end-to-end visibility into system health and user experience.
We will cover why traditional monitoring can't keep up with today's distributed environments, how observability shifts your team from reactive firefighting to proactive operations, and how AI-driven analytics are taking it further, automating insights, predicting issues before they surface, and turning data into decisions.

Everyone's talking about AI. This panel is about what actually happens when you deploy it.

Practitioners from Government, Education, and Commercial sectors come together to share what's working, what isn't, and what they wish they'd known sooner. The conversation spans real implementations, from modernizing public services and improving student outcomes to streamlining business operations and sharper decision-making.

No hype, no demos. Just honest lessons from the field on responsible AI design, transparency, and how to measure whether it's actually delivering value. You will leave with practical adoption strategies, cross-sector insights, and the ethical frameworks that separate sustainable AI programs from expensive experiments.

As public sector organizations navigate increasingly complex threat landscapes and strict regulatory mandates, modernizing physical security is no longer just an operational upgrade—it is a critical necessity.

In this session, attendees will explore how Verkada is redefining safety for government and public institutions by replacing vulnerable, legacy NVR/DVR setups with a secure, scalable hybrid cloud architecture. We will dive into the practical applications of edge-based Artificial Intelligence, showcasing how innovations like proactive threat deterrence, real-time intelligent video analytics, and AI-powered search empower lean security teams to resolve incidents in seconds rather than hours. Discover how unifying video security, access control, alarms, visitor management, and environmental sensors into a single platform allows public sector leaders to transform reactive security measures into a proactive, highly efficient, and future-proof safety strategy.

The pilot phase is over. AI is now foundational to how organizations operate and deliver value, and IT teams are expected to lead the way.

This session cuts through the theory and focuses on what's actually working: real-world AI automation use cases across industries, and practical guidance on how to move from curiosity to mission-critical outcomes. If you are ready to go beyond the experiment and start driving results, this is your starting point.