Thank you for attending Appalachia Advance 2026!

One day, nine sessions, and a keynote at Hershey Lodge — here's what's worth carrying back to your desk from this year's AI and cybersecurity conversations.

• AI agents are the new insider risk. Dr. Chase Cunningham's keynote made the case that every AI agent you deploy is effectively a new hire — arriving with credentials and production access but no background check or offboarding date. Zero Trust is the architecture that makes AI adoption survivable, with enforcement living outside the model.

• Identity is the perimeter. With 80%+ of breaches tracing back to compromised credentials, the "password is dead" session pushed passkeys (FIDO2) as the phishing-resistant path forward — and the top-10-controls session reminded us that the same fundamentals (IAM, MFA, patching, logging) show up in every audit.

• Govern AI like any other system — and any other vendor. Diane Jones' AI Admissibility Framework (Authority, Actions, Context, Evidence) gave governance a concrete structure, while the third-party risk track urged treating every AI tool like a vendor: ask what credentials it needs, what access it has, and what it does with your data.

• Translate it all into business terms. Whether it's choosing SOC 2 vs. HITRUST based on what customers actually require, calculating AI ROI from unlocked capacity rather than "hours saved," or quantifying cyber risk so leadership can decide what to fund — the day's recurring theme was making security a conversation the whole business can have together.

Thanks to our speakers, panelists, and sponsors — McKonly & Asbury (Platinum), Alerify and Full Span Solutions (Gold) — and to everyone who joined us in supporting our Vista Autism partnership. See you at Appalachia Advance 2027.