On March 25, CLTC co-hosted a lunch panel event, “Empowering Communities to Navigate the AI-Cyber Frontier,” during the 2026 RSA Conference. The event brought together young cybersecurity professionals and seasoned industry veterans to discuss the intersection of AI innovation, evolving cyber risk, and workforce development. (Watch the event above or on YouTube.)
Held at Okta’s San Francisco headquarters, the event was presented by CLTC in partnership with Cyversity, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting diversity in the cybersecurity field, and Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS), which works to recruit, retain and advance women in cybersecurity.
Key Takeaways: How to Navigate the AI-Cyber Era
Here are some of the key strategies shared by the experts for both individuals and organizations:
- Leverage Community for Career Longevity: Use organizations like Cyversity and WiCyS for mentorship and “continuous muscle building.” In a field where you might be the only person of your background in the room, community can provide the confidence to lead.
- Find Your Niche: Cybersecurity is no longer just for “engineers with ten monitors.” Whether you are a layperson or a technical expert, find an area of specialization (like governance or cloud security) that fits your unique talents.
- Prioritize Foundational AI Literacy: It is no longer optional. Every role — from product management to engineering — requires a baseline understanding of the “AI stack” to understand how threats are detected and neutralized.
- Embrace the “Human-Machine” Teammate: Shift your mindset. Don’t view AI as a tool, but as a teammate. The goal is to learn how to “co-work” with AI agents to perform jobs faster and smarter.
- Focus on Governance and Decision Authority: As AI agents begin to automate intelligence and decision-making, the human role must “level up” to provide the necessary oversight, critical thinking, and ethical boundaries.
The Need to Adapt to a Complex Threat Landscape
The partnership between CLTC, Cyversity, and WiCyS underscored a critical mission: expanding who participates in cybersecurity to meet an increasingly complex threat landscape. As Eric Kelleher, President and COO at Okta, noted, we stand at an exciting time for the industry — both “exciting scary” due to the acceleration of AI, and exciting for the potential of the field.
“We’re at a point in time right now where cyber threats and threat actors have never been better funded than they are today,” Kelleher said. “The work that you’re doing as a group is terribly important to the future — to the future of cybersecurity, to the future of AI, and really to the future of humanity.”
Kimberly Quan, Chapter Leader and Training Coordinator for the Cyversity SF Bay Area chapter, decided to get involved four years ago after sponsoring the organization’s annual conference. At the event, she met a mother of two who had been struggling to make ends meet in customer service. The woman shared that Cyversity had helped her secure a career in cybersecurity, a transition that completely transformed her family’s life. That moment crystallized for Quan why this work matters.
Sherron Burgess, VP of Strategy at Cyversity, explained that the event was closely aligned with Cyversity’s goal of “having a room full of practitioners that come from diverse backgrounds and diverse perspectives.” She noted that Cyversity has 1,200 members with chapters across the U.S. and has provided over $3 million worth of scholarships, in addition to pairing 300 mentor-mentee partnerships. “We are really working to make sure that people have a place, that they understand that every gift and talent they have is valued and necessary in this future fight we have in cybersecurity.”
CLTC Executive Director Ann Cleaveland celebrated the ongoing partnership between CLTC, Cyversity, and WiCyS. “Those of you who’ve been to this event in the past will know that we’ve tried to cultivate a reputation for ‘real talk,’” Cleaveland said. “At the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, our research and our convening and practice is to focus on the future of cybersecurity and expand who participates in cybersecurity. This event — and the partnerships that are here — are emblematic of that mission.”
Ronit Polak, President of the WiCyS Silicon Valley Affiliate, introduced Women in CyberSecurity, explaining that WiCys is a global nonprofit that provides an array of programs to promote the inclusion of women in the cyber field, including by offering certifications, webinars, book clubs, mentorship programs, an annual conference, and other services. “We just want to be able to support you through our mission of attracting, retaining, and advancing women in the cybersecurity domain,” Polak said.
Next-Gen Panel
Following the introductions was a panel discussion highlighting what it takes to build a career in cybersecurity, particularly for those in the early stages of their careers. Moderated by Lynn Dohm, Executive Director of WiCyS, the panel included Sybil Carter-Love, SCRUM Product Owner and a member of Cyversity’s Education Cohort and Mentorship Program; Fiona McCrae, Senior Cybersecurity Engineer at MITRE; and Archana Kulkarna, Security Engineer at DoorDash.
The panelists shared their experience in working in the field and stressed the importance of finding mentorship, training, and other support. For example, Carter-Love talked about the importance of continuously growing professionally, including by joining and learning from a community such as Cyversity. “Once I got my cybersecurity certificate in cloud security, I saw opportunities where businesses were not securing a lot of what they did. They didn’t have any governance,” she said.
Carter-Love stressed the value of finding an area of specialization that appeals to you. “It’s exciting to see all the different opportunities you can actually get in cybersecurity, whether you’re an engineer or just a lay person,” she said. “You need to find your niche, and anybody can get into that niche, depending on what you want to do.”
McCrae explained that, while studying computer science at Northeastern University, there “were not a ton of other young women like me,” which led her to WiCyS. “It was a way to connect with others who were on the same journey,” she said. “When you are a small group in the larger organization, it means a lot to have that community. And as I have gotten involved as a professional, I’ve been both mentored and been able to give back and be a mentor and a volunteer with WiCyS. It’s really cool to keep building that community, and it helps to give other folks confidence and be able to see themselves, which is so important.“
Kulkarna explained that her perspectives on cybersecurity were shaped in part by her time getting a master’s degree at UC Berkeley, when she carried out research focused on understanding the digital security challenges of underprivileged communities. “When we talk about hackers and security, you picture like 10 monitors, and it sounds fancy, but the root of the problem goes much deeper,” she said. “We have to be prepared to make things secure without many resources.”
She also emphasized the value of community in taking on the dynamic challenges of cybersecurity. “There have been many meetings over my career where I’m the only woman in the call, and it’s very valuable to have communities focused on mentorship,” Kulkarna said. “AI has unleashed this whole new power in the team,” she said. “The lines between all the roles are blurring. A lot more people can now be engineers, a lot more people can now be product managers with AI. We really cannot underestimate what anyone can do anymore.”
Industry Panel
Next on the agenda was a panel that brought together practitioners from industry to discuss how the AI-cyber convergence is playing out in their organizations. Moderated by Rolanda Small, Executive Director of Cyversity, the panel included Alissa Abdullah (a.k.a. “Dr. “Jay”), Deputy Chief Security Officer and Senior Vice President of Emerging Corporate Security Solutions at Mastercard; Christelle Chau, Vice President of Security Governance, Risk, and Compliance at Okta; Corey Lee, Security CTO at Microsoft; and Camille Stewart Gloster, CEO and Founder of CAS Strategies.
Abdullah explained that AI is not only scaling attackers and defenders, but it is “helping us scale decision-making and judgment,” as new technologies are “moving us from the automation of tasks to the automation of intelligence, to the automation of decision-making.”
“People who know AI will replace people who don’t use AI,” she said. “Your team is not going to be just people, it’s going to be people and machines. If you start thinking about it that way now, it will help you pivot and lean into all of the different things that you need to learn.”
Abdullah emphasized that professional development will be essential, as will oversight and governance of AI used within organizations. “Your tasks may be replaced, but then what are you doing to level up to make sure that you can govern AI in the way that it needs to be governed?” she said.
She explained that Mastercard already has over 500,000 AI agents in use that are working alongside humans or performing human-like work. “Everyone at the company is being asked to have a foundational level of AI literacy,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what role you’re in.… The objective is to understand, how can you as the human learn how to co-work, no pun intended, with an agent or AI in order to do your job better, faster, smarter… Foundational AI literacy has to be a common core.”
Corey Lee also noted the need for organizations to evolve into “frontier organizations,” which are capable of using AI “as an assistant, as a teammate, and as a leader. There’s a lot of discussion around, what does the future of teammates look like? What does the future of an individual look like, and what does the future of leadership look like?…. It really doesn’t matter what innovation comes out, we’re still having a similar conversation around where we need professionals specifically to govern the risk associated with AI adoption in either of those three buckets.“
“It’s very important for everyone in the field to start understanding what we refer to as the AI stack,” Lee said. “This is breaking down the architecture of AI in a way that allows you to understand where AI is playing, and more importantly, what you need to pay attention to in terms of protecting, detecting, and then responding to threats.”
Camille Stewart Gloster noted that the advent of AI agents will make many of the traditional tasks of cybersecurity, like logging online activity, more complicated. “Who’s storing all that data when you’ve got a bunch of agents, and you’re tracking every interaction, and their interactions with each other? Now you’ve got to change and think about the decision authority, and you really need to build the governance that helps you track, contain, and bound decision authority. Our organizational structures need to change, and our operational processes need to change.“
She emphasized that cybersecurity will be essential for the AI era. “Security is performance in this agentic age,” she said. “The way that you bound authority, the way that you have reliable operations of your agents is leveraging security practices…. Things will change, and you’ll continue to need to adapt and understand your environment better, and you’ll also have to get a lot more muscle around continuous learning, both as an individual and as an organization.”
Christelle Chau also stressed that while AI will accelerate tasks, it must be approached cautiously. “The critical thinking of the end user actually asking AI to do something should be very thoughtful, considerate, but also asking compelling questions,” Chau said. “AI can only answer based on how you ask the question. So the intent is super important, and in my day-to-day job where I craft policies and drive remediation of risk, it’s important that we allow that business context to really ensure that we get the best from the AI model.”
