Resilience Reinvented:
Featured Speakers and Sessions
​​Keynote, Plenary, Breakout Sessions and Live Workshop Panel

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Please expand the sessions listed below to learn more about the session topics and speakers.

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Keynote | Why the Ai revolution needs you more than you need it

Why the AI Revolution Needs You More Than You Need It
Speaker: Jason Hoss

The most valuable people in the AI era are not the ones building the models. They are the ones who know where the models should be pointed. In this opening keynote, Jason Hoss makes the case that business resilience, continuity, and emergency management professionals hold the one asset artificial intelligence cannot replicate and desperately needs: earned context. The organizational knowledge, the risk intuition, and the stakeholder trust accumulated across real incidents are exactly what separate AI experiments that stall from AI programs that deliver. 

The gap is measurable. MIT NANDA research found that 95% of custom AI implementations produce no measurable business impact, and an IAPP survey found that only 28% of organizations have formally defined AI governance roles. The bottleneck is not intelligence; it is direction. Drawing on live demonstrations and the governance landscape defined by NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act, Jason introduces the Domain Translator: the professional who pairs Deep Domain Expertise with AI Fluency and the Problem Selection judgment to know which problems deserve to be solved. Along the way, he confronts the dark side directly, from hallucinations to deepfakes and synthetic media, and shows how practitioners convert those threats into a mandate for leadership. 

This session distills keynote material delivered and refined for audiences at MIT, BCI World in London, Continuity and Resilience Today in Toronto, and the ACP Northeast Regional Conference, now brought home to the chapter where Jason first shared his AI practitioner's journey. Attendees leave with the complete Domain Translator model, a practical governance baseline, and a personal 30-day roadmap for becoming the translator their organization did not know it was missing. This is not a session about fearing AI. It is about owning it. 

Attendees will leave able to:

• Articulate why earned context is the decisive asset in AI adoption, and why resilience and emergency management practitioners hold more of it than anyone else in the organization. 
• Establish a defensible AI governance baseline aligned to NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act. 
• Apply AI to practical workflows, from tabletop exercise design to incident data analysis and crisis communications, using a structured, low-risk-first approach. 
• Execute a personal 30-day roadmap to step into the Domain Translator role within their own organization.

Plenary | The Next Continuity Frontier: Cybersecurity risks in space-based ai infrastructure

The Next Continuity Frontier: Cybersecurity Risks in Space-Based AI Infrastructure
Speaker: Dr. Brian Hart
​Astrophysicist, AWS AI/ML SME

Continuity professionals are accustomed to planning for cloud outages, cyberattacks, communications failures, supplier disruption, and critical infrastructure dependencies. But the next generation of AI infrastructure may introduce a new planning frontier: systems that operate in orbit, depend on satellite communications, and cannot be physically repaired or inspected after deployment. 

The central question is simple: if AI infrastructure begins moving beyond Earth-based datacenters, how should continuity professionals update their planning assumptions?

This session introduces ACP attendees to the resilience implications of space-based AI datacenters and spaceenabled AI infrastructure. The discussion will translate a complex technical topic into practical continuity, governance, compliance, and operational-risk concerns, including dependency mapping, degraded-mode operations, incident response, third-party risk, cyber-physical disruption, and executive preparedness.

The session will also provide a technically grounded overview of the risk environment. Topics may include satellite communications dependency, ground-station exposure, uplink and downlink risk, inter-satellite links, AI model and data integrity, supply-chain compromise, remote-only incident response, radiation-induced faults, thermal-management constraints, and the difference between recoverable terrestrial systems and physically inaccessible orbital systems.

Attendees do not need to be space engineers or AI architects. The focus is on what continuity, resilience, governance, compliance, and risk professionals should understand as AI, cloud, communications, and satellite-enabled systems become more interconnected.

Learning Objectives / Audience Takeaways
By the end of this plenary, attendees will be able to:

1. Explain why space-enabled AI infrastructure may become a future continuity, resilience, and governance concern.
2. Identify how satellite communications, orbital infrastructure, cloud services, AI systems, and third-party technology providers may create hidden operational dependencies.
3. Recognize key technical risk areas associated with space-based AI infrastructure, including communications links, ground stations, supply-chain exposure, AI model integrity, cyber-physical disruption, and limited recovery options.
4. Compare traditional terrestrial datacenter recovery assumptions with the challenges of remotely operated, physically inaccessible space-based systems.
5. Describe governance, compliance, and executive-level questions organizations should begin asking about emerging space-enabled AI and communications dependencies

Attendees should leave with:

1. A practical understanding of why space-based AI infrastructure matters to continuity professionals.
2. A nontechnical but technically credible framework for discussing orbital AI, satellite dependency, and cyberphysical risk with executives, compliance leaders, and risk stakeholders.
3. A clearer view of how AI, cloud, communications, and space-enabled infrastructure may converge into future business-continuity dependencies.
4. A set of questions their organizations can use to evaluate hidden dependencies on satellite services, AI infrastructure, cloud providers, communications systems, and critical third parties.
5. A better understanding of why future continuity planning may need to account for infrastructure that cannot be physically inspected, repaired, or recovered in the same way as terrestrial systems

Lunch & Learn | When Alerts become actions: moving from static plans to living resilience

When Alerts Become Actions: Moving from Static Plans to Living Resilience
Speaker: James Podlucky

​AI is changing how business continuity and emergency management teams move from awareness to action. This Lunch & Learn session will explore how organizations can evolve from static continuity plans and manual alert interpretation toward context-aware resilience, where critical event signals help identify impacted locations, recommend relevant plans, anticipate operational risks, and guide faster human-led decisions.

This session will cover:

• The Context: Why traditional BC/EM plans are necessary, but often too static for fast-moving events.

• Where Organizations Are Today: Teams receive alerts, review plans, assess impact, determine affected buildings or business functions, and decide what actions to take, often manually and under pressure.

• Where Resilience Is Going: AI can help connect alerts to enterprise context: people, facilities, assets, processes, plans, and response actions.

• Practical examples showing how AI can help: 
  
  1. Understand the type and severity of an alert
     
  2. Identify which continuity or emergency plans may apply
     
  3. Anticipate likely operational risks
     
  4. Recommend which buildings may need to close, monitor, or escalate
     
  5. Support crisis communications and stakeholder updates

• Human-in-the-Loop Decision Making: AI should assist with context, recommendations, and speed, while BC/EM leaders retain approval, judgment, and accountability.

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• What Comes Next: What this shift means for resilience leaders, and how organizations can begin moving from plan documentation to action-oriented resilience.

Breakout Session | Developing Strong bia findings using artificial intelligence

Developing Strong BIA Findings Using Artificial Intelligence
Speaker: Alex Fullick

Organizations are collecting more Business Impact Analysis (BIA) data than ever before — yet many still struggle to convert that information into clear, defensible, and actionable findings. As a result, recovery assumptions go unchallenged, systemic risks remain hidden, and leadership receives reports that describe data rather than explain what it means. This session introduces a modern, AI-enabled approach to BIA analysis that strengthens insight generation, improves defensibility, and elevates the role of Business Continuity and Operational Resilience programs.

In this session, attendees will learn how Artificial Intelligence can be used responsibly to accelerate BIA analysis by identifying inconsistencies, surfacing dependency concentrations, detecting Single Points of Failure (SPOFs, SPOCs, SPOKs), and revealing risk themes that traditional methods often miss. Rather than replacing professional judgment, AI enhances it — enabling practitioners to focus on interpretation, synthesis, and decision-support.

The session will walk through what a complete BIA dataset should contain, how to prepare data for AIsupported analysis, and how to use AI to cross-reference impacts, RTOs, staffing, technology, and vendor dependencies. Attendees will see how AI can highlight misalignment, uncover hidden fragility, and strengthen the credibility of findings through evidence-based insights.

Participants will also learn how to translate analytical outputs into executive-ready findings, including how to write defensible risk statements, structure a BIA Findings Report, and communicate insights in a way that resonates with senior leadership, audit, and regulators. The session concludes with a practical maturity lens: what “good” looks like 12 months after adopting AI-supported BIA analysis, and how organizations can move from one-time assessments to continuous improvement.

​This session is designed for Business Continuity, Operational Resilience, Risk, and Audit professionals who want to modernize their BIA approach, improve the quality of their findings, and strengthen their organization’s resilience and executive support through better insights, faster analysis, and more strategic decision-support. 

Breakout Session | The Mushroom Problem: ai, bcm, and the case for measurable resilience

The Mushroom Problem: AI, BCM, and the Case for Measurable Resilience
​Speaker: Max Glodde

Every risk program is built on data that's unstructured, incomplete, and decaying between review cycles. Teams spend months mapping dependencies and exposures, only to watch the picture go stale.

AI doesn't fix that. AI multiplies it. Confident answers built on an incomplete foundation are still wrong and the cost of unpreparedness is no longer measured in hours, but in minutes and millions.

​This session explores what changes when risk teams fix the data layer first. We'll cover the four hard requirements AI needs to work in BCM: quantification, touchpoints, speed, velocity; and the methodology that produces structured data as a by-product of the workshop itself, not an analyst task afterward. Includes one anonymized case where a "low concern" site surfaced as a $200M single point of failure in three days. You'll leave rethinking how much of your risk landscape is truly visible and with a clear test for whether your next AI investment will move the needle or just multiply what's already broken.

Breakout session | Adversarial orchestration and the collapse of "human-in-the-loop" security

Adversarial Orchestration and the Collapse of "Human-in-the-Loop" Security
​Speaker: Heather Lawrence

The rapid paradigm shift from passive AI chat assistants to an autonomous, agentic workforce has fundamentally transformed the enterprise threat landscape. As organizations aggressively integrate multiagent orchestration frameworks into operational pipelines to drive productivity, they inadvertently expand their attack surface to machine-speed vulnerabilities. This presentation explores the emerging reality of a posthuman attack lifecycle, where autonomous threats outpace traditional, human-centric defense mechanisms and render legacy "soft" enterprise boundaries obsolete.

We will dissect critical, real-world examples of autonomous exploitation, including zero-click data exfiltration vectors via cloud connectors (AgentFlayer) and fully automated cyber espionage campaigns (GTG-1002) operating at speeds physically impossible for human defenders to counter. Furthermore, the session addresses the rise of "semantic corruption"—tactics where adversarial networks deliberately poison training and retrieval data to covertly manipulate the internal logic of production models.

​By decoupling technical execution from manual human oversight, these autonomous architectures present an existential challenge to standard business continuity and incident response models. Attendees will move beyond the theoretical to gain a comprehensive, technical understanding of the "agent stack" vulnerability landscape. Finally, the discussion outlines the vital defensive pivot required to preserve operational resilience in an AI-driven ecosystem: transitioning away from reactive human intervention and toward "hard boundaries," automated agentic auditing, and trajectory-level risk assessments.

Breakout Session | How AI Helped Scale a global resilience community and create learning experiences

How AI Helped Scale a Global Resilience Community and Create Learning Experiences
​Speaker: Doniella McKoy

Business continuity professionals are expected to do more with limited time, limited resources, and growing expectations for engagement, communication, and preparedness. At the same time, many resilience communities struggle to sustain momentum, consistently deliver relevant content, and convert informal practitioner conversations into reusable learning value. This session presents a practical case study of how AI was used to support the growth of the Continuity Coffee & Chat under the Global Resilience Exchange LLC and enhance the experience for participants.

Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for human expertise, this case study explores how AI can support the work behind the scenes: generating YouTube scripts, developing promotional content, refining session ideas, and producing ideas for community building and knowledge sharing. These applications helped reduce friction in content development and made it easier to extend the value of each conversation into a broader learning experience.

​The session will share lessons learned from using AI in a practitioner-led environment, including what worked, what required human judgment, and how BC leaders can adapt similar approaches within their own programs. Attendees will gain practical ideas for using AI to strengthen stakeholder engagement, improve program maturity, and build a stronger resilience culture without losing authenticity.

Breakout session | ai-ready resilience at google scale

From Generative "Shiny Objects" to Predictive Agentic Sytems: AI-Ready Resilience at Google Scale
​Speaker: Michael Quam

As the velocity of global risk outpaces manual intervention, organizations must move beyond qualitative, "check-the-box" human assessments to high-fidelity, automated reasoning engines. This session provides an inside look at how Google is reinventing enterprise resilience through three active AI implementations, detailing their underlying architectures and real-world performance metrics:
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1. VectorSight (Automated Supplier Auditing): Traditional third-party vendor audits are expensive, slow, and resource constrained. This segment shows how Google adapted its patented "VectorSight" methodology to audit supplier Business Continuity Plans (BCPs). Utilizing complex thematic prompting and majority-voting consensus protocols, VectorSight transforms a 6-week, 1,200-hour manual audit into a secure, automated process completed in under two hours with 95.4% accuracy against ISO 22301 and related standards.
2. Project Cassia (The Agentic SOC): This 3-year moonshot integrates multi-modal telemetry and external signals (OSINT, news feeds, network data) into a unified RAG lake. We demonstrate how layers of specialized AI agents filter out white noise, automatically construct chronological incident timelines, generate automated Situation Reports (SitReps), and map escalation paths to provide leaders with data-driven Courses of Action (COAs).
3. Project Barks (Travel Security Chatbot): Moving away from static, one-way travel notifications, this interactive chatbot ingests global threat intelligence to provide real-time, conversational safety guidance to traveling employees while establishing automated escalation pathways to the GSOC.

​Crucially, the session will address AI Governance, Privacy, and Safety. We will outline Google's "AI Relay Race" development lifecycle, illustrating how we enforce strict human-in-the-loop (HITL) validation and rigorous "blind-run" testing to eliminate AI hallucinations and protect sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) before code is integrated into production.

Breakout session | Leading with resilience: Governing ai in the age of digital risk

Leading with Resilience: Governing AI in the Age of Digital Risk
​Speaker: Nicole Scott

Artificial Intelligence is no longer something organizations are planning for—it is already influencing how they identify risk, make decisions, communicate during crises, and support business operations. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in Business Continuity and Emergency Management, I believe we need to shift the conversation from "How do we use AI?" to "How do we govern AI?"

Throughout my career, I have worked with organizations across government and the private sector to build Business Continuity and resilience programs that enable leaders to make informed decisions before, during, and after disruption. One lesson has remained constant: technology alone does not create resilience. Governance, communication, collaboration, and leadership do. AI should be no exception.

This session explores AI Governance through the lens of Business Continuity and Organizational Resilience rather than technology alone. Designed for Business Continuity and Emergency Management professionals, it provides practical guidance for integrating AI into resilience programs while maintaining accountability, transparency, and trust.

Participants will examine how AI introduces new dependencies on cloud providers, data centers, third-party vendors, and critical infrastructure while expanding cybersecurity, operational, legal, and regulatory risks. We will also discuss how AI-generated information can influence executive decision-making during a crisis and why human judgment must remain at the center of every critical decision.

Rather than focusing on AI tools or demonstrations, this presentation focuses on the governance structures that enable organizations to innovate responsibly. We will explore practical strategies for identifying AI-related risks, incorporating AI into Business Impact Analyses (BIAs), continuity planning, crisis management, exercise design, and third-party risk assessments. Participants will also learn how governance frameworks, executive sponsorship, cross-functional collaboration, policy development, and ongoing oversight can help organizations adopt AI with confidence while strengthening organizational resilience. Business Continuity professionals have always served as trusted advisors, helping organizations prepare for uncertainty and navigate disruption with confidence. AI introduces a new dimension of that responsibility. As resilience leaders, we have an opportunity to help shape not only how AI is used, but how it is governed.

​Attendees will leave with actionable strategies they can immediately apply to strengthen their resilience programs, engage executive leadership, and establish AI Governance practices that support responsible innovation. Because the future of resilience will not be defined by the organizations with the most artificial intelligence— it will be defined by the organizations with the strongest governance, the clearest accountability, and the leadership to turn disruption into direction.

breakout session | the matrix of mayhem: ai's after-action review of 'contagion'

The Matrix of Mayhem: AI's After-Action Review of 'Contagion'
​Speaker: Donna Speckhard

In the face of widespread threats, from pandemics to cyberattacks, Contagion offers a chillingly realistic portrayal of societal breakdown and the intricate challenges of managing a global crisis.

This presentation will transform a viewing of key scenes from Contagion into an interactive AI- driven afteraction review (AAR) for Business Continuity and Emergency Management professionals. We will examine how Artificial Intelligence, a key focus of this conference, could have augmented or potentially altered the outcomes depicted in the film. Our AAR will dissect the film's narrative through the lens of AI applications in BC/EM, focusing on:

• Predictive Analytics for Early Detection and Spread: The film highlights the slow realization of the pandemic's scale. AI, with its ability to process vast, disparate datasets (genomic sequencing, travel patterns, public health reports), could have been provided earlier and more accurate predictions of the virus's spread and potential R-naught values. This mirrors AI's role in risk identification and forecasting. Imagine AI flagging anomalous health clusters or social media trends long before human epidemiologists.

• AI in Response Coordination and Resource Allocation: As the crisis escalates, Contagion shows the immense strain on public health infrastructure and the struggle for resources. AI could have optimized the distribution of medical supplies, personnel, and testing kits based on real-time infection data, demographic vulnerabilities, and logistical constraints. This aligns with AI's capacity to support crisis response and manage complex supply chains. AI could also facilitate rapid communication and information dissemination, combating misinformation, a critical issue in the film.

• AI-Powered "What-If" Scenarios for Planning and Exercise: The film depicts the reactive nature of many responses. AI can simulate various pandemic scenarios, testing the efficacy of different containment strategies, vaccination rollouts, and public health interventions before a real crisis strikes. This directly supports AI's use in exercise planning and execution, allowing practitioners to stress-test their plans in dynamic, datadriven simulations.

• AI in Long-Term Recovery and Resilience Building: Beyond immediate response, AI can assist in understanding long-term societal impacts, identifying critical infrastructure vulnerabilities exposed by the crisis, and informing strategies for building more resilient systems. This includes analyzing economic impacts, social behavioral shifts, and informing future preparedness measures. 

live workshop | planning for the unplanned outage: ai-assisted exercise design

Planning for the Unplanned Outage:
​Live AI-Assisted Exercise Design for Businesses Facing Public Safety Power Shutoffs

The Panel:

Jason Hoss

Hal Grieb

Joshua Rostek

Justin Snair

Exercises take weeks to design. The thinking that goes into them is invisible by the time participants see the binder. And the scenarios themselves often lack the variety needed to stress-test real organizations — too few inject paths, too few participant types, too little grounding in the compliance frameworks, data, and risk realities that actually shape decisions.

​AI is supposed to help with this. But practitioners have real concerns: hallucinated facts, ungrounded scenarios, vendor handwaving about "AI-powered" tools that produce generic output.

This session takes those concerns seriously by doing the work in front of you. In one session, a five-person panel will design a complete tabletop exercise on a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) scenario — a planned, multi-day de-energization triggered by extreme fire weather — live, using Preppr. The platform grounds every design choice in its compliance and operational physics engine and a corpus of 20,000+ authoritative documents, live feeds, and data sources. The audience steers objectives, scenario, injects, and the discussion questions as the design unfolds. PSPS sits at the seam between BC and EM, and the scenario scales naturally from a small business with a single location to a large enterprise with regional operations. Every design choice the panel makes will be visible and challengeable in real time.

The Panel:

• Jason Hoss (Whirlybird Labs) — facilitating audience input and the human-AI interaction layer
• Hal Grieb (Pearl Snap Consulting) — grounding the design and discussion in EM doctrine
• Joshua Rostek (Xcel Energy) — offering the energy provider perspective on planned outages and utility-customer coordination
• Justin Snair (CEO & Founder, Preppr) — driving the AI platform and surfacing the design choices it forces into the open

This is not a slide deck about AI. It is a working demonstration of how AI changes the economics of exercise design — compressing weeks of work into a single session, expanding the variety of scenarios any one designer can produce, and doing it without losing the doctrinal and data grounding BC and EM practitioners rightly demand. Throughout, the panel will field candid audience questions on AI accuracy, sycophancy, vendor accountability, and what "human in the loop" actually requires.

Attendees leave with three things: a complete, adaptable PSPS exercise they can take back to their organizations; a working mental model for AI-assisted exercise design at any organizational scale; and honest answers about what AI can and cannot do in BC and EM today.