Keynote: Diana Kelley | SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit

Diana Kelley is speaking at the SANS Institute AI Summit this April.

"A malformed AI prompt is like a misplaced comma in a legal contract. One simple error could lead to thousands in revenue lost to unnecessary refunds." -- Diana Kelley, CISO at Noma Security.

If you asked me to name the smartest people in our field, Diana would be on that list. 

She was Cybersecurity CTO at Microsoft, Global Executive Security Advisor at IBM, and GM at Symantec. She was inducted into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2023. (That’s usually where the career story ends — the victory lap phase.) 

She spent decades fighting to get CISOs a seat at the board table. AI finally did it. Her take: “AI has done what decades of breaches, compliance mandates, and ‘security-first’ slogans couldn’t fully achieve. It has prompted organizations to make security a standing agenda item.” 

But now that we’re there, the conversation is different. “This isn’t a polite dinner table where we chat about risk in theory. This is a high-stakes arena where the pace of AI innovation collides head-on with an evolving threat landscape.” (I felt that one.) 

Diana is tracking a shift most security teams haven’t fully absorbed: AI systems are moving from passive assistants to autonomous agents that take independent actions across your environment. That’s not a warning about ‘someday.’ That’s now. 

Her view on why AI governance keeps failing: “Cross-functional collaboration around AI governance rarely fails for lack of tools. It often fails because the people using the tools don’t share the same process or goals.” Not a technology problem. A people problem. (As it usually is.) 

Diana is CISO at Noma Security, an agentic AI security company working with Fortune 500 customers and named by Gartner as a leader in AI trust and risk management. 

She could have stayed in the Hall of Fame. She went to the frontier instead. 

That’s the kind of thinking we need more of, and the kind of people you’ll meet in this room. 

See the speakers and agenda for the SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit here. Hope to see you there.