Most enterprises still measure AI by how much it produces: dashboards, risk scores, reports, code, agents that run while the team sleeps. The harder question is whether anyone trusts what comes out, and who answers for it when an agent acts on its own.

At the Empower Summit, two practitioners approached that question from opposite ends of the business. Michael Meis spoke from inside healthcare security. Thomas Ahl spoke about data and the economics of AI. Their conclusions met in the same place, and events since the summit have tested both arguments in public.

Trust as a position you can measure: who you take commission from, which conflicts you have put on the table, how the audit trail of your last twenty engagements actually reads. Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for GRC Tools, Assurance Leaders made a parallel point about software. Vendors treating AI as a feature add are losing to vendors treating it as a structural change in how decisions get made. Advisory firms are no different.

I've spent my career in rooms where the stakes are measured in dollars, or in how fast you can contain something that's already going wrong. I'm good in those rooms. But those rooms will take everything you give them and ask for more, and not one of them will ever tell you to go look at a lizard.

Out on the Swan Islands, none of that applied. The ocean didn't know I ran a company. The animals I was looking for had been there long before any of us, and they didn't care what was sitting in my inbox. There's something clarifying about that. You spend a few days somewhere none of your usual advantages count for anything, and you come back able to see your actual work more clearly than you could while standing inside it.

The window between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation has gone from years to hours. In this post, a security leader examines what that compression breaks inside a modern security program and how a four-layer defense model built for machine-speed threats is the most defensible path forward when certainty is no longer an option.

I was selected to speak at RSA Conference 2026 for the first time this year, and had the honor of sharing the stage with Deidre Diamond, CEO and Founder of CyberSN. Our session, "The Power of Influence for Security Leaders," started from a simple observation. Adversaries study influence every single day. Social engineers, nation-state operators, ransomware negotiators. They train this skill deliberately. Meanwhile, the people defending organizations are expected to just figure it out on the job. Research from Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, and the Center for Creative Leadership consistently places influence in the top three skills required for leadership effectiveness. Yet almost nobody in cybersecurity receives formal training in it.

We are excited to announce the acquisition of Konnect.io and having an extremely passionate developer in Kodie Kennedy joining the 3 Tree Tribe!

As Monks expanded its Technology Services and Artificial Intelligence capabilities, its legacy data stack became a significant barrier to growth, treating the massive volumes of data generated by their platforms as a tax rather than an asset.

This document details how the strategic partnership between Monks and Three Tree Tech led to the selection and implementation of Axiom. The engagement successfully unlocked significant cost savings and performance gains, establishing the foundational AI readiness required for Monks' next wave of innovation.

Superpowers and Megazords

We also spent time talking about how we've built our team differently. In a traditional channel partner, you get a seller who has surface-level knowledge across a broad set of products paired with a sales engineer who actually knows the technology. The seller does the talking, the sales engineer does the explaining. We don't operate that way.

At 3 Tree Tech, our sellers are subject matter experts. Each person on the team has deep expertise in specific areas of IT and cybersecurity. But nobody can be an expert in everything, so instead of faking it, our team is incented to bring in the right teammate when they identify a customer need that falls outside their specialty. Team selling isn't a buzzword for us. It's baked into how we pay people.

Joseph Meyer has lead successful sales teams for over 18-years in retail B2C, mid-market B2B, and in the Fortune 500 enterprise markets.  His technology experience ranges from networking, voice transformation, applications, analytics, and all realms of IT and telecom. He has a passion for bridging divisions within companies to ensure that vision, infrastructure and solutions work together.

Carraig Stanwyck joined Lou Rabon on Channel Security Secrets to dig into what’s actually happening inside security programs. Teams chasing new products while ignoring what they already own. Procurement shaping outcomes more than the people running security. Organizations operating without a clear risk appetite. And the role transparency plays when you’re trying to build trust in an environment that isn’t always built for it.

Michael Meis is a security leader with a passion for architecting security programs, leading people, and developing world-class security teams. He argued that cybersecurity struggles not because teams lack funding or tools but because the structure puts too much weight on too few people. Attackers move fast and the traditional model cannot keep up. 

Three Months as CEO and What I Got Wrong About Being a Good Customer

When I accepted the CEO role at 3 Tree Tech three months ago, I thought I understood the vendor side of technology partnerships. I’d been partnering with vendors for over a decade, and I'd been 3 Tree Tech’s customer for over five years. I'd seen how partnering was traditionally done, and then I saw how 3 Tree Tech operated differently. I felt I knew the pain points on both the customer and vendor sides.

At the Portland Summit, 3 Tree Tech hosted its own “tribal council.” Tim Schocke, Product Manager at Lowe’s, Stacy Sherman, Founder of Doing CX Right®, and Eric Skeens, Co-founder and CTO of 3 Tree Tech sat down to debate. In true Survivor fashion, the question was not who has the best tools. It was who can outwit, outplay, and outlast the speed of disruption.

A friend in business retorted to me, “I’ve never known anyone to actively demote themselves and bring in their replacement while smiling.” Cyber security leaders think in terms of impact. They don’t ask “Is this cool?” — they ask “If this fails, what breaks for customers and the business?” That mindset promotes growth while reducing friction in business.

Stacy Sherman, founder of Doing CX Right, took the stage at the Portland Summit to deliver a powerful message for technology leaders: IT and security are not just support functions. When leaders break silos, align goals, and strengthen connection across teams, they turn technology into a true competitive advantage.