What I Learned About AI and CIOs at the National Homeland Security Conference

Shifting Perceptions and Foreshadowing AI in 2026

My fellow panelists and I walked into the room and were immediately surprised by its size. The room was set up in a “bride’s side, groom’s side” arrangement with a convenient (although not covered in flower petals) aisle down the middle. Rows of chairs on either side of the aisle were empty, but we were a bit early. It was an afternoon panel at the National Homeland Security Conference 2025 held at the Convention Center in DC. I was there to participate in a panel on the implementation of AI, a popular topic in 2025. As we settled into our seats on stage, tested our microphones, and pulled up our slides, the room began to fill with a wide range of technologists, policy folks, and general homeland security professionals somehow drawn away from the working dog demonstration down the hall.

The panel ran an hour occasionally punctuated with questions from the large crowd. Those questions were, to me, the most valuable part of the entire exercise because it revealed something incredibly important about the implementation of AI, organizational challenges, and what AI adoption will look like in 2026. Even after the panel wrapped, all three of us were held back by questions and discussions so long that we had to move to the hall because we were impeding the next panel in the same room. A few things were made clear during those sessions, but the biggest one was how practitioners engage their CIOs.

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