Mayer Brown and Blue Team Alpha Host Cybersecurity and AI Executive Roundtable in Chicago

In a press release, an executive roundtable titled Beyond the SOC, co-hosted by Mayer Brown, Tölt Strategies, Blue Team Alpha, and DIACSUS, addressed how companies are responding to evolving cyber threats and the impact of AI on both attacks and defenses. The event was held in Chicago in April and gathered cybersecurity, finance, legal, and technology leaders to discuss risk management, recovery, and active defense.

Participants noted that most organizations fail to quantify cyber risk in financial terms, creating a gap between security teams and executive decision makers. Experts estimated that 80% of firms cannot assign a dollar value to their data or calculate the financial impact of operational outages. The roundtable concluded that chief information security officers should express risk in measurable economic terms to improve board-level decisions.

Blue Team Alpha CEO Ed Driscoll said that while AI-based threat triage exists, many company defenses still depend on manual processes that are becoming obsolete. He described modern attacks as autonomous and customized, requiring machine-speed countermeasures with human oversight. DIACSUS partner Kirke Cushing added that compliance audits do not guarantee security, as breaches often occur in untested gaps such as misconfigured permissions and overlooked workflows.

The discussion also explored the idea of offensive cyber defense within legal boundaries. Mayer Brown partner Veronica Glick highlighted growing interest in policy debates around active defense, though participants cautioned that outdated laws like the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act complicate such actions. Driscoll suggested that firms with critical infrastructure should participate in policy advocacy rather than wait for legislative changes.

Tölt Strategies CEO Dorothy DeWitt proposed that companies use prediction markets to assess cyber risk, turning uncertainty into quantifiable probabilities to guide resource allocation. Participants agreed that avoiding AI is not a viable defense strategy and that autonomous detection and response systems are becoming necessary for effective resilience.