A Cybersecurity Room with a View

Temporarily Losing Human Connection

There was a time not long ago when airports were empty, planes were spotlessly clean, and you could breathe disinfected air during your flight. Even the various surfaces on the aircraft weren’t sticky as they had been thoroughly wiped and steamed. And there were no crumbs on the seats!  It was the most hygienic flying experience of my life. But it came at the worst possible cost of losing human connection.

Fast forward six years.

Now it’s back to a dirty and dusty flying experience. And I’d ever so slightly credit this to the renaissance in-person events are having. I don’t mind at all because human connection is what cybersecurity marketing is all about.

Hands On Energy

Roundtables are booked out months in advance. Panel discussions at our summits are drawing standing-room-only crowds with heated debates. And our recent NullCon event in Goa demonstrated something I hadn’t seen in years, practitioners genuinely energized by hands-on simulations, solving real problems together in real time. The old is new again.

And the reason is simple. AI has made all the basic stuff instantly accessible.

When any question can be answered by a chatbot and any content format can be generated in seconds, human perspective and human connection become scarce resources. Everything else is just a prompt.

Roundtables are Unporompted

What can’t be prompted is the conversation that happens when the right people are in the same room, eating the same food, wrestling with the same problems.

Roundtable dinners are the best mechanism we have for building those connections. When you break bread with someone, the dynamic shifts. CISOs who might never respond to a cold email will share their honest assessment of a vendor, a strategy, or a career decision over a well-run dinner. That candor is worth more than any analyst report.

Here are some of things that are discussed that we will never share on our traditional channels:

Experiences with Previous Vendors
Roundtables create a rare, off-the-record space where leaders can speak candidly about real-world experiences with vendors—what worked, what didn’t, and why—without the constraints of public forums or formal evaluations. These nuanced perspectives are often too sensitive or contextual to share on digital channels but are invaluable in peer-to-peer settings.

Career Trajectories
Unlike LinkedIn narratives or polished bios, roundtable discussions open the door to honest reflections on career paths—the pivots, missteps, and behind-the-scenes decisions that shape leadership journeys. These conversations offer a level of authenticity and mentorship that simply doesn’t translate in documented environments.

Local Hiring Dynamics
In-person dialogue allows participants to explore the realities of local talent markets—supply, demand, and evolving expectations—in a way that goes beyond published reports. These insights are often highly situational and best shared in trusted, closed-door environments where context can be fully understood.

Navigating Internal Politics at an Organization
Roundtables provide a discreet setting to discuss the complexities of organizational dynamics—how decisions really get made, how influence is built, and how leaders navigate competing priorities. These are the kinds of insights that rarely surface in formal content but are critical to operational success.

Mutual Cybersecurity Acquaintances
There’s also space for thoughtful, respectful exchange about the broader professional community—shared connections, collaboration experiences, and reputational insights. In a private setting, these conversations can add valuable context that helps leaders better understand the ecosystem they operate in.

Hospitality Can’t Be Itemized

For vendors, the lesson here is something they need to incorporate in their marketing plan. The worst thing you can do right now is be perceived as cheap. Hospitality is not a line item to optimize. It’s one of the most authentic human signals you can broadcast. It tells your guests whether you value their time and their trust.

AI will get cheaper. Within a few years, almost all marketing content will cost essentially nothing to produce and will be worth exactly that. What won’t scale is the 1-to-1 and small-group experiences. The meal. The conversation. The moment where someone watched you think through a hard problem and respected what they saw.

That’s what roundtables can create. And the compounding effect is how these small group conversations leave lasting impressions that get carried into larger buying groups.

A CISO or senior cyber practitioner who had a genuine experience at your event doesn’t forget that when a board conversation turns to vendors. This is what brand building looks like in this industry. Everything else, AI can handle.

The practitioners and executives who understand this are already acting on it. They’re showing up with personal stories that specific, unindexed observations from their own careers that no model was trained on and no competitor can reproduce.

That’s the content that resonates. That’s what makes someone worth following, worth trusting, worth buying from. Digital marketing won’t die. It will just have 90% personal stories and 10% basic marketing content that can be prompted.

The playbook for the AI era isn’t more content. It’s more presence.

Do more roundtables.