> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # CISO Ann Delenela: Don't Fear the Change. Lead It. - URL: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/ciso-ann-delenela-dont-fear-the-change-lead-it/ - Published: 2026-09-16T19:49:16.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-17T23:12:25.000Z - Description: Entergy CISO Ann Delenela used her CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026 keynote to argue that AI and accelerating change demand something technology cannot provide: deliberate, accountable human leadership. - Author: George V. Hulme - Tags: Leadership, CYBR.SEC.CON, Article Ann Delenela has spent three decades in security leadership, much of it in environments where failure carries consequences far beyond an IT department. But when the Entergy vice president and chief information security officer took the stage at CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026, her message wasn't primarily about cybersecurity technology, but about people, change and what leadership looks like when certainty disappears. Delenela built her keynote around four stories from her own life, beginning with her family's escape from South Vietnam in 1975 and the years of rebuilding that followed. Rather than offering a conventional list of leadership principles, she used those experiences to explain how her own approach to leadership developed — and why she believes those lessons matter even more as artificial intelligence accelerates change. **Full Coverage of CYBR.SEC.CON.:** [CYBR.SEC.CON 2026: News, Speakers, Agenda & CoverageFollow CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026 in Houston with the latest news, speakers, keynotes, agenda, cybersecurity tracks, AI.SEC.CON. highlights, interviews and event coverage.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ab/67/ab676516-71e3-473d-8f73-9e0692f5aaee/content/images/icon/CYBR.SEC.Media-Logo-copy-79c7366c-e441-4944-ad9c-06f8df91bac9.jpg)CYBR.SEC.MediaBill Brenner![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ab/67/ab676516-71e3-473d-8f73-9e0692f5aaee/content/images/thumbnail/42601a79-4e56-4e1b-8342-c02f537cefcd-a1184345-998c-4018-9b2c-6f391df71ec2.png)](https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/cybr-sec-con-2026-news-speakers-agenda-and-coverage/) ## Leadership when there is no playbook Delenela's family fled South Vietnam as the country fell in April 1975, eventually rebuilding their lives in the United States. For Delenela, the experience became an early lesson about uncertainty, adaptation and moving forward without knowing exactly what comes next. That theme followed her through a career in which she was frequently underestimated and through personal experiences that forced her to confront fear and circumstances she could not control. "You don't control what people assume about you; you decide how you respond," she told the CYBR.SEC.CON. audience. Her response has been to focus less on proving herself to others and more on how she chooses to lead. "Grace is strength with nothing left to prove," she said. The same applies to fear. Delenela described courage not as the absence of fear but as the decision to move forward despite it. Fear, in her formulation, gets a voice, but doesn't get the final vote. ## Leadership isn't control Another theme running through Delenela's keynote was the distinction between leadership and control. Security leaders spend their careers trying to reduce uncertainty. They assess risk, build controls, create incident response plans and prepare organizations for what might go wrong. But some events offer no clean playbook. Delenela drew from deeply personal experiences to describe what happens when leaders find themselves in circumstances they cannot control. In those moments, leadership becomes less about producing an answer and more about determining how to show up for the people depending on you. That philosophy has also shaped how Delenela develops her teams. A leader's job, she argued, isn't simply to make decisions. It is to build other people capable of making them. That distinction becomes especially important when circumstances force the person at the top to step away. An organization that depends entirely on one leader isn't resilient. Leadership has to exist throughout the team. And sometimes the things that matter most aren't reflected on a dashboard at all. Performance, standards and accountability remain important. But Delenela said some of life's most difficult moments reinforced another lesson: People remember who showed up. ## Then came AI Artificial intelligence arrived later in Delenela's keynote, but not as a separate subject. Instead, she framed AI as the newest test of the same leadership principles. We've been through profound technological transitions before. What makes the current one different is the speed. Security leaders increasingly face systems capable of performing work, making recommendations and taking actions that once belonged exclusively to people. The technology is moving faster than many of the governance structures surrounding it. "Technology can do the work," Delenela said. "It cannot answer for the work." Organizations can delegate more activity to machines, she said. They can automate decisions and accelerate processes. But when those systems make mistakes or produce consequences nobody anticipated, accountability ultimately remains human. For security leaders, the challenge therefore isn't simply determining what AI can do. It's deciding what AI should do, where human judgment must remain involved and who answers for the outcome. "AI does not make leadership less important," Delenela said. "It makes deliberate human leadership more important." ## Don't fear the change Delenela closed by connecting the accelerating technological change facing security leaders today with the larger theme that ran throughout her keynote. We don't get to choose every change that comes our way. We do get to decide what we do with it. That's as true for AI as it is for the other moments of uncertainty that shaped her life and career. The technology will continue advancing. Security leaders won't always have certainty, complete information or a finished playbook before they're required to act. Delenela's message was that they don't need to. They need the willingness to move forward, the judgment to understand what should remain human and the accountability to stand behind the decisions made along the way. Her closing challenge to the CYBR.SEC.CON. audience: "Don't fear the change. Create it. That is how we keep the lights on." [ ![HOU.SEC.CON CTA](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/assets.cybersecmedia.com/HSC+CTA.jpg) ](https://houstonseccon.com/?ref=cybrsecmedia.com)