Elliott Mattice
Founder, Exprima Digital Consulting - Federal Compliance Expert
San Francisco, California, United States
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Elliott Mattice is the founder of Exprima Digital Consulting, where he advises organizations on scalable cybersecurity, GRC strategies, and geopolitical threat integration. With over 20 years of cross-sector experience in IT operations and cybersecurity, he has led enterprise programs across both civilian and defense contracting environments. Elliott brings a strategic, systems-level approach to helping organizations anticipate risk, align with regulatory expectations, and build resilient, threat-informed security practices.
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Burnout Is a Systems Problem. Breathing Is a Tactical Control.
Cybersecurity has detailed procedures for detecting incidents, containing damage, restoring systems, and returning operations to a known state. We have almost no equivalent process for the people operating those systems. The alert closes, the bridge ends, and the ticket is resolved, but the analyst may still be carrying the stress response into the next decision, conversation, or shift.
Burnout is not an individual failure. Chronic understaffing, weak leadership, excessive workloads, poor incident processes, and unreasonable on-call expectations are organizational problems. Breathing exercises will not fix them. What they can do is help practitioners recognize mental fatigue earlier, interrupt escalating stress, and regain enough control to think, communicate, and respond more deliberately.
This session turns that idea into practice. It is not a lecture on wellbeing but a working session built around three techniques matched to escalating levels of stress: a brief reset for low-grade tension that goes unnoticed, a short grounding exercise to return attention to the body, and a longer stabilization sequence for the moments that spike above an already-high baseline. Attendees do not just hear about the techniques, they practice each one in the room and feel the effect before they leave. Every technique is optional, runs in under two minutes, and is quiet enough to use at a desk, on a bridge, or between meetings. The goal is not to solve burnout in a few minutes but to hand practitioners a usable set of controls: notice fatigue earlier, interrupt a stress response before it drives a poor decision, and keep the practice going afterward.
Attendees will be able to:
1) Recognize early signs of mental fatigue and burnout, and intervene before they escalate.
2) Use three short techniques for early tension, active stress reduction, and high-intensity stabilization.
3) Continue the practice with a curated list of free and low-cost tools, resources, and communities.
When the News Becomes the Threat: A Crash Course in Geopolitical Awareness for Cyber Pros
What do fuel riots in Nigeria, a defense bill in Japan, and a semiconductor standoff in Europe have to do with your cyber alerts? Everything. Global events aren’t background noise, they are early warning signals. If you’re not tracking what’s happening in parliaments, ports, and press briefings, you’re already behind.
Geopolitical shifts often shape attacker behavior: trade policy can disrupt cloud access; civil unrest can expose vendor risk; military escalations can shift targeting. Understanding these signals allows you to strengthen threat models, anticipate risk before it hits your systems, and make smarter decisions during triage or response.
Attendees will learn how specific geopolitical developments can serve as early indicators of risk; practical methods for incorporating global context into threat modeling, incident triage, and third-party risk assessments; and where to locate open-source feeds and resources to help them build and maintain geopolitical awareness.
Attendees will:
1. Learn how specific geopolitical developments can serve as early indicators of risk.
2. Gain practical methods for incorporating global context into threat modeling, incident triage, and third-party risk assessments
3. Locate open-source feeds and resources to help them build and maintain geopolitical awareness.
Leading Without Needing to Inspire: Staying Human in AI-Driven Workplaces
Modern leadership was designed for people who feel. We motivate, inspire, and create psychological safety because teams need it. AI agents do not. They simulate rapport, offer apologies, and mirror empathy, yet nothing in the system actually feels. As these agents take over, leaders spend more time in human–AI exchanges and less time in human–human conversation. The result is a predictable collapse of the old playbook.
Research shows why this matters. Sustained chatbot use and heavy AI interaction are associated with loneliness, emotional and social avoidance, and empathic drift. When connection is rehearsed with machines, real conflict finds leaders dulled: presence fades, listening weakens, judgment blurs. Confidence erodes, culture splinters, execution slows.
This session is a proposal to rebuild. I will introduce an evolution of Authentic Leadership tailored for dual-mode work. The pillars remain familiar. Self-awareness becomes noticing how AI interactions shape tone and judgment. Relational transparency becomes labeling AI influence in decisions. Balanced processing becomes separating model output from human deliberation before the call is made. Moral perspective becomes a set of non-delegable decisions that stay human by design. It is a set of behaviors leaders can adopt now to protect relational intelligence while AI accelerates the work.
With more than twenty years in executive leadership across cybersecurity and IT operations and a graduate degree in Mindful Leadership I will ground this approach in current literature on agency, cognition, AI-driven leadership capability, and my own practice. The session translates that mix of research and experience into concrete choices leaders can make today.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of why modern leadership frameworks built to motivate and protect people who feel fail in AI-heavy environments; why sustained AI use and anthropomorphism is linked to loneliness, emotional and social avoidance, and empathy drift, resulting in leaders lacking presence and judgement in human conflict; and how to adopt an evolved Authentic Leadership model that bridges human–human and human–AI work by establishing a non-delegable decision charter, dissent by design, AI influence disclosure, and human-only conversation topics. These are leadership norms and decision policies that can be implemented now, without new tools, to keep leadership human while the machines run faster.
Trust Is a Security Control: Applying Human Trust Mechanics to AI
AI security still treats intelligence like infrastructure. We secure ports, protocols, identities, and access controls, then hope the agent behaves. But agentic AI is fundamentally language-mediated. Agents interpret goals, explain decisions, negotiate constraints, invoke tools, and delegate work through language. That gives defenders a new control surface: trust itself.
Humans already build trust dynamically. We observe whether another person is consistent, honest, competent, transparent, and aligned with our expectations. Trust grows when behavior matches those expectations and contracts when it does not. This session applies those same relational mechanics to AI, converting human trust dimensions into measurable signals that can be evaluated continuously as an agent acts.
The result is a model that goes beyond deterministic security. Instead of asking only whether an agent has permission to perform an action, we can ask whether its language and behavior continue to justify that permission. Trust becomes something that can be earned, monitored, challenged, reduced, and restored in real time.
Because the framework evaluates language and behavior rather than a model’s specific skills or architecture, it remains portable across vendors, model upgrades, and new generations of agents. Once trust can be measured, it can support stronger security decisions, more defensible governance, clearer accountability, and eventually insurable AI risk.
This session empowers the audience to learn:
1) How to define what trustworthy AI behavior really means
2) Three distinct trust exercises that quantitatively measure trust within AI structures
3) Convert behavior into a security and governance decision
Simply Cyber Con 2025 Sessionize Event
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