Next month, get ready to explore real-world case studies, lessons learned, and practical solutions from organizations helping governments solve today’s biggest technology challenges. Sessions at the WRITA Fall Summit are led by our vendor partners and are designed not to be sales pitches, but foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Let’s dive into some of the insights and innovations you’ll bring back to your organization:
Spoiler Alert: Your AI Strategy Starts with a Phone Call
Alex Stanich, Donavan Dolph | Packet Fusion
September 2, 10:45 – 11:45 AM
Most government AI conversations start in the wrong place. They open with platforms, features, and capability lists before anyone has defined the operational problem AI is supposed to solve. This session corrects that, grounded in a real city deployment attendees can learn from directly.
We’ll work through a practical, outcome-first framework for evaluating AI adoption in local government, establishing a clear decision lens: where does AI deliver measurable value, and why does communications consistently come out on top?
This is a session for IT leaders managing real constraints: tight budgets, limited staff, compliance requirements, and pressure to improve services without disrupting operations. Every example comes from agencies facing those same constraints.
Reliable Communications for Government: From Copper to Cloud
Karen Beatty, Ellie Becker | Maverick Networks
September 2, 1:15 – 2:15 PM
This member-led case session is the field report of how Okanogan County modernized communications across 5,300 square miles without gambling on a vendor promise. The session is built as a series of short, practical lessons. including:
- The challenge
- Skipping the RFP
- Running a procurement you can defend
- Voice-enabling Microsoft Teams the right way
- Building redundancy
- The POTS problem
- Kari’s Law and Ray Baum’s Act
- Implementation & ongoing support
You’ll leave with a repeatable modernization playbook built to work just as well for a larger agency or an urban campus as for a remote rural county.
Goodbye Silos, Hello Service: Clark County’s Resident 360 Transformation Journey
Bob Leek, Duane Oertell | Portage CyberTech
September 2, 2:30 – 3:30 PM
Citizens increasingly expect government services to be delivered with the same simplicity, accessibility, and personalization they experience in the private sector. Yet many agencies continue to struggle with fragmented applications, multiple identities, disconnected records, and siloed service delivery.
Presented as an interactive government-led case study featuring Clark County CIO, Bob Leek, and Portage CyberTech, the session focuses on strategy, governance, organizational alignment, and practical lessons learned rather than product features.
You’ll leave with a framework for evaluating your own Resident 360 maturity, identifying high-value life-event opportunities, and building a roadmap toward a more connected, citizen-centered digital government experience.
Before the Clock Strikes 25: Thwarting Frontier AI and Autonomous Insider Threats in Government Infrastructure
Wendi Whitmore | Palo Alto Networks
September 3, 8:30 – 9:30 AM
AI-driven attacks are shrinking the time between compromise and data exfiltration. This session explores the architecture of the 25-minute AI attack window and how threat actors weaponize compromised internal LLMs, synthetic identities, and autonomous AI agents.
You’ll learn how to re-evaluate Zero Trust for autonomous agents, adapt identity access management models, and implement “AI by Design” practices to map and audit data pathways in public-sector applications. A real-world public sector case study will demonstrate how an AI-driven security operations model reduced security alerts by more than 80%, cut detection time to under two minutes, and contained rogue synthetic access sessions within five minutes.
Bots, Bureaucrats, and Bad Guys: How One Agency Used Identity Security to Outsmart AI Powered Attacks
Tony Gerberick | SailPoint
September 3, 9:45 – 10:45 AM
As agencies race to modernize, attackers are skipping firewalls and going straight for people—their accounts, roles, and access paths. This session walks through how one public‑sector organization put identity at the center of its security program, starting with human identities: tightening joiner/mover/leaver processes, cleaning up over‑permissioned access, and using an identity-first approach to automate reviews and prove measurable risk reduction.
You’ll walk away with practical patterns, lessons learned, and sample metrics you can reuse when making the case for identity‑first, AI‑aware security in government.
