DR. SANNY LIAO
Beyond the Weakest Link
Defending Humans
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Fable Security
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Former Head of Data Science, Abnormal Security
Former Data Science Lead, TellApart (acquired by X, formerly Twitter) and IFTTT
Fable Security has raised $31 million from Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, named to the 2026 Cyber 150 list
From Educator to Enabler: The New Mandate for Human Risk Practitioners
Human risk managers built their careers on a clear premise: teach people to recognize threats, measure whether the training worked, and repeat. The technology moved slowly enough that the program could keep up. That's over.
Now every employee is making unsanctioned AI decisions in real time, and the business has decided adoption is happening with or without security's blessing. Human risk practitioners are being handed a new mandate: stop documenting what people are doing wrong and start designing how they do it securely. This is a new remit, and it requires a new way of thinking.
Dr. Sanny Liao examines what that shift actually requires, and how human risk practitioners can lead it without abandoning what made them effective in the first place.
Attendees will leave with:
A map of how AI has changed the human risk surface, and which parts of the old model still hold up
A behind the curtains look at what other security teams are doing to enable secure AI adoption
Specific ways to position human risk management as the function that enables safe AI adoption, inside the security org and with the broader business
Dr. Sanny Liao is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Fable Security, a human risk management platform she built alongside co-founder Nicole Jiang. Fable applies targeting, timing, and measurement principles borrowed from ad tech to human risk, aiming to understand how employees actually behave and to deliver precise, timely interventions rather than static, one size fits all training. The company has raised $31 million from investors including Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, counts clients such as Fidelity Investments, Stifel Financial, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and was named to the 2026 Cyber 150 list.
Before founding Fable, Liao led the Data Science team at Abnormal Security and previously led data science at TellApart (acquired by X, formerly Twitter) and IFTTT. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, following an academic path that began in pure mathematics and economic policy, an unconventional route into cybersecurity that shapes how she approaches human risk today.
Liao is a vocal critic of the industry's long standing "weakest link" framing of employees, arguing that security programs work better when people are treated as part of the system to support, not a problem to blame. That philosophy sits at the center of her work: using data and behavioral insight not to catch people failing, but to help them succeed securely, especially as AI adoption accelerates faster than most security teams can govern it.