Chicago has a second downtown beneath the one most visitors see. The Downtown Pedestrian Walkway System, or just "The Pedway," links train stations, office towers, government buildings, hotels, stores, and civic spaces through a network of underground passages and concourses. It is practical, a little confusing, and easy to overlook until the weather turns or the streets above get crowded.
Modern organizations also run on pathways most people rarely see. Service accounts, API keys, SaaS integrations, vendor access, CI/CD pipelines, AI tools, and automated workflows move work through the business beneath the visible org chart. That hidden layer makes Chicago feel like the right city for the GCSI Annual Conference 2026.
This yearly event for the Global Cyber Security Initiative gathered hundreds of CISOs, cybersecurity experts, legal practitioners, board members, and other leaders at Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law and online around the globe. Across the event, we heard sessions on AI adoption, supply chain risk, board governance, and offensive automation. It was clear that cyber readiness depends on understanding the hidden routes through which decisions, data, credentials, and risk actually move.
