Michelle Watson
Michelle is the Co-Founder and Chief Security Officer of Graymont Partners, responsible for analytical leadership, senior client engagement, and the firm’s cyber intelligence and corporate statecraft practice. She co-founded Graymont with Chandler around a specific thesis — that geopolitical risk has become a commercial reality most organizations are being asked to navigate with tools built for a different era.
Her work at Graymont centers on leading senior client engagements directly, driving the firm’s analytical methodology, and bringing an active network across government, national security academia, and allied institutions that informs intelligence context at a level boutique firms rarely carry.
Michelle brings over three decades of senior experience at the intersection of cyber intelligence, geopolitical risk, and enterprise decision-making. She began her career at British Telecom, rising to Vice President of Client Relationships for North America, South America, and Europe — leading teams of more than one hundred across ten countries, delivering managed network and outsourcing solutions to Fortune 100 clients, and negotiating strategic partnerships with AT&T, Siemens, Cisco, and SWIFT. She later co-founded Cyber Intelligent Partners, a Washington, D.C. advisory firm, where she built consulting teams in cyber threat intelligence, insider threat assessment, and geopolitical risk — delivering more than twenty bespoke assessments to government and corporate leaders across the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan in the firm’s first year. At Deloitte, she co-led the relaunch of the firm’s commercial Cyber Threat Intelligence strategy and co-created its Cyber Threat Intelligence Assessment offering.
She currently serves as Executive Director of Corporate Relations at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., a graduate school dedicated to national security, intelligence, and statecraft — where she previously created the school’s first Corporate Relations Program and co-founded and directed the Cyber Intelligence Initiative, IWP’s first professional education program. She is an adjunct instructor at the Joint Special Operations University and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest.
Michelle holds a Master of Arts in National Security and Statecraft from the Institute of World Politics, with executive certificates from Harvard’s Belfer Center in Cyber Risk Management and the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School in Executive Leadership. She is a member of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, where she has served on the Cyber Intelligence Taskforce since 2015.
Her speaking record spans Oxford University, the Harvard Kennedy School, NATO workshops, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Danube Institute Geopolitical Summit, and the Joint Special Operations University, with engagements across Europe, Asia, and North America — on cyber threat intelligence, Russian and Chinese influence operations, 5G and supply chain security, and information warfare.
At Graymont, Michelle leads the firm’s most complex engagements — bringing practitioner-level depth in cyber intelligence, insider threat program architecture, corporate statecraft, and geopolitical risk assessment to clients operating where the cost of getting it wrong is not abstract.