About Chris McConnell

Chris McConnell, MBA, is a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and cybersecurity practitioner in Richmond, Virginia. He is the founder of Eagle Ridge Advisory, which takes defense contractors through the first mile of CMMC and NIST SP 800-171 compliance, and an Applied AI Strategist at Humaine Studio, a thought lab on human and AI collaboration.

Before founding Eagle Ridge he was Director of Digital and Business Transformation at Deep Water Point, where he led more than 300 consultants through Zero Trust architecture work for CMMC compliance. He holds an MBA from NYU Stern and a BA from the University of Idaho.

His working thesis is the "missing middle": systems that help people think better without taking the decision away from them. In practice that means he builds the AI tooling he uses, including compliance engines for clients and revenue systems for his own pipeline, and then open-sources the methodology. One internal workflow cut 160 hours of monthly manual work to 12.

Focus areas: CMMC, Zero Trust, AI agents, and go-to-market engineering. Projects and code are listed on the home page and at github.com/miqcie.