Brandon M. Hanes
Brandon has worked in information technology since 1999, with the last fifteen years focused specifically on security. He founded Graystone Solutions in 2013, initially providing managed IT services to regional businesses before shifting the firm's focus to advanced IT and AI security consulting in 2026.
Prior to founding Graystone, Brandon served as Chief Information Security Officer at Guaranty Bank and Trust Company for a decade, where he built and managed the organization's security program from the ground up — including a virtualized data center, disaster recovery infrastructure, vendor risk management, and regulatory compliance under GLBA and GDPR. Earlier in his career he worked with Soltra Solutions under TS clearance alongside DHS, the FBI, and DOD, contributing to the development of a national cyber threat intelligence sharing platform now in use at OCCIP.
He holds the CISSP designation alongside three banking-specific security certifications. His current focus is the development of Project Zoey — a locally hosted, multi-agent AI platform being built under the Graystone umbrella.
Dr. Amanda Walker-Hanes
Dr. Walker-Hanes holds a Doctor of Education from Baylor University's Department of Curriculum and Instruction, with a concentration in Secondary Literacy. Her dissertation — Improving Literacy with Graphic Novels — examined how non-traditional media can serve as a serious instructional tool, a line of inquiry that reflects her broader interest in how people engage with and make meaning from information in evolving formats.
Her career spans over two decades in education — classroom teaching, reading remediation, graduate instruction, curriculum alignment, school administration, and university-level teacher preparation at both Baylor University and Louisiana Tech University. She has published peer-reviewed research on media literacy in teacher education and presented at national conferences on critical thinking, curriculum design, and emerging instructional tools.
At Graystone, Dr. Walker-Hanes leads AI Ethos and Ethics — responsible for the values-based training and behavioral frameworks applied to all AI models developed under the Graystone umbrella, beginning with Project Zoey. Her work ensures that what these systems learn, how they reason, and how they respond reflects deliberate, principled design rather than assumption.
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