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Giuseppe Ficara - The Untold Story of Amplifon's Data & AI Transformation
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France Nov 4, 2025 Country Members Physical french
Join us on the evening of 4th November for dinner and discussion in the company of experts from BT and Cisco. Hosted at an exclusive venue, this is the perfect opportunity to network, exchange ideas with your peers and leave with actionable insights.
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Spain Nov 5, 2025 Country Members Physical spanish
Este año, además de analizar las dinámicas habituales de la colaboración entre tecnología y negocio para trascender los desafíos tradicionales de comunicación y alineación, damos un paso más allá para abordar otros temas de interés: cómo evolucionar de cultura de proyectos a producto digital, mejores prácticas en Gobernanza IT eficaz., gestión estratégica del cambio o modelos de innovación en el negocio.
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Italy Nov 6, 2025 Country Members Physical italian
Nel mondo digitale odierno, l'IA e le tecnologie dei dati sono forze trainanti che stanno rimodellando i settori e favorendo livelli senza precedenti di agilità e innovazione. Questo evento presenta avanzamenti all'avanguardia come l'IA generativa e i modelli di base, consentendo alle organizzazioni di offrire esperienze personalizzate e soluzioni trasformative su larga scala. Scopri come l'adozione di strategie agili, potenziate dall'IA, stia supportando i leader aziendali nell'adattarsi ai continui cambiamenti del mercato.
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Belgium Nov 6, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
The modern cyber threat landscape has evolved from simple data breaches to sophisticated, systemic attacks designed to cripple an entire organisation. Ransomware, in particular, has made traditional backup and recovery strategies insufficient, as attackers often compromise backups before launching their main assault. In this new reality, the question is no longer "if" an attack will happen, but "when” and how quickly you can recover. Furthermore, regulations like DORA and NIS2 are making robust recovery a legal imperative, compelling businesses to adopt solutions that can guarantee data integrity and business continuity even after a catastrophic cyber event, making a Cybervault a critical component of regulatory compliance.
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Netherlands Nov 10, 2025 Public Physical english
CIONET Nederland vertrekt met een groep Nederlandse CIO's en digital leaders 10 t/m 12 november 2025 voor de geheel verzorgde CIO Innovation Trip naar de Web Summit in Lissabon, Portugal. Reis jij mee of neem je collega(s) mee!
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Germany Nov 11, 2025 Country Members Physical english
On the eve of the ServiceNow World Forum, CIONET invites you to an exclusive dinner in the fabulous Restaurant Little London in the heart of Munich City. Join leading CIOs, CDOs, and ServiceNow product owners for a candid exchange on how to get the most from your ServiceNow investment.
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Estée Lauder applies AI, AR for cosmetics accessibility
The cosmetics giant has released its Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant, which leverages artificial intelligence and augmented reality to help visually impaired people use cosmetics.
How can we help visually impaired individuals use our products and feel more self-reliant and confident? That’s the question The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) set out to answer in 2022 with the help of AI and augmented reality (AR).
The result is the Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant (VMA), now fully launched in the UK and US, and soon to debut worldwide. The project also earned ELC a 2023 CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.
“We set out to address a significant business problem in the beauty industry, and that’s the lack of accessible solutions,” says Michael Smith, ELC SVP and CIO. “There are 2.2 billion people globally that have some type of visual impairment. There’s over two million in the UK alone, which is our pilot market. But it’s more than just a business opportunity. It’s also something that aligns with our mission to be the most inclusive and diverse beauty company in the world, both for our employees and all our consumers.”
Christopher Aidan, ELC’s VP of innovation and emerging technologies, adds that visually impaired people often must rely on others for help, so the vision for VMA was to use ELC’s existing Augmented Reality Immersive Application (ARIA) platform, which leverages AR, AI, and machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyze makeup on a user’s face. VMA then uses voice guidance to help the user create their ideal look.
VMA is a mobile app that leverages the preferences the user has already configured on their device for voice controls, but it also gives the option to customize the voice and its speed using the accessibility settings.
While Aidan’s team was able to build the app relatively quickly, the research stages to get to that point proved challenging. With inclusivity as the project’s guiding principle, the team recognized the need for the app to accommodate all shapes, sizes, shades, and unique features of any potential user’s face. Ensuring the AI could adapt and react to the diversity of colors, shades, facial features, hair, and other inclusions made the AI training process more complex than initially anticipated, requiring a wide diversity of faces for the training corpus.
The original design involved taking a selfie, which the algorithm analyzed to assess the uniformity of application and then provided guidance to the user. It didn’t take long, though, for the team to instead utilize real-time video the app could use to scan the user’s face. For instance, if the video shows the user has applied foundation or lipstick unevenly, the app provides verbal descriptions of the specific areas that need a touchup and guidance to correct the issue. The user can then make adjustments, rescan, and the app will provide a prompt when everything is correctly applied.
First priority, however, was for Aidan and his team to directly engage with the visually impaired community. “We really wanted to gain an understanding of what their unique needs were, their pain points and preferences, and what they desired from our products,” he says. “We pulled together focus groups and asked questions, but mostly listened to them about their personal experiences with makeup and technology.”
Importantly, he says, some focus group members were completely blind, some experienced varying degrees of low vision, and some had excellent peripheral vision. This enabled his team to gain insight from a variety of individual experiences and to question their own assumptions.
“We assumed that a natural, more humanistic sounding voice would be the preference for the implementation, but the user research confirmed that familiarity was actually most important to our users,” Aidan says. “Whatever they had set up on their device is what they wanted to experience.”
The team also partnered with internal advocacy groups at ELC, external advocacy groups, and experts in accessibility and inclusivity, and combined their insights with feedback from the focus groups to gather requirements for VMA. The team then leveraged the user research for everything from naming the application to getting the tone of voice just right.
“Throughout the design, build, and test phases, their feedback was informing our decisions, even the small features like being able to adjust the speed of the virtual assistant’s speech,” Aidan says.
The team has continued to monitor feedback on the app since its initial launch in the UK in January, and Aidan notes that even with extensive testing prior to launch, users have since identified new issues.
“We started getting questions no one had asked in all the early interviews,” he says. “What about when I remove product? Can you tell me if I did a good job removing it?”
Smith says ELC is measuring the success of VMA by user feedback, which has been as positive as it’s been constructive.
“One user said, ‘This is one of those apps where I’m going to wonder how I ever lived without it,’” Smith says. “The app allows them to feel empowered and to try out new products and avoid feeling like they have to rely on other people when they might feel hesitant to even ask. There’s no judgment from the app; it’s just honesty.”
Smith also says VMA doesn’t just benefit those who are visually impaired. For instance, young people who don’t have an adult in their lives to support them, or those who don’t feel comfortable asking an adult could use this app to learn how to apply makeup.
“I would challenge other CIOs to put a priority on creating more accessible and inclusive products,” he says. “When you design for all abilities and people in an inclusive way, you benefit everyone.”
Giuseppe Ficara - The Untold Story of Amplifon's Data & AI Transformation
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Jesús Oliva, Head of Data & AI at Moeve - From Data Challenges to AI Leadership
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Radosław Maćkiewicz - CEO at COI - Empowering Citizens Through Digital Innovation
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
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Isabelle Droll - CIO for Airline, Corporate, Hotels & Resorts and Sustainability at TUI - Data, Diversity, and Destinations
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Sharon Prior - CIO in transition - How Great Tech Leadership Begins with Business Thinking
The role of the CIO has evolved from managing systems to shaping outcomes: growth, resilience, and competitive edge are now won or lost in the technology arena. Today ’ s CIOs must balance stability with innovation, control costs while attracting scarce talent, and modernise legacy infrastructure while adopting emerging technologies.
As AI transitions from a specialised tool to an all-pervasive force, understanding its profound implications for our human lives is no longer merely academic but an urgent imperative for social well-being and strategic preparedness.
Geopolitical tensions have dominated the headlines for over two years now. In this context, the cyber threat landscape is also evolving rapidly. The protection and security of critical infrastructure – both physical and digital – is becoming increasingly important.
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