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CIONET - What's next

Connecting ambitious digital leaders and businesses around the globe.

Catch up on the upcoming CIONET Events

             
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Germany Aug 27, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: Wine Tasting - Unified Operations & Security

Die neuen geo-politischen Veränderungen und unvorhergesehene wirtschaftliche Anforderungen stellen Digital Leader vor neue Herausforderungen. Immer öfter wird in den Vorstandsetagen die Frage gestellt, wie der (IT) Betrieb sicher und ungestört weiter funktionieren kann, wenn regionale Rechenzentren und Infrastrukturen plötzlich nicht mehr verfügbar oder nur teilweise noch einsatzbereit sind. Der CIO muss für diese neue Welt resiliente Strategien parat haben, die für Business Continuity in bisher nicht vorstellbaren politischen und wirtschaftlichen Szenarien ermöglichen.

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Belgium Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

With the theme “The Power of Connection,” we’re embracing the essence of meaningful connections within IT and beyond. To honour our tradition, expect an unforgettable evening featuring keynote presentations, open bars, a summer BBQ, and a special experience designed to bring our vibrant community together.

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Belgium Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Poland Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical Polish

SUMMER MIXER

SUMMER MIXER

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Germany Sep 9, 2025 Country Members Physical german

Frankfurt: AI Driven Logistics

Vom ersten Use Case zur strategischen Neuausrichtung CIONET lädt bereits zum vierten Mal zu einem exklusiven Roundtable für CIOs und Digitalverantwortliche aus Logistik und Handel ein. Im Mittelpunkt des Abends steht die Frage, wie Unternehmen ihre KI-Initiativen erfolgreich skalieren und aus ersten Use Cases echten strategischen Mehrwert schaffen. Microsoft 365 für Frontline Worker: Moderne Tools, die Mitarbeitende im Tagesgeschäft entlasten ServiceNow für Prozessintegration: Automatisierte End-to-End-Workflows – vom Schadensfall bis zur Retourenabwicklung KI-gestützte Disposition und Planung: Mit smarten Algorithmen zur optimierten Supply Chain Digitale Lieferketten und letzte Meile: Transparenz, Effizienz und Kundenzentrierung durchgängig gedacht

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Belgium Sep 13, 2025 All Members Physical english

CIONET Cycling Event

Join us for a wonderful ride. The ride is accessible to all levels of riders and doesn't require extensive technical skills. More information will follow soon. Looking forward to ride together!

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Recent Cases

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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.

 

Getting the AI right

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.

 

A work in progress

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.”

Partners

Checkout our CIONET COOKBOOK

cookbook

Embark on a culinary journey through the ever-evolving world of digital leadership with our third edition of the CIONET Cookbook: Recipes for Digital Success. Unveiling the intricate trilemma faced by today’s Master Chefs, our trailblazing European CIOs address a challenge at the nexus of customer interests, digital transformation strategies, and IT modernisation. Their secret? Synchronising the gearing between customer, business, and technology to create a frictionless movement through the digital landscape.

The CIONET Cookbook uses the analogy of a five-star restaurant to explain the importance of optimally integrated technology, with the CIO as Master Chef. In order to provide the best service to its customers, a top restaurant must have the right atmosphere, an inviting menu, a well-equipped kitchen, talented and committed front-of-house and kitchen staff and smooth-running processes that ensure an enjoyable experience for diners.

CIONET TV

 
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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

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José Antonio López, Group CIO at TOUS - Jewels, Data & AI: Inside the Digital Transformation of TOUS

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Tom Tanghe - General Manager ITC EMEA at Daikin Europe - Reinventing the CIO Role

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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor

CIONET Reports

 
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Cybersecurity in critical infrastructure

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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HDS - From Hype to Reality Navigating the Challenges of GenAI

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Integration In An Era Of AI: Challenges And Opportunities

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Anna Kopp (1)

Anna Kopp

Head of IT Germany and Regional Office Lead Munich, Microsoft

“The CIONET App allows us to learn from eachother and and find the courage to be authentic by hearing stories from others! Thanks to Tobias and the whole team for bringing us together:-) ”
Mauricio Amaro

Mauricio Amaro

IT Director, IT Thinker

“The main things that I would like to get from our community of Digital Leaders are: networking, share experiences, share best practices and successful cases, and comments and recommendations about providers.”
Vijay Anand

Vijay Anand

Vice president IT & Compliance, VisionaryRCM (A Carlyle Grp Company)

“The CIONET app provides a really cool platform to network and share insights.”

About CIONET

CIONET’s mission is to help IT executives become more at ease and above all more successful in their jobs. So they can do more than just keep up with change but ultimately define it. CIONET opens up a whole new universe of opportunities in IT management.

With the largest membership of corporate digital leaders across Europe, Latin America, US and Australia, CIONET has the expertise and pioneering vision to solve or address any IT management challenge.

Why join CIONET?

From our local and global events, from our publications and research to our executive education programmes, everything we do is aimed at making sure digital leaders maximise their potential.

Connect

with digital leaders who share your interests, who face the same challenges, who care about the same topics.

Share

stories, experiences, and ideas around our shared mission.

Learn

from our exclusive events, publications and research.

Find

inspiration, thought-provoking conversations, expert perspectives and exclusive first-hand content each and every day

Grow

and make better, more well-informed decisions on how to lead your digital business.

Maximise

your potential. Realise your ambitions.

About CIONET

Join CIONET

We'd love to welcome you as the newest member of our CIONET community where Digital Leaders unite. 

You can either send us a registered handwritten letter explaining why you'd like to become a member or you can simply talk to us right here!

Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!