Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
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Germany Sep 9, 2025 Country Members Physical german
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
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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Germany Sep 17, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Cybersecurity ist längst kein reines IT-Thema mehr – sie betrifft das gesamte Unternehmen. Doch während die Bedrohungslage zunimmt, geraten viele Security-Verantwortliche an ihre Belastungsgrenzen: zwischen 24/7-Verantwortung, wachsenden Anforderungen und dem ständigen Innovationsdruck.
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Germany Sep 17, 2025 Country Members Physical german
IT-Betrieb und Cybersicherheit stehen heute unter extremem Druck: steigende Komplexität, wachsende regulatorische Anforderungen (NIS2, DORA, KRITIS), chronische Ressourcenknappheit – und gleichzeitig eine Bedrohungslage, die keine Verzögerungen duldet. Trotzdem agieren viele IT- und Security-Teams noch immer in Silos. Die Folge: ineffiziente Abläufe, Tool-Wildwuchs, langsame Reaktion auf Vorfälle und unklare Verantwortlichkeiten.
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Germany Sep 18, 2025 Country Members Virtual german
Nachhaltigkeit ist für CIOs nicht nur ein „Nice-to-have“, sondern eine strategische Priorität – sie beeinflusst direkt die finanzielle Performance, die operative Effizienz und die langfristige Wettbewerbsfähigkeit.
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Belgium Sep 18, 2025 Country Members Physical french
La dette technique est comparable à la négligence des réparations d'une maison. Ignorer un toit qui fuit peut faire gagner du temps aujourd'hui, mais cela pourrait conduire à l'effondrement du plafond plus tard. Pour remédier à la dette technique, il faut trouver et réparer ces fuites dès maintenant et mettre en place un plan d'entretien de la maison afin qu'elle soit prête pour les extensions futures. Pour résoudre ces problèmes, il faut définir des priorités stratégiques, communiquer clairement avec les parties prenantes et établir une feuille de route à long terme pour la modernisation. Cet événement se déroulera entièrement en français.
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Unilever leverages GPT API to deliver business value
The CPG titan has created AI tools using neural networks to help it respond to messages from customers, generate product listings, and even minimize food waste.
The past several years have thrown numerous challenges at consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. The pandemic has led to shifting consumer channel preferences, a supply chain crunch, and cost pressure, to name just a few. CPG titan Unilever has been answering the challenge with analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
The 93-year-old, London-based CPG company is the world’s largest soap producer. Its products include food and condiments, toothpaste, beauty products and much more, including brands like Dove, Hellmann’s, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Alessandro Ventura, CIO and vice president of analytics and business services for North America at Unilever, has been at the forefront of helping the company apply AI to its businesses for years. While originally in the role of IT director, he has since added analytics and people services to his portfolio.
“That’s everything from facility management, fleet management, employee and facilities
Unilever believes AI is not a technology of tomorrow. It’s already being widely used, and Ventura feels all industries will need to adapt to it.
In recent months, Unilever has developed a number of new technology applications to help its lines of business in the markets of tomorrow. One of the most important is “Alex,” short for Alexander the Great. Alex, powered by GPT API, filters emails in Unilever’s Consumer Engagement Center, sorting spam from real consumer messages. For the legitimate messages, it then recommends responses to Unilever’s human agents.
“Although Alex is good at what it does, it may lack a bit of a personal touch that instead our consumer engagement center agents have in big quantities,” Ventura says. “So, we let them decide whether they want to respond to our consumer as Alex suggested, or they want to add some personal recommendation; if the answer suggested by Alex is wrong or doesn’t have an answer, they can flag it so Alex can learn it the following time.”
Alex was created using a system of neural networks, with GPT API for content generation. Ventura says the tool can understand what a consumer is asking and even capture the tone. It can then store the answer and sentiment in Salesforce. Importantly, he says, the tool does the heavy lifting on those tasks, giving the human agents more time to dedicate to what they do best. To date, Ventura says Alex has helped Unilever reduce the amount of time agents spend drafting an answer by more than 90%.
Another Unilever tool, called Homer, leverages GPT API to generate content. It’s a neural network that takes a few details about a product and generates an Amazon product listing, with a short description and long description that matches the brand tone.
“We want to ensure we captured the voice of the brand so, for example, that we differentiate between a TRESemmé and a Dove shampoo, and the system got it absolutely nailed,” Ventura says.
Another AI-based tool that Unilever launched on the week of US Thanksgiving supports the Hellmann’s mayonnaise brand. Its purpose is to reduce food waste.
“It links up with the recipe management system that we have at Hellmann’s, so somebody can go in and select two or three ingredients that they have in the fridge and get in exchange recipes for what they can do with those ingredients,” Ventura says.
In the first week, the tool got 80,000 users who reported loving it.
For Ventura, that’s the magic of analytics and AI in the CPG space: It enables personalization at scale.
“In CPG, we rely more and more on analytics and AI for different things,” he says. “Consumers are more and more specific about what they want. It’s a bit of a cliché, but they really do want personalized products and experiences. Analytics helps CPG to understand the context they’re navigating through and what the consumer wants, and then, with AI, we can scale that one-to-one relationship across all the multitude of consumers that we have.”
Beyond the consumer relationship, analytics and AI are also key to making CPG companies more sustainable. Ventura points to examples like ingredient traceability and usin
g machine learning (ML) to automate forecasting, which in turn helps the company minimize waste. Unilever is also applying analytics and AI to logistics, including tracking inventory and optimizing routes.
“The old interpretation of elasticity, we threw it out the window,” Ventura says of operations in the wake of the inflation crisis. “We had to come up with new calculations because the traditional ones were giving us very different scenarios from what we were seeing happening at the shelves. Going forward, we will continue to see that pressure from all the different challenges coming from the geopolitical situation around the world.”
To support its innovation around analytics and AI, Unilever has adopted a hybrid model. It has a global center of excellence, but also keeps some data scientists embedded with business units.
“It’s basically a two-gear system,” Ventura says. “The local team can be activated very quickly, ingest the data very quickly, and then create a statistical model and analytics model together with the business, sitting next to each other. Then, if that model can be leveraged across and scaled, we pass it on to the global team so they can move data sets in the global data lake that we have and can start creating and maintaining that model at a global level.”
Ventura believes co-creation and co-ownership of analytics and AI capabilities with the business function is essential to success.
“Whether it is machine learning for automating the forecast or Alex with the Consumer Engagement Center, if we show up with a black box and say, ‘Hey, follow whatever the machine tells you,’ it will take a long time and probably will never get to 100% trust in the machine,” Ventura says. “With co-creation and co-ownership, I feel like we get to start with the right foot, with the human and the machine working alongside each other in partnership, almost as colleagues. Also, you get a much less biased system in the end because you’re able to introduce a much more diverse angle in your algorithms, both from a business perspective and a technology perspective.”
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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor
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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