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Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
Germany Oct 20, 2025 Country Members Virtual german
Die Realisierung des Potenzials von KI und datengesteuerten Strategien stellt nicht länger nur einen Wettbewerbsvorteil dar, sondern ist Heute auch entscheidend für den langfristigen Erfolg eines jeden Unternehmens. Unsere Wissensaustausch-Briefings "AI & Data Knowledge Transfer" zielen darauf ab, CIDOs und Senior Digital Leaders praktische Anwendungen aufzuzeigen und umsetzbaren Erkenntnissen von Fachexperten zu vermitteln, die den Weg für die transformative digitale Reise ebnen und beschleunigen.
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Belgium Oct 21, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
In today's competitive landscape, customer expectations have never been higher. They demand a personalised, seamless experience at every touchpoint, from initial marketing contact to post-sale service. Unified data is at the heart of creating engaging customer experiences and is meant to fuel the 360 profile. However, for many organizations, a complete picture of the customer is fragmented, with critical data scattered in disconnected systems and departments. This exclusive roundtable will bring together Digital Leaders active in multiple industries to discuss a critical challenge: breaking down data silos to build a true 360° view of the customer. We will explore how to solve the complex integration challenges that prevent a unified view, and how to transform disparate data into a single source of truth. Join us to: Discover how to overcome the technical hurdles of integrating critical business systems, such as ERP and CRM platforms, to unify customer data. Explore real-world case studies on how organisations have successfully created unified customer insights to enhance personalisation and boost commercial and operational efficiency. Discuss best practices for turning fragmented data into actionable insights that can anticipate customer needs, drive revenue growth, and foster long-term loyalty. This is a unique opportunity for Digital Leaders who are ready to transform their customer engagement strategy and unlock the full potential of their data.
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Spain Oct 22, 2025 Country Members Physical spanish
Descubre cómo las organizaciones están utilizando la tecnología para impactar en el negocio a través de casos reales de uso y aprendizajes clave en áreas como ciberseguridad, automatización o data, contados por los protagonistas. Un espacio diseñado para inspirarte, conectar con expertos y potenciar la innovación en tu organización.
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Belgium Oct 22, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
Enterprises are questioning whether private networks and stacked firewalls are still worthwhile investments. A newer approach operates on the open internet with Zero Trust, eliminates perimeter complexity, and reframes cybersecurity as a business performance metric for boards and audit committees. This is a closed-door, peer discussion, not a lecture. We’ll examine the promise and its pitfalls: Are the promised savings significant, or are they too good to be true? What risks do you introduce? How does this collide with your installed base, legacy OT, entrenched processes and team competencies, and how do you overcome that without breaking operations or credibility with the board? Two senior leaders from global companies will spark the dialogue with lived experience: Kurt De Ruwe, CIO AkzoNobel Frank Bolata, CIO Syensqo
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Poland Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical Polish
Cloud UP! ’25 to miejsce spotkań managerów, którzy chcą świadomie i skutecznie rozwijać swoje organizacje, wykorzystując najnowsze technologie. Nieformalnym hasłem tegorocznej edycji jest “Chmura gotowa na AI” - będziemy rozmawiać o tym, co sztuczna inteligencja naprawdę potrafi oraz pokazywać, jak wdrażać ją w praktyce. Wspólnie z ekspertami przeanalizujemy, jakie warunki muszą zostać spełnione, aby wdrożenia AI były zarówno skuteczne, jak i bezpieczne. Zerkniemy za kulisy najnowszych rodzimych produktów AI-owych, by zobaczyć ich możliwości, a także poznamy najciekawsze wdrożenia z wykorzystaniem Agentspace. Po raz kolejny spotkamy się w formule Share.Explore.Execute. Stawiamy na wymianę wiedzy i doświadczeń zdobytych podczas realizacji projektów. To one stanowią punkt wyjścia do odkrywania, testowania i skutecznej implementacji najlepszych rozwiązań w organizacjach. Cloud UP! ’25 to cztery ścieżki tematyczne, na które złożą się prezentacje, rozmowy, sesje live-demo oraz pogłębione dyskusje w formule roundtables: AI: Beyond the Hype Data Mastery Resilience & Regulatory Advanced Practitioners Dołącz do liderów chmurowych innowacji w Polsce i spotkaj się z nami już 23 października w Event Hall w Fabryce Norblina.
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Belgium Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
How to lead responsibly when technology can deceive better than a human? AI’s ability to shape our perceptions and create new realities is becoming increasingly sophisticated. While it opens significant opportunities, it also carries risks. What happens when AI goes beyond data and algorithms to influence - or even deceive - our senses? How does this change not only our understanding of reality but also the foundations of trust, creativity, and truth in business? AI isn’t just transforming business, it is altering how we experience and interpret everything around us. From AI-generated deepfakes to personalised experiences designed to influence behaviour, the line between truth and illusion is increasingly blurred. This event combines a roundtable discussion among peers with a hands-on sensory workshop, where you will experience illusions through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Through these experiments, we will confront the ethical dilemmas that arise when AI has the power to fabricate realities and influence decisions.
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Unilever: Using AI to freeze out competition & discover “breakfast for dessert”
Unilever has used AI to sort through their structured data for years. Partnering with American, Chinese, Israeli and U.K. startups to analyze information from content people post and reactions to that content, Unilever has been able to unearth insights in gap areas in their marketing they would have otherwise missed.
Unilever, a British consumer goods company, made a sugary sweet move to freeze out their competition when they implemented the usage of twenty-six AI data centers across the globe to synthesize insights from a range of sources, including social listening, CRM, and traditional marketing research. Unilever owns over 400 brands spread across 190 countries, and thirteen of those brands have sales over a billion dollars. Such brands include Lipton, Sunsilk, Dove, Knorr, Magnum and hundreds of other food, vitamin, beauty and cleaning products. While Unilever has used AI to sort through their structured data for years, they recently took a deep dive into their qualitative data by gleaning through text, audio, social media and phone activity as a means to influence more of its marketing. Partnering with American, Chinese, Israeli and U.K. startups to analyze information from content people post and reactions to that content, Unilever has been able to unearth insights in gap areas in their marketing they would have otherwise missed.
A prime example is their development of Ben & Jerry’s cereal-flavored ice-cream (Fruit Loops and Frozen Flakes) after listening to over 50 songs in the public domain that had lyrics talking about “ice cream for breakfast.” One of the AI algorithms Unilever enlisted in a partnering startup recognized a data set that revealed an opportunity for a new product. Although Dunkin Donuts sold ice cream in the morning for years, Unilever never had the data to prove this customer pain point. As a result, ice cream companies like Ben & Jerry’s missed this niche market opportunity. With the new product on the shelves, competitors are now incorporating breakfast ice cream in their own name brand product lines, But that’s just the icing on the (ice cream) cake.
In addition to infiltrating the ice cream market, Unilever is using AI to pioneer the recruitment of executives and marketers in order to decrease the money and time spent invested in the hiring process. They currently spend over 100,000 hours hiring over 30,000 people a year and processing 1.8 million job applications. Partnering with Pymetrics, Unilever built an online platform that used the aptitude, logic and reasoning of a candidate acquired through a neuroscience gaming activity to sift through preliminary screening of applicants. Pymetrics used this information and measured it against the role for which they applied as well as the profiles of successful employees currently working at the company.
Unilever deployed video analyzing software in 2018 that introduced candidates into the second stage of the interview process where their facial expression, body language and word choice were scanned from the comfort of their own homes as they sat in front of their computers or mobile phones. The machine learning algorithm examines the candidate after listening to the candidates answer questions for 30-minutes and then determines who is a good-fit through a variety of natural language processing and body language analysis.
This automated screening system is programmed to look for cues in behavior that selects candidates who demonstrate “systemic thinking, resilience, and business acumen.” Unilever also uses this proprietary technology to deliver feedback to applicants by giving them a detailed list of how they did in the interview, what characteristics align with the company, what traits do not, and how to be more successful in the application process in the future. The irony is that artificial intelligence is actually allowing companies to be more human. Instead of large companies allowing applicants CV’s fall into the black hole, they are connecting and addressing areas of growth and improvement.
Within the first 90 days of adoption, Unilever doubled the amount of application to jobs success rate moving from 15,000 to 30,000. In addition, they hired their most diverse candidate pool by focusing on hiring non-white applicants and increasing representation 2,600 universities as opposed to 840 universities in the years prior. For the first time in their hiring history, they achieved gender parity in their hiring, as well as increasing socioeconomic representation by 20%. In terms of the efficiency of the hiring process, the average hiring time went from four months to four weeks and saved a cumulative 50,000 hours. Recruiters spent 75% less time reviewing applications, and the acceptance rate of offers to candidates went from 64% to 82%, and the completion rate of the Pymetrics game was 98%.
After the hiring process, Unilever incorporated machine-learning into their onboarding initiatives to help new employees adapt to new routines and corporate culture. They built a bot using natural language processing to understand important employee information that is retrieved for new candidates and acts as an HR specialist, IT assistant, and general logistical support that answers questions pertaining to parking, salary, reviews, and time-off allowances. A customer-service corporate bot varies with a consumer-facing bot in that it must appropriately identify the employees information by using geographical location, level of seniority and other differentiating information in order for real and authentic support to be provided.
Current data comes from internal sources like schedules, policy documents, guidelines and the warehouse of data that comes from the litany of questions employees pose everyday. This data is currently being used to develop learning material.
Other initiatives Unilver is piloting is their smart sourcing technology that uses satellite imagery, cloud computing and AI to help achieve sustainable commodity sourcing by monitoring the effect sourcing has on the environment and communities. Their goal is to help companies avoid waste by building out an algorithm that shows the “optimum probability curve of need, demand and consumption.”
Unilever is harnessing the latest advancement in AI to most past outdates recruitment practices and improving candidate and employee experiences. In addition, they are using AI to innovate and learn from their users to create products that people crave, and not just for breakfast.
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
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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