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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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Belgium Sep 24, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

Bridging the Unbridgeable: IT Meets M(i)OT ; Converged infrastructures demand converged security

As smart devices proliferate across operational environments — from sensors on factory lines and GPS trackers in logistics fleets to wearables in healthcare and connected systems in smart cities — the integration of Managed IoT (MiOT) is accelerating. But with it comes a surge in cybersecurity risks. No longer isolated or air-gapped, OT systems are becoming fully networked, remotely accessible, and deeply entwined with IT. This creates a vulnerable, highly complex digital mesh, one where a single compromised device can trigger physical, financial, and reputational consequences.

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UK Sep 24, 2025 Country Members Physical english

CIONET UK Business Community Program: Creating agile partnerships – making the right choice between in and out-sourcing

Join us for our community event on 24th September in London. Join us for our community event on 21st May in London. Sponsored by Business Partners Cognizant, Orange Business, Entelect, Strategy, Stefanini & Thoughtworks.

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Belgium Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

The power of Hybrid - Cloud-Native Application Modernisation as a No-Regret Move

On 25th September, during the Red Hat Summit: Connect 2025 in Brussels, CIONET is hosting an exclusive, invitation-only round table for leading CIOs, CTOs, and digital leaders. While the Summit offers a broad programme, this CIONET session is a separate, distinct event, conducted in its own dedicated room with private catering, ensuring a focused and confidential peer-to-peer discussion. This round table will delve into why certain cloud-native techniques offer undeniable benefits, irrespective of where your applications are deployed, be it on-premise, in a hyperscale cloud, or a hybrid environment. Even outside public clouds, these modern, modular architectures consistently deliver increased agility, enhanced scalability, and quicker time-to-market. The real power behind these advantages lies in automation. When done properly, automation significantly boosts team efficiency, improves system quality, and drastically cuts risks from slow systems or downtime. However, achieving truly effective automation comes with its own set of challenges, which we'll address head-on. Key Discussion Points Include: "No-Regret" Cloud-Native Pillars: We'll try to pinpoint essential techniques every organisation should adopt, such as microservices architecture, containerisation (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), API-first design, stateless application design, and immutable infrastructure. Why are these crucial for modern applications, no matter the deployment location? Strategic Vendor Lock-in: How to judiciously manage vendor lock-in. For new innovations and applications with a relatively short life expectancy, leveraging the latest unique features of a hyperscale cloud might be beneficial. For long-lived applications (expected to be live for decades), the focus might shift to limiting exposure by utilising generally available technologies. Automation Anywhere: How can organisations effectively implement automation strategies to unlock the full potential of cloud-native initiatives across diverse infrastructures? What are the biggest hurdles, and how are leaders overcoming them? This CIONET round table offers a unique and intimate setting for digital leaders to gain critical insights, exchange perspectives, and shape the strategic path towards application modernisation that truly offers no regrets.

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Belgium Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

Women of CIONET - Female Leadership Circle 2

As AI shapes our future, the time is now to address and correct its inherent biases. Join leading female voices in tech as we explore how to undo past mistakes, champion neutrality, and feed AI systems with inclusive, unbiased data. This conference is a call to action for female leaders in AI and tech to ensure the next generation of intelligent systems reflects fairness, diversity, and equity. Together, let’s set things right and redefine the future of AI.

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Poland Sep 25, 2025 All Members Physical Polish

COMMUNITY EVENT #7: HUMAN MACHINE

Agenci AI to przyszłość, która wyniesie organizacje na inny poziom dostarczania wartości biznesowej. Już teraz wiadomo, że nowa generacja inteligentnych agentów zmienia sposób, w jaki firmy działają, podejmują decyzje i się rozwijają. Podczas siódmego Community Eventu wraz z ekspertami AI sprawdzimy: możliwości, które dają agenci; jak wprowadzić governance i umiejscowić w organizacji tysiące sztucznych pracowników; jak zapewnić bezpieczeństwo, gdy każdy z agentów może wykonywać inne operacje; jaki jest wpływ wykorzystania agentów na koszty i środowisko; jak zmienia się pozycja firmy na rynku. Omówimy, jak liderzy IT i cyfrowi mogą i muszą strategicznie dostosować się do tej nowej rzeczywistości. Zarejestruj się już teraz i zapewnij sobie miejsce!

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Italy Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical italian

Innovation in Balance: governing the power of data and automation

Nel percorso verso l’AI e la trasformazione digitale, dati e automazione sono gli elementi centrali di ogni strategia tecnologica. Ma senza una governance chiara, rischiano di diventare non solo fonte di inefficienza, ma anche di rischi e incoerenza.   Come garantire che i dati siano completi, accessibili e affidabili? Come automatizzare le operation IT e i processi aziendali mantenendo controllo, compliance e sicurezza?   Durante questa roundtable esclusiva, organizzata da CIONET Italia e IBM, affronteremo:   La governance come abilitatore di dati affidabili e automazione sicura. Come prepararsi a un’adozione dell’AI realmente scalabile. Il ruolo di controllo, resilienza e gestione del rischio nell’innovazione.

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Recent Cases

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AddAI.Life: Simplifying Customer Interactions with Contextual AI Assistants

AddAI.Life is bringing AI to the forefront of customer service. Their AI assistants can be integrated into a wide range of channels, from websites to messaging apps. By providing consistent and personalized support across multiple touchpoints, AddAI.Life is helping businesses build stronger customer relationships.

 
Deploying generative AI
 

AddAI.Life (AddAI) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a Czech-based startup, and an IBM Business Partner, established in 2019 with a vision to help companies improve their customer experience and efficiency by implementing AI assistants that are available 24x7 to answer a wide range of questions promptly and accurately. “When developing virtual assistants for our customers, our goal is to ensure each assistant sounds very natural and brings the customer and its end-users an amazing experience,” explains Jindrich Chromy, CEO and co-founder of AddAI.Life.

When it comes to generative AI, trust and transparency, as well as accuracy, are critical for AddAI and its customers. Each assistant needs to be specifically tailored to each customer and its unique use-cases: whether it will be answering billing questions for a user in telecommunications or resetting a digital account password for a banking customer. “Our customers include some of the top Czech companies as well as telecommunication corporations and banks. It’s important for our assistants to be able to deliver accurate and consistent answers. Moreover, the answers need to be curated or generated automatically on verified data. We also need to comply with bank-level security, which includes granted data exclusivity for the customer. We also need to be able to opt-out the training of the AI model on our user’s conversations,” adds Chromy.

In order to continue delivering an exceptional customer experience while also shortening the time it takes to implement a new AI assistant, AddAI has begun using the IBM® watsonx.ai, IBM watsonx Assistant and IBM Watson® Discovery solutions.

 
 
Watsonx.ai proved to be very useful. In our research, we liked how it helped our customers (and our development team) to simplify tasks and extend the assistant knowledge without the need to pre-set the whole dialog in advance. It is a next level for us and our customers. 
Jindrich ChromyCEO and co-founderAddAI.Life
 
 
 Implementing watsonx.ai
 

In collaboration with the IBM Client Engineering and Technical Sales teams from the Czech Republic, AddAI built an AI assistant for a customer in the banking sector that they then piloted. The assistant utilized the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methodology, coupled with watsonx.ai, to deliver relevant and precise responses in the Czech language for frequently asked questions (FAQs) on topics ranging from account access to payments, pricing and account services. Through intensive optimization efforts, the implementation team ensured that the answers generated by large language models (LLMs) met a high standard of accuracy and language fluency. To optimize end-user experience, the team integrated watsonx.ai with watsonx Assistant, and was able to deliver instant replies on a user-friendly front end.

“We use watsonx.ai to access selected open-source large language models like Llama 2 to enhance and contextualize information from our databases and present it to the end customer through the watsonx Assistant chatbot in an accurate and conversational manner. In our case watsonx.ai generates its answers to users’ questions through RAG,” explains Klaudia Miezgova, watsonx developer at AddAI.Life.

Additionally, Add.AI included IBM Watson Discovery in this pilot for its banking customer. The team used publicly available bank documents such as contracts, terms and conditions and price lists and tuned Watson Discovery to understand domain-specific questions and expressions. “We were able to obtain very accurate answers, including snippets from the document used as a reference or basis of the answer. This happened automatically, without the need to build and set the dialog manually,” notes Chromy.

 
85%

accuracy rate for answers generated via AI

 
50%

reduction in unanswered queries

 
 
 Achieving 85% accuracy rate
  

“We always track, measure and test new ideas to see how they work in real-life situations. That way, we can improve them quickly,” explains Chromy. “In this case, we took a set of testing queries, for which we had the correct answers pre-defined in our hand-built AI assistant which was powered by watsonx Assistant. We then fed those queries to the new assistant which was powered by both watsonx Assistant and watsonx.ai. That one had no pre-built dialogues and had to come up with the answers by itself, using the provided documentation and skill it had as a large language model. It responded with 85% accuracy compared with the pre-defined answers of the former version. With much less work input. So now we know that it is on a good track.”

Through this new assistant, AddAI also helped its customer achieve a 50% reduction in unanswered customer queries. Moreover, when answering customer questions, an AI assistant powered by watsonx.ai is designed to provide a more detailed and actionable answer than was previously possible.

“We have been able to tune the model to query complex data sets and then summarize the data it collected in a much more effective way. For example, the previously mentioned banking customer uses the assistant to deliver fee information to its customers. Rather than serving up raw data that requires the user to analyze the output and infer the next step, the assistant can deliver a clearly summarized answer with helpful next steps for the user to consider. This was not possible before watsonx.ai,” explains Miezgova.

This is just the beginning. Going forward, AddAI is confident it can reduce the implementation time on any new AI assistant by up to 30% given they can now use generative AI to help prepare the assistant to be questioned by end-users. The team expects this to significantly shorten the amount of time it takes to test and optimize an assistant before it is ready to be shared with end-users. AddAI also expects it can provide next-level, more knowledgeable assistants, even without the need of developing each dialogue (response) manually, using this new approach with watsonx.ai and watsonx Assistant.

 
About AddAI
 

AddAI.Life (AddAI) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a Czech-based startup, and an IBM Business Partner, established in 2019 and headquartered in the natural surroundings of Řevnice, a town close to the capital, Prague. The firm focuses on the development of AI Virtual assistants that have natural-sounding dialogues and work with context of the conversation. They can integrate into various channels (web, mobile app with voice, customer support line, Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Assistant, and others).

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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A research proposal_AI and the Human Experience

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.

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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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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.

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

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stories, experiences, and ideas around our shared mission.

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from our exclusive events, publications and research.

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

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

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your potential. Realise your ambitions.

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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!

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