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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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Protecting 182 million wireless customers from harm

AT&T, facing massive data challenges and legacy infrastructure limitations, transformed its operations using Databricks. By unifying data and AI, they created over 100 ML models to combat fraud, optimize dispatch, and improve customer experience.

“Databricks has provided a unified platform that brings together data and AI to deliver predictive solutions that help to protect our customers and our business by stopping fraud before it happens.”

— Kate Hopkins, Vice President, AT&T
 
 

AT&T is dedicated to providing its 182 million wireless customers with secure, reliable and frictionless communications. With 10 million transactions occurring every second, staying ahead of fraudsters — from robocalls and texts to gaming and identity theft — requires harnessing the power of data and AI to stop attacks before they happen. But AT&T’s legacy on-premises architecture created infrastructure complexity and failed to deliver the innovation needed for an optimal customer experience. By modernizing their data infrastructure in the cloud with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, AT&T was able to implement a unified approach to data and AI. They now have over 100 ML models in production that better protect customers and their business, using real-time data, automatic alerts and recommendations to arm employees across AT&T’s operations. With a unified lakehouse architecture for data and AI, AT&T has already significantly reduced fraud, and has a robust roadmap to deliver more data-driven solutions that will help to democratize AI across the business.

Outgrowing a legacy on-premises data architecture

AT&T had been operating their on-prem environment for years. While they were utilizing data analytics for different use cases, it became clear that they’d outgrown their legacy infrastructure as the types and amount of data expanded. Critical interventions in fraud detection and security required the participation of dozens of teams across different systems to first acquire fraud insight data, and then feed that data to retail, call center, and online systems for alerting and notification. The process was protracted, inefficient, resource-heavy and expensive. More importantly, it was reactive instead of proactive. The rule-based technology used to detect fraud made it difficult to stay ahead of bad actors, especially with the growing number of sophisticated fraud attempts plaguing both customers and their own business.

Similar to fraud detection, AT&T also struggled to gain the real-time insights and automation necessary to optimize dispatch. On their legacy system, AT&T could not unify data points to match a technician’s troubleshooting skills to the customer issue and location. Each unsuccessful attempt to solve an issue increased operational costs while impacting customer experience.

Kate Hopkins, Vice President of AT&T, says, “We wanted to take care of these things automatically. How can we stop robocalling and robotexting? How can we match a tech with the right skills to solve a problem, while also taking into account traffic and weather to predict when they’ll arrive at the house? We couldn’t answer these questions on-prem. It was clear that we had largely tapped the technology that was available to us.”

 

AT&T Uses Databricks to Stop Fraud Before It Happens

AT&T is using data and AI to deliver predictive solutions that protect its customers from fraud. Moving from an on-premises architecture to a cloud-based lakehouse allows AT&T to take in all kinds of data, standardize it and then run ML models that drive fraud alerts in real time.

 

Proactively stopping fraud with Databricks

AT&T chose to migrate to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform because of the open nature of the software and their alignment with the Databricks roadmap. Kate explains, “Every company is moving workloads to the cloud to some extent, but we picked a bolder path. With tools like Databricks and Delta Lake we can get the benefits of the cloud faster. While the other carriers may be doing more lift and shift, we don’t think that’s a recipe for transformation. We’re going to the next level.”

To do so, AT&T first launched Databricks with their data science team. They pumped their on-premises data into Delta Lake, moved their workloads to the cloud, and created a Center of Excellence (CoE) with training and community support to expand adoption and data democratization going forward. Focusing on fraud detection as their first use case, the data science team was able to develop predictive solutions with unified data and AI, and seamless collaboration that stops fraud before it happens. Kate says, “We’re able to ingest huge amounts of structured and unstructured data coming from different systems, standardize it, and then build ML models that deliver alerts and recommendations that empower employees in our call centers, stores, and online.” Building on the positive experience of the data science team, Databricks is being introduced to the data science organizations in AT&T’s business units.

 

Reducing the impact of fraud before it happens

Since moving away from their rules-based fraud system and creating ML models for real-time, automatic fraud detection, AT&T has reduced fraud by up to 80% with over 100 fraud detection ML models in production. “Now that our fraud detection is real time, we can outwit fraudsters and stay ahead of their efforts in areas like fraudsters gaming the system, illegal unlocks, robocalls and robotexts, and identify theft,” says Hopkins.

Fraud detection is just one example of how AT&T can make an impact with scalable, democratized data access and AI on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Moving forward, AT&T will continue to increase adoption for use cases benefiting dispatch, service reliability, quality of coverage, and sales growth. Their goal is to be completely off the AT&T on-prem data lake by 2023.

Looking forward, Hopkins says, “We still get a lot of business benefits from data analytics, but it doesn’t compare to the scale of benefits we can engender when we apply AI. We’re looking to continue that trend and accelerate it. We know that there’s a lot of potential and now we can realize it.”

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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Discover the CIONET app

Staying ahead of trends and connecting with other CIOs was never easier.

In our new app, our members connect with other digital leaders from around the world to find better solutions to their challenges.

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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!

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