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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 Sep 25, 2025 Country Members Physical english

Munich: The Human Edge

Join us for an evening of thought-provoking discussions, real-world use cases, and insights from digital leaders, tech-pioneers and academics as we explore the dynamics of the human-machine relationship.

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Netherlands Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical dutch

Business Continuity & IT Resilience in 2025: Safeguarding Against Downtime and Disruptions

Alleen op uitnodiging. How can organizations proactively ensure business continuity and IT resilience in 2025 amidst increasing disruptions?

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Germany Sep 29, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: AI & DATA Knowledge Transfer - Briefing 19

Unsere Wissensaustausch-Briefings "AI & Data Knowledge Transfer" zielen darauf ab, CIDOs und Senior Digital Leaders mit praktischen Anwendungen und umsetzbaren Erkenntnissen von Fachexperten zu vermitteln, die den Weg für transformative digitale Reisen ebnen.

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Germany Sep 30, 2025 Country Members Physical german

München: Unstrukturierte Daten – Das verborgene Kapital in deinem Unternehmen

Von der Theorie in die Praxis: Erst Business, dann Bier.Unstrukturierte Daten sind das verborgene Kapital vieler Unternehmen – und zugleich eine der größten Herausforderungen moderner IT. Gemeinsam mit CIOs, CDOs und CTOs der CIONET-Community sprechen wir zuerst bei WeWork München über Strategien, Technologien und echte Use Cases, um dieses Potenzial zu heben. Danach geht's weiter auf die Wiesn – für den offenen Austausch in bayerischer Atmosphäre.  

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UK Sep 30, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

How CIOs drive game-changing results at scale?

This exclusive Jefferson dinner, hosted by Mendix and CIONET, brings together a hand-picked group of senior executives and digital leaders from across the UK financial sector.

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Netherlands Sep 30, 2025 Invitation Only Physical dutch

Vision Dinner From the Network to the Data

Alleen op uitnodiging. Mastering Digital Sovereignty Control, trust and resilience in an era of geopolitical and regulatory shifts. From the Network to the Data.

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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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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 (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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