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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 Oct 20, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: AI & DATA Knowledge Transfer - Briefing 20

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

CIONET Round Table - From Disconnected Data to Unified Insight ; Building a 360° customer view to unlock commercial growth

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

Barcelona TECH Quest 2025

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

The End of the Firewall

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

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

AI: The Great Illusionist

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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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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How CIOs drive game changing results at scale?

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.

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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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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.

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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.

About CIONET

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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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