Giuseppe Ficara - The Untold Story of Amplifon's Data & AI Transformation
Netherlands Nov 10, 2025 Public Physical english
CIONET Nederland vertrekt met een groep Nederlandse CIO's en digital leaders 10 t/m 12 november 2025 voor de geheel verzorgde CIO Innovation Trip naar de Web Summit in Lissabon, Portugal. Reis jij mee of neem je collega(s) mee!
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Germany Nov 11, 2025 Country Members Physical english
On the eve of the ServiceNow World Forum, CIONET invites you to an exclusive dinner in the fabulous Restaurant Little London in the heart of Munich City. Join leading CIOs, CDOs, and ServiceNow product owners for a candid exchange on how to get the most from your ServiceNow investment.
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Switzerland Nov 12, 2025 Country Members Physical english
CIONET invites you to a private dinner with a select group of enterprise CIOs and senior infrastructure leaders in Zurich – part of a multi-country dialogue series with IT executives across Europe. This strategic dialogue is designed for digital leaders to share insights on one of the most pressing challenges facing today's leaders: How can organisations build true digital sovereignty in the face of geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory pressure, and growing technological dependencies?
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Germany Nov 13, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Bauen Sie mit uns ein starkes Netzwerk führender WOMEN CIDOs aus der IT- und Technologiebranche auf! Unser zweites Treffen findet im PwC Experience Center in Frankfurt statt.
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Belgium Nov 13, 2025 Country Members Physical english
The Role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is no longer confined to securing the network perimeter. As organisations become more digitally connected and data-driven, the CISO’s responsibilities have expanded far beyond traditional security measures. Today’s CISO must not only defend against cyber threats but also enable the business to innovate securely, manage complex regulatory environments, and instill a culture of trust across the organisation. This event will explore the evolving role of the CISO as a strategic leader who balances security with business enablement. As digital transformation accelerates, how can CISOs align their security strategies with organisational goals, ensure compliance, and lead their teams in the fight against increasingly sophisticated threats? Key Discussion Points: From Gatekeeper to Strategic Partner: How CISOs can shift from being seen as barriers to innovation to becoming key enablers of business agility and transformation through security. Balancing Risk and Innovation: Learn how top CISOs navigate the delicate balance between mitigating risk and supporting the organisation’s need to innovate and scale in a secure environment. Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC): Explore how CISOs are managing an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, ensuring compliance while still driving business objectives forward. Building a Security-First Culture: Practical strategies for CISOs to foster a culture where security is embedded into every part of the business, from boardroom discussions to frontline operations. CISO as Crisis Manager: How to prepare for and lead your organisation through major cybersecurity incidents. From ransomware attacks to data breaches, we’ll discuss how today’s CISO is as much a crisis manager as they are a strategist. Why You Should Attend: As a CISO, your role is evolving faster than ever before. This event is designed to provide you with actionable insights into how to embrace your expanded responsibilities while keeping your organisation safe and secure. Whether you’re focused on aligning security with business goals, navigating regulatory challenges, or leading in times of crisis, this event will equip you with the strategies to lead the next era of cybersecurity.
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UK Nov 13, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
Join us on November 13th for the exclusive roundtable powered by Cognizant.
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Expanding access to the economy
Block is a global technology company that champions accessible financial services, prioritizing economic empowerment. Its subsidiaries, including Square, Cash App, Spiral, TBD and TIDAL, are committed to expanding economic access. By utilizing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), Block proactively identifies and prevents fraud, ensuring secure customer transactions. Moreover, Block enhances user experiences by delivering personalized recommendations, utilizing identity resolution to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer activities across their diverse services. Internally, Block optimizes operations through automation and predictive analytics, driving efficiency in financial service delivery. To bolster their capabilities, Block leverages the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, consolidating and streamlining their data, AI and analytics workloads. This strategic move positions Block for the forthcoming automation-driven innovation shift and solidifies its position as a pioneer in AI-driven financial services, facilitating inclusive access to financial opportunities for economic growth.
In pursuit of their data strategy to enhance time to market, Block embarked on an active migration of their data processing to the cloud. A significant obstacle they faced was the efficient management of a large volume of data crucial for graph-related use cases. This encompassed handling graph databases, leveraging various machine learning tools and optimizing performance for petabytes of data. Additionally, operational inefficiencies and scalability concerns arose from the fragmented nature of data across diverse business units. Cumbersome data transfers between these systems combined with the siloed nature of data governance policies further complicated matters, posing auditing and policy enforcement challenges.
To address these challenges and accelerate graph analysis, especially in Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) mode, Block chose to migrate to Spark and selected Databricks as their lakehouse. This decision allowed them to consolidate all data and AI workloads onto a unified platform, empowering data scientists, data engineers and AI practitioners to leverage data efficiently from a centralized location.
As Joseph Kesting, Software Engineer at Block, explained, “The adoption of Databricks as a centralized platform for storing and sharing data across business units has empowered Block to establish a thriving data marketplace. This unique setup enables individual business units to exert their own controls while benefiting from the conglomerate’s resources, granting them access to diverse data sets from different units.”
Currently, Block manages 12PB of data on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and anticipates reaching 16PB by year-end. Approximately 70 different teams across business units, such as TIDAL, Cash App, Square and TBD, and 500 active power users actively utilize the platform.
One of Block’s critical requirements was the proper implementation and uniformity of data governance policies, ensuring compliance with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA for both customers and internal teams. The objective was to enable secure and compliant access to personally identifiable information (PII) data. To address these challenges, Block adopted Unity Catalog for centralized governance.
According to Kesting, “Introduction to Databricks coincided with the launch of Unity Catalog, eliminating the need for evaluating alternative data governance tools. The seamless integration with Databricks was the primary factor driving our choice of Unity Catalog.”
With Unity Catalog, Block achieved a unified view of their data estate across different business units, simplifying access permission management. It also offered the flexibility to distribute cost attribution among teams by allowing the assignment of storage locations per team for their catalogs and schemas. This approach enabled different business units to maintain their distributed data governance policies while ensuring a streamlined process.
“Unity Catalog played a pivotal role in facilitating secure and controlled access to sensitive PII data for diverse business units. It allowed data access restriction through dedicated workspaces, ensuring compliance with the original terms of service for data collection. This compliance was enforced not only for the business units that collected the data but also for other units accessing it,” says Kesting. Block plans to enhance this capability by implementing a clean room solution using Delta Sharing in Unity Catalog, enabling secure and privacy-safe collaboration across business units and the partner ecosystem.
Block also intends to leverage data lineage to comply with right-to-forget scenarios. This involves tracing the usage of PII data throughout the entire Block ecosystem, ensuring adherence to data privacy regulations.
Migrating graph use cases to Databricks proved to be a game changer for Block, delivering substantial improvements in compute performance and cost optimization. By leveraging Databricks, Block managed to reduce compute costs by an impressive 12x while unlocking previously unattainable use cases due to scaling limitations. According to Kesting, “the elimination of these constraints with Databricks has opened up new possibilities for innovation and analysis.”
The implementation of Unity Catalog within Block’s data ecosystem brought about transformative benefits. It facilitated the creation of a dynamic “marketplace” for data exchange between different business units, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing. This played a crucial role in reducing data egress costs associated with cross-cloud provider data transfer by 20%.
Unity Catalog also improves the ease of IAM policy management for Block. Previously, they had to navigate a complex two-step approval process, involving attaching IAM policies to roles and then to S3 buckets. This often led to bucket policy limitations and required permissions to be refactored. However, with Unity Catalog, they streamlined this process by configuring sub-group level access permissions in a single location. The operational efficiency of data sharing improved significantly, reducing the time required from days to seconds. Additionally, the adoption of Unity Catalog promoted the collection of data into S3 buckets, resulting in improved latency and the co-location of compute and storage.
Moreover, Unity Catalog empowered Block to attribute data ownership more easily and decentralize decision-making. Data sets could be associated with their respective owners, enabling them to determine how the data is shared. This shift from a centralized team imposing data governance to actual data owners making decisions improved compliance and audit reporting, enhancing overall data governance and accountability.
Looking ahead, there is a big focus on leveraging generative AI and LLMs in Block’s overall data and AI strategy, and Unity Catalog will play an important role in delivering on that strategy with the ability to govern ML models along with the data from single location will accelerate AI and analytics initiatives.
Giuseppe Ficara - The Untold Story of Amplifon's Data & AI Transformation
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Jesús Oliva, Head of Data & AI at Moeve - From Data Challenges to AI Leadership
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Radosław Maćkiewicz - CEO at COI - Empowering Citizens Through Digital Innovation
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
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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