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Belgium 10-09-2026 Squad Only Physical english

Building the Infrastructure AI Needs: From computer and data access to scalability, cost control, and operational readiness.

AI is moving from pilots into operational use, and the infrastructure question is becoming more concrete. The challenge is deciding what needs to be built, expanded, controlled, or delayed as usage grows. Three pressure points usually appear first. - Compute capacity requires careful planning: teams need enough GPU, cloud, or specialised processing power, while keeping utilisation and cost under control. - Data movement becomes more demanding: AI needs access to data across systems, with latency, security, integration, and quality managed from the start. - Operational control becomes essential: monitoring, access rights, resilience, cost visibility, and ownership need to scale with usage. The working question is simple: how do we support AI at scale while keeping infrastructure efficient, governed, and financially sustainable? If you are working through these choices, let’s compare approaches with others facing similar constraints.

Belgium 15-09-2026 Squad Only Virtual english

Turning AI Pilots into Daily Workflows: How to move from experimentation to adoption by redesigning work, ownership, controls, and habits.

AI pilots are easier to launch than to embed into daily operations. The challenge is changing how work happens once AI becomes part of decisions, tasks, handovers, and controls. Three pressure points tend to decide whether adoption holds. - Workflow fit matters: AI has to enter the flow of work as part of the process. - Ownership needs to be clear: someone must own the process, the controls, the exceptions, and the outcome. - User trust has to be built: people need to know when to rely on AI, when to challenge it, and when to escalate. The working question is simple: how do we move AI from promising pilots into daily work while keeping clarity, accountability, and risk control? If this is part of your current reality, let’s compare choices, constraints, and lessons learned.

Belgium 17-09-2026 Country Members Physical french

Les Rencontres: CTO: Le Saint Graal?

Pendant longtemps, le TCO donnait une impression de contrôle. On investissait, on amortissait, on optimisait. Les coûts étaient visibles, relativement prévisibles, et structurés autour d’une logique claire entre CAPEX et OPEX. Ce modèle ne suffit plus à expliquer où va réellement l’argent. Aujourd’hui, une part croissante des dépenses IT ne repose plus sur ce que l’on possède, mais sur ce que l’on consomme: des tokens générés par l’IA des agents qui exécutent des actions en continu des outils SaaS qui se multiplient dans les équipes du cloud qui s’adapte en permanence à l’usage Le coût ne disparaît pas, mais il devient plus diffus, plus dynamique, et souvent plus difficile à attribuer, à expliquer, et à maîtriser. C’est là que des approches comme le Technology Business Management, ou TBM, redeviennent particulièrement utiles: non pas comme un exercice de reporting supplémentaire, mais comme un moyen de relier concrètement les dépenses aux services, aux usages, et aux décisions. Et c’est là aussi que la question du “Saint Graal” revient, mais sous une autre forme. Vous vous demandez peut-être: Comment garder de la maîtrise quand la dépense dépend du comportement, des usages, et parfois même de systèmes autonomes ? Comment piloter l’équilibre CAPEX/OPEX quand le cloud, le SaaS et l’IA déplacent progressivement les coûts vers des modèles variables ? Quels coûts restent encore trop souvent hors radar: ressources métier, formation, support, intégration, sécurité, gouvernance ? Et surtout, qu’est-ce qu’un “bon TCO” veut encore dire quand il faut le mettre en regard d’objectifs parfois plus stratégiques, plus longs à mesurer, ou plus difficiles à quantifier: qualité de service, résilience, agilité, expérience utilisateur, capacité d’innovation ? Ce sont précisément ces questions qui seront au cœur de notre rencontre: une discussion ouverte entre pairs, ancrée dans la réalité du terrain, pas pour débattre de modèles idéaux, mais pour comprendre comment chacun tente, concrètement, de mesurer, d’attribuer et de reprendre le contrôle, sans réduire la valeur d’un choix technologique à son seul coût.

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Total Produce Delivers Daily Fruit to UK Schools With OutSystems

Having won the UK government Fruit4Schools contract, Total Produce encountered a problem. In order to ensure payment for deliveries under the contract. Working with OutSystems gave Total Produce the speed and agility to provide not only this solution, but many more since.

"It’s not just faster development. The DevOps capabilities of OutSystems, like one-click deployment and performance monitoring, mean the apps we deliver this way are less costly to update and maintain. That means we can invest more in innovation that will keep the company competitive into the future."Tony O’Halloran, Director of IT, Total Produce

An Upset to the Apple Cart

Challenge – Total Produce is one of the world’s largest providers of fresh produce, with operations in 26 countries and 140 facilities across Europe, India, and North America. The company is involved in growing, sourcing, importing, packaging, and distributing over 300 lines of fresh produce, from apples to zucchini and everything in between. However, as this story shows, sometimes it’s the last-mile delivery that can be most difficult.

When the UK government awarded the Fruit4Schools contract to Total Produce, it came with a stipulation:

Provide every primary school child a piece of fruit every day, but if you can’t prove delivery with a signature, we won’t pay you.

From bitter experience, Total Produce knew that paper-based signatures were a recipe for disaster. Missing delivery slips, manual processing, and the impossibility of real-time reporting could quickly turn this prestigious contract into a loss-making venture.

Total Produce needed a mobile app that could route drivers to each school and collect signatures for each delivery. That was the challenge thrown at the Total Produce busy IT department, together with what seemed like an impossible deadline.

Tony O’Halloran, Director of IT at Total Produce, takes up the story. “I’d been looking for an opportunity to try OutSystems for some time. This project seemed to tick all the boxes for a first project; it wasn’t overly complex, and the need for mobile offline functionality was both a capability of OutSystems and a missing piece in our armory. The fly in the ointment was the pressing deadline; I didn’t think we’d have time to learn OutSystems and deliver this project in the three months available.”

Teamwork Prevents Sour Grapes

Solution - When Tony called OutSystems, he quickly learned that a problem shared could be a problem halved. One of the best ways to get started with OutSystems is through a pilot project, staffed by the customer and the OutSystems professional services team.

A combination of structured training, moment-of-need coaching, and day-to-day collaboration on the project is the surest way to learn OutSystems and immediately put it into practice.

“What we liked about this teamed-up approach was that it disrupted our normal ways of working. OutSystems brought significant agile expertise to the table, not just technical skills. There was a much greater focus on user experience throughout the project, all the way from requirements capture to the weekly demonstrations at the end of each sprint. As we completed development, there were absolutely no surprises, and the training effort seemed minimal because the app worked the way all users needed,” explained O’Halloran.

The shared development approach compressed development to just nine weeks, with another three weeks for final user acceptance testing and training. By the end, Total Produce had its own OutSystems expertise it could apply to future projects.

“It was a win-win from our point of view. OutSystems was the right tool for the job, but without the team approach, we would not have met our deadline, because we were too busy to assign more in-house developers to this project,” explained O’Halloran.

A Low-Code Labor Bears Fruit

Results – The resulting app has been a real hit with drivers, schedulers, and delivery managers because it’s easy to use and more efficient. Here are a few of its capabilities:

Back-office Administration

Integration with ERP system to load daily orders
Route scheduling
Driver route assignment
Internal reporting
Proof of delivery reports for schools/education authorities

Mobile Access for Drivers

Route guidance
Delivery confirmation
On-screen signature capture with photo fallback
Delivery adjustments
Offline availability
Data and signature synchronization when online

Thanks to the success of this first project, Total Produce has expanded their use of low-code with four more projects, covering diverse requirements such as help desk ticketing, time tracking, credit control, and a customer complaint case management system.

“Now that we’ve proven this low-code approach, we’re bringing more developers into the OutSystems team and starting to tackle more strategic projects,” explained O’Halloran.

However, the benefit is not just much faster development, but also significant savings on IT operations time and resources.

The benefits of OutSystems from IT’s perspective:

Faster, visual development
Better support for an agile, user-centric development approach
DevOps “in a box” including code integrity checking, one-click deployment, and performance monitoring
Ease of integration with a wide variety of business systems including bespoke ERP
Ability to design brilliant user experiences with no dependency on designers/CSS experts
Build mobile apps, both hybrid and native, with full offline capabilities, and use of device features like GPS, touchscreen signature, and camera
Future proof enterprise-grade security and performance

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Outsystems

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