null

Belgium 21-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

From Victim to Victor: Cyber resilience is a means, providing Business Continuity the goal

In an era where every outage, audit, and cyberattack is a test of organisational survival, resilience has become the new currency of trust. While traditional perimeter security with: firewalls, intrusion detection, and scanners, remains essential, it is no longer a sufficient guarantee against modern threats that bypass these layers to penetrate your core systems. Today, enterprises require security and continuity that are built-in, not bolted-on. This CIONET roundtable focuses on the shift from reactive disaster recovery to proactive Business Continuity. Together with experts from HPE Zerto, we will explore how organisations can transform their recovery strategies into seamless continuity models.

Belgium 23-4-26 Country Members Physical & Virtual english

CIOFEST BELGIUM: Leadership in the Agentic Era

AI is no longer confined to supporting human tasks. We are entering the agentic era, where autonomous systems act on behalf of people and organisations. These agents can gather information, make decisions, negotiate terms, and even complete transactions. The implications extend well beyond technology; they touch the very foundations of business models, governance, and leadership. For CIOs and their peers, the rise of “machine customers” and autonomous partners poses new questions: Market impact: How do you compete and create value when some customers and suppliers are machines? Governance: What trust, compliance, and accountability structures are needed when AI acts independently in financial, procurement, or customer-facing processes? Leadership: How should CIOs guide their organisations in redefining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making when agents take over parts of the value chain?Business strategy: What opportunities emerge for new revenue models, platforms, and ecosystems shaped by autonomous interaction? This session shifts the focus from the mechanics of AI agents to the decisions that will shape leadership in the next decade. It is a call for CIOs to prepare for a future where relationships, markets, and strategies are no longer limited to human-to-human interactions, but also extend to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.

Belgium 29-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Building Future-Ready Application Ecosystems in the Age of Intelligent Automation

This CIONET workshop is a collaborative deep-dive into the practicalities of"rewiring the building" while it’s still occupied. Drawing onKyndryl’s deep heritage in mission-critical infrastructure and their latestresearch, we will dismantle the "hidden costs" of legacyenvironments. The conversation will focus on the transition from static,monolithic structures to composable architectures that allow intelligent agentsto operate seamlessly across hybrid landscapes.

April 2, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Taming the SaaS Sprawl: Tracking spend, ownership, and usage before it slips out of control

SaaS gave business units freedom: quick onboarding, no infrastructure, and instant results. But over time, that freedom turned into fragmentation. Each team now buys, renews, and configures its own stack. HR has one platform, finance has another, and marketing probably has ten. The invoices keep coming, usage keeps dropping, and no one is sure who’s accountable for what.

May 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Product-Centric IT 2.0: Blending product and project thinking

Everyone says they’ve gone product-centric. In reality, most organisations live in a hybrid world where projects, products, and platforms overlap. Teams manage releases while still chasing deadlines, and governance still thinks in milestones rather than outcomes. The shift is underway, but the mindset hasn’t caught up.

May 19, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

The game has changed, clearly. Attackers have AI, defenders have AI, and both sides are learning faster than anyone expected, or maybe the attackers are just a bit faster. What used to take hours now happens in seconds, and detection windows close before alerts even appear. It’s adaptation beyond automation, and no one gets to sit still.

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

PenFed to bank on gen AI for hyper-personalization

After successfully leveraging chatbots to support employees and members, the credit union is now looking to generative AI to blend digital channels with data and thereby turn itself into a ‘cognitive credit union.’

Pentagon Credit Union (PenFed), the second-largest credit union in the US, is looking to generative AI to transform how it interacts with its customers. Its vision? To create a new, cost-effective channel that helps meet members needs — and learns as it does so, to the benefit of members and the credit union itself.

“What’s happened in our business over the years is every channel is expensive and it doesn’t ever replace another channel. It’s just additive,” says Joseph Thomas, PenFed EVP and CIO, who notes that today 80% of PenFed’s interactions are digital, 15% are via call center, and 5% still rely on physical branches. “But we realized that with AI, we could add another channel of engagement but very cost effectively. We could add chat with a bot-enabled interaction to solve the early, simpler questions.”

Even with more than 2.9 million members, as a credit union PenFed doesn’t have the resources of a traditional bank. It doesn’t have an innovation lab or center of excellence to help it develop new technologies. But it does have more than eight years of experience leveraging supervised ML to support credit risk modeling and decision making. And in that time, it also adopted Salesforce.

“Salesforce is not just a CRM for us,” Thomas explains. “Salesforce is a digital platform, and it already had capabilities with Einstein as part of the platform, so we could cheaply and efficiently get into AI-enabled chatbots.”

The AI journey

The credit union started its new service strategy by deploying an Einstein-powered chatbot internally to support its IT service desk. The bot, which leveraged PenFed’s body of knowledge articles to assist end-users with tasks such as password resets, proved its effectiveness immediately and now handles about 25% of common internal service requests, freeing up service desk staff to focus on more complex tasks.

Once Thomas’s team developed experience with the platform, it began rolling out bots externally to the credit union’s members. Today, bots handle nearly 40,000 sessions per month, providing loan application status, product and servicing information, and technical support.

“We wanted to use AI internally before we unleashed it on the members,” Thomas says, adding that, with Einstein packaged with Salesforce, PenFed was able to conduct those internal experiments and later offer the new channel to its members at no extra cost.

PenFed now resolves 20% of cases on first contact with Einstein bots, with a 223% increase in chat and chatbot activity over the past year, Thomas says. The chat channel has also taken pressure off PenFed’s call center, which has reduced its average speed to answer by a minute, to less than 60 seconds, even as PenFed’s membership has increased by 31%.

But it is phase three of PenFed’s AI journey that Thomas is particularly excited about: Using generative AI for an assistant that can interact more naturally than a traditional chatbot while gathering data for insights that can lead to more personalized interactions.

“I don’t normally get hyped up on technology; I’m much more practical,” Thomas says, adding that his primary focus is always delivering value. “But what I’m seeing with generative AI is the missing ingredient to the world of digital, to the world of data.”

For years, CIOs have invested in data initiatives — data science, business intelligence, analytics — and they’ve also investing in digital channels, Thomas explains. But generative AI offers the potential to “snap data and digital together” to help institutions like PenFed go “from the digital credit union to the cognitive credit union,” he says.

Thomas offers up an example to illustrate his point. Today PenFed members can use the credit union’s digital channel to, say, change a CD from automatic to manual renewal. With gen AI in the mix, even as the bot helps a member perform this task, it can seek to understand the meaning behind it. In this case, the member may be shifting to manual renewal in order to facilitate moving their investments to a new account with another financial institution once the current CD matures.

“They’re going to take their money to [the other institution] because [the other institution] has got a better rate,” Thomas says. “Let’s say ours is 4.5% and theirs is 4.75%. In today’s world, we’re missing the digital forensics that members leave behind with the digital transaction.”

With generative AI, that insight could trigger the system to deliver the member a personalized offer of, say, 4.7% via the member’s channel of preference. The member gets a personalized experience, and the business could target members likely to churn rather than creating a marketing campaign that offers a 4.75% rate to 500,000 members.

“Now you get this hyper-personalized business transaction that benefits both parties,” Thomas says. “That’s just a small example. I think the combinations are endless.”

The copilot approach

As with its previous phase, PenFed is starting to use gen AI as a “copilot” for the credit union’s internal employee support line before the team extends the technology to its members. The next step will likely be a copilot for call center representatives dealing with member calls.

The credit union is using Einstein GPT on the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud because that’s where its knowledge articles sit. It is in the process of standing up Salesforce Data Cloud, which will act as the connection to other data sources.

“Data Cloud is going to be the zero ETL capability,” Thomas says. “It will get real-time data from Salesforce clouds and from our Snowflake environment.”

As Thomas sees it, that combination of real-time data and AI insights will further transform PenFed’s customer experience to an intelligent, mutually beneficial one for both the credit union and its members.

Technologies

Einstein GPT

CIONET Business Circles

Cyber Circle

CIONET’s Cyber Circle: a new three-event programme exclusively focusing on the most urgent, complex, and high-impact challenges in cybersecurity today. Launched in 2026, this initiative brings together CISOs, CIOs, and senior IT executives with a strong interest in cybersecurity for three curated gatherings each year. As part of CIONET’s trusted executive community, the Cyber Circle provides a confidential, peer-driven environment to exchange insights, share real-world experiences, and address evolving cyber threats. Each session is designed to foster strategic dialogue, strengthen resilience, and elevate cybersecurity as a core driver of business value.

Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.

Les Rencontres

Découvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !

Female Leadership Circle

CIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.