Belgium 23-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english
Security teams are overwhelmed. Too many tools. Too many alerts. Too few people. And now, increasing pressure from the board to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. Expect honest reflection, shared strategies, and a conversation that cuts through compliance noise and focuses on what to do when your team is stretched and your risk is rising.
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Belgium 23-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the financial services industry in Belgium faces a critical juncture regarding its cloud adoption strategy. While the allure of cloud computing – with its promise of scalability, agility, and innovation – is undeniable, the unique regulatory demands and paramount need for data sovereignty present significant challenges. This CIONET roundtable, aims to bring together Digital Leaders from the Belgian financial sector to discuss how to navigate these complexities. We will explore how financial institutions can leverage cloud technologies while ensuring complete control over their data, maintaining compliance with stringent European regulations like GDPR and DORA, and mitigating geopolitical risks.
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Belgium 24-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
As smart devices proliferate across operational environments — from sensors on factory lines and GPS trackers in logistics fleets to wearables in healthcare and connected systems in smart cities — the integration of Managed IoT (MiOT) is accelerating. But with it comes a surge in cybersecurity risks. No longer isolated or air-gapped, OT systems are becoming fully networked, remotely accessible, and deeply entwined with IT. This creates a vulnerable, highly complex digital mesh, one where a single compromised device can trigger physical, financial, and reputational consequences.
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September 23, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Security teams are overwhelmed. Too many tools. Too many alerts. Too few people. And now, increasing pressure from the board to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. Expect honest reflection, shared strategies, and a conversation that cuts through compliance noise and focuses on what to do when your team is stretched and your risk is rising.
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September 30, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Everyone has technical debt. The question is what to do with it. Refactor now? Wait for the next feature? Build on it and hope it holds? If you’re tired of debating whether to clean up or move on, this session helps you frame the debt conversation in a way that supports both speed and stability.
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October 2, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Architecture doesn’t happen in diagrams. It happens in minds, seasoned, curious, sharp minds that understand how the pieces fit. But who’s shaping these minds? Who’s growing the next generation of digital architects? If you’re responsible for complex systems, and for the people designing them, this session is for you.
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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 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.”
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.
Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?
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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.
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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 !
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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.
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