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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.

Belgium 5-5-26 All Members Physical english

Women of CIONET - The Female Edge in Digital Transformation

Why many transformations fail is not about technology, but about people and culture. Female leaders often excel in stakeholder alignment, empathy, and habit change; qualities that can make the difference between rollout and real adoption.So, where do those who drive digital transformation, often women, belong? Why are they labeled as “change leaders” and not CIOs?

Belgium 7-5-26 All Members Physical english

Resilience by Design - The Design Choices Behind Infrastructure That Cannot Fail

The most consequential security decisions are not made in the SOC. They are made at the drawing board, when architects choose who will manage their network fabric, where sovereignty will reside, and what dependencies they are prepared to accept. This roundtable brings together technology leaders who recognise that network and infrastructure design is no longer a technical decision but a strategic one. Rather than reviewing the threat landscape, we focus on the foundational choices that determine resilience long before the first incident occurs. Participants will explore how geopolitical fragmentation is turning technology and partner selection into a strategic act, what it means to engineer resilience into infrastructure rather than layer it on afterwards, and whether AI is changing the architectural calculus or simply raising the stakes.

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.

May 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

Every vendor swears their platform is open, flexible, and built for freedom. Then comes the renewal date. The price goes up, migration looks painful, and “strategic partnership” starts to feel more like dependency. Most organisations don’t get trapped overnight, they walk into it one contract at a time. Broadcom, anyone?

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Nordstrom Analytical Platform and Enhancing the Customer Experience

Nordstrom develops the Nordstrom Analytics Platform (NAP), which uses AI-powered analytics to personalize the shopping experience through deeper customer insights and predictions.

Chief Technology Officer, Edmond Mesrobian, recently participated in a conversation with VentureBeat's Hari Sivaraman, discussing the role of data infrastructure to enhance the customer experience. Focusing on AI-powered analytics, Edmond described the journey of building the Nordstrom Analytical Platform (NAP) to leverage deeper insights and predictions for a personalized experience. See highlights from their conversation below.

With our Nordstrom Analytical Platform (NAP), we are improving on our ability to provide personalized product discovery and service.

When we think about analytics as opposed to data reporting, timing is the most precious commodity, and making the timeliest decisions required us to build a platform. Whether it's stores, fulfillment centers or online, we built and translated those signals through models and actions. It's difficult to buy that type of solution off-the-shelf because you need to wire your enterprise. We asked, can we generate a prediction cost-effectively and translate that into a customer benefit and service? That's where we started, and we realized we needed to create it as opposed to buying it.

We embarked on this journey to get the business aligned so that we can capture events and stream them in real-time or near real-time into our analytical platform. We then layered analytical models of a variety of forms to translate into predictions—today's predictions are the new KPIs. Our goal was not to be technology providers for the components, but rather stitch it together to create the kind of analytical platform that we can then robustly drive machine learning. What we call our one-hop engine essentially translates our business events into something that could then be activated through a model. And so that's the special sauce—how we put the business events together, how we transformed them from one hop into our models and then generated predictions on the other end.

Our goal is to make the digital experience personal by offering our customers curated product choices on an individual level.

There are over a hundred AI models that we leverage daily at Nordstrom—a significant portion of them are backward-facing capabilities from inventory control to fulfillment and how to route orders to the nearest store and more. Customers will experience those capabilities indirectly in terms of getting orders shipped and delivered on time. Our mission and holy grail from a digital perspective is delivering the capability of discovery. Taking what we know about our customers we can deliver personalized products and better selection—through improved Looks, style boards and more. We are using AI in a more robust way to drive product discovery and personalization.

We are also focused on what we call our fashion map. The fashion map essentially takes a natural language-based approach with deep learning to interpret images and information from social networks—this allows us so to get to know customers through a natural language conversation, as opposed to keyword searches that are very taxonomy driven and hardcoded. We are continuing to work on achieving AI discovery to get closer to our customers in a personalized way.

See the full conversation below.

Partners

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.