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Belgium 9-10-25 Country Members Physical english

Belgium's Got Talent '25 - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

Today’s IT world moves faster than ever. New tools, new ways of working, constant updates! The real challenge? Making sure your people stay in the loop, up to speed, and ready to move. That’s why this year’s edition of Belgium’s Got Digital Talent is all about mastering knowledge flow, how to share the right know-how with the right people, at the right time. No more teams working in silos. No more vital info getting lost.We’re diving into practical ways to keep your teams smart, agile, and aligned. Whether you're leading an IT team, shaping digital strategy, or hiring tech talent, this event will give you the ideas, tools, and energy to turn fast change into a competitive edge.

Belgium 14-10-25 Squad Only Virtual english

Agile Infrastructure ; How to build technical foundations that don’t slow you down

Agile delivery often collides with inflexible infrastructures. One team wants to release weekly. Another is waiting six months for a new test environment. Sounds familiar? If your infra team is tired of being the bottleneck, and your devs are tired of waiting, this session opens a path forward.

Belgium 14-10-25 Invitation Only Physical english

Towards Digital Sovereignty in the Financial Sector

For financial institutions, a strategic approach to cloud adoption is needed, but not simple to achieve. The challenge lies in leveraging the benefits of modern cloud infrastructure while simultaneously preparing to meet strict sovereignty requirements. This necessitates a careful consideration of cloud architecture, including hybrid and multi-cloud models, and a thorough understanding of data residency and governance.

October 14, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

Agile Infrastructure ; How to build technical foundations that don’t slow you down

October 17, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Leading Change When Your Organisation Pushes Back ; How to move forward when transformation feels like a threat

You’ve secured the budget. The tech is solid. Leadership has signed off. But the project’s going nowhere. People smile in meetings and ignore you afterwards. Middle managers hesitate. Teams follow the old way, even when a new one exists. Every step forward feels like a negotiation, because it is. You’re not alone. Many digital leaders find themselves in this position. The business knows it needs to change but isn’t ready to let go. This session is about those moments.

October 21, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

AI in Practice ; What it really takes to move from pilot to production

Every organisation has a handful of AI pilots. But very few have scaled them. The models are accurate. The vision is clear. But something’s always in the way; lack of infrastructure, unclear ownership, security concerns, or just plain fatigue. This is a conversation for people in the messy middle of the AI journey, those navigating the leap from promising prototypes to operational value.

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Estée Lauder applies AI, AR for cosmetics accessibility

The cosmetics giant has released its Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant, which leverages artificial intelligence and augmented reality to help visually impaired people use cosmetics.

How can we help visually impaired individuals use our products and feel more self-reliant and confident? That’s the question The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) set out to answer in 2022 with the help of AI and augmented reality (AR).

The result is the Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant (VMA), now fully launched in the UK and US, and soon to debut worldwide. The project also earned ELC a 2023 CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.

“We set out to address a significant business problem in the beauty industry, and that’s the lack of accessible solutions,” says Michael Smith, ELC SVP and CIO. “There are 2.2 billion people globally that have some type of visual impairment. There’s over two million in the UK alone, which is our pilot market. But it’s more than just a business opportunity. It’s also something that aligns with our mission to be the most inclusive and diverse beauty company in the world, both for our employees and all our consumers.”

Christopher Aidan, ELC’s VP of innovation and emerging technologies, adds that visually impaired people often must rely on others for help, so the vision for VMA was to use ELC’s existing Augmented Reality Immersive Application (ARIA) platform, which leverages AR, AI, and machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyze makeup on a user’s face. VMA then uses voice guidance to help the user create their ideal look.

VMA is a mobile app that leverages the preferences the user has already configured on their device for voice controls, but it also gives the option to customize the voice and its speed using the accessibility settings.

Getting the AI right

While Aidan’s team was able to build the app relatively quickly, the research stages to get to that point proved challenging. With inclusivity as the project’s guiding principle, the team recognized the need for the app to accommodate all shapes, sizes, shades, and unique features of any potential user’s face. Ensuring the AI could adapt and react to the diversity of colors, shades, facial features, hair, and other inclusions made the AI training process more complex than initially anticipated, requiring a wide diversity of faces for the training corpus.

The original design involved taking a selfie, which the algorithm analyzed to assess the uniformity of application and then provided guidance to the user. It didn’t take long, though, for the team to instead utilize real-time video the app could use to scan the user’s face. For instance, if the video shows the user has applied foundation or lipstick unevenly, the app provides verbal descriptions of the specific areas that need a touchup and guidance to correct the issue. The user can then make adjustments, rescan, and the app will provide a prompt when everything is correctly applied.

First priority, however, was for Aidan and his team to directly engage with the visually impaired community. “We really wanted to gain an understanding of what their unique needs were, their pain points and preferences, and what they desired from our products,” he says. “We pulled together focus groups and asked questions, but mostly listened to them about their personal experiences with makeup and technology.”

Importantly, he says, some focus group members were completely blind, some experienced varying degrees of low vision, and some had excellent peripheral vision. This enabled his team to gain insight from a variety of individual experiences and to question their own assumptions.

“We assumed that a natural, more humanistic sounding voice would be the preference for the implementation, but the user research confirmed that familiarity was actually most important to our users,” Aidan says. “Whatever they had set up on their device is what they wanted to experience.”

The team also partnered with internal advocacy groups at ELC, external advocacy groups, and experts in accessibility and inclusivity, and combined their insights with feedback from the focus groups to gather requirements for VMA. The team then leveraged the user research for everything from naming the application to getting the tone of voice just right.

“Throughout the design, build, and test phases, their feedback was informing our decisions, even the small features like being able to adjust the speed of the virtual assistant’s speech,” Aidan says.

A work in progress

The team has continued to monitor feedback on the app since its initial launch in the UK in January, and Aidan notes that even with extensive testing prior to launch, users have since identified new issues.

“We started getting questions no one had asked in all the early interviews,” he says. “What about when I remove product? Can you tell me if I did a good job removing it?”

Smith says ELC is measuring the success of VMA by user feedback, which has been as positive as it’s been constructive.

“One user said, ‘This is one of those apps where I’m going to wonder how I ever lived without it,’” Smith says. “The app allows them to feel empowered and to try out new products and avoid feeling like they have to rely on other people when they might feel hesitant to even ask. There’s no judgment from the app; it’s just honesty.”

Smith also says VMA doesn’t just benefit those who are visually impaired. For instance, young people who don’t have an adult in their lives to support them, or those who don’t feel comfortable asking an adult could use this app to learn how to apply makeup.

“I would challenge other CIOs to put a priority on creating more accessible and inclusive products,” he says. “When you design for all abilities and people in an inclusive way, you benefit everyone.”

CIONET Business Circles

Healthcare Circle

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?

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.