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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership. Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.

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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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August 5, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI Act – praktyka stosowania na rynku polskim

AI Act – dyrektywa unijna regulująca wiele zasad wykorzystania AI w modelach biznesowych- już obowiązuje na polskim rynki. Ciekawe są prawdziwe i realne przypadki jej stosowania. Spójrzmy na temat od strony regulacyjnej, czyli prawnej. Ale zobaczmy praktykę aktywnej w temacie kancelarii prawnej. Zaprosiliśmy mecenaskę Aleksandrę Maciejewicz z kancelarii Lawmore, która od dłuższego czasu jest niezwykle aktywna i praktykuje w tym temacie. Poznamy podstawę prawną, praktyczne case’y i opis sytuacji oczami prawdziwego praktyka.

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August 6, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

DORA: wszystko, co chcielibyście wiedzieć, a baliście się zapytać

Michał Kulesza, adwokat, partner w departamencie technologicznym kancelarii Rymarz Zdort Maruta i szef zespołu regulacji ICT, przeprowadzi nas przez kluczowe wątki rozporządzenia i zmierzy się z pytaniami zgłoszonymi przez uczestników. Omówimy zarówno krytyczne aspekty na początku wdrożeń, jak i dostrajanie zmian na poziomie organizacyjnym i strategicznym. Masz konkretny temat, który warto poruszyć? Zgłoś go w trakcie rejestracji. Zamiast czytać między wierszami DORA – porozmawiajmy o tym wprost.

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August 7, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Automated Systems Testing

Duże tempo developmentu i dokonywanych zmian wymaga nowej klasy testowania. Jakość systemów obserwowana na produkcji będzie pochodną skuteczności tego procesu. Duże nadzieje wiążemy z platformami wspierającymi testowanie i opartymi na AI. Sesja ta pokaże, gdzie jesteśmy w poszukiwaniu takich rozwiązań i gdzie ewaluuje myślenie szefów testów i ich rozwiązania organizacyjne.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

AddAI.Life: Simplifying Customer Interactions with Contextual AI Assistants

AddAI.Life is bringing AI to the forefront of customer service. Their AI assistants can be integrated into a wide range of channels, from websites to messaging apps. By providing consistent and personalized support across multiple touchpoints, AddAI.Life is helping businesses build stronger customer relationships.

 
Deploying generative AI
 

AddAI.Life (AddAI) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a Czech-based startup, and an IBM Business Partner, established in 2019 with a vision to help companies improve their customer experience and efficiency by implementing AI assistants that are available 24x7 to answer a wide range of questions promptly and accurately. “When developing virtual assistants for our customers, our goal is to ensure each assistant sounds very natural and brings the customer and its end-users an amazing experience,” explains Jindrich Chromy, CEO and co-founder of AddAI.Life.

When it comes to generative AI, trust and transparency, as well as accuracy, are critical for AddAI and its customers. Each assistant needs to be specifically tailored to each customer and its unique use-cases: whether it will be answering billing questions for a user in telecommunications or resetting a digital account password for a banking customer. “Our customers include some of the top Czech companies as well as telecommunication corporations and banks. It’s important for our assistants to be able to deliver accurate and consistent answers. Moreover, the answers need to be curated or generated automatically on verified data. We also need to comply with bank-level security, which includes granted data exclusivity for the customer. We also need to be able to opt-out the training of the AI model on our user’s conversations,” adds Chromy.

In order to continue delivering an exceptional customer experience while also shortening the time it takes to implement a new AI assistant, AddAI has begun using the IBM® watsonx.ai, IBM watsonx Assistant and IBM Watson® Discovery solutions.

 
 
Watsonx.ai proved to be very useful. In our research, we liked how it helped our customers (and our development team) to simplify tasks and extend the assistant knowledge without the need to pre-set the whole dialog in advance. It is a next level for us and our customers. 
Jindrich ChromyCEO and co-founderAddAI.Life
 
 
 Implementing watsonx.ai
 

In collaboration with the IBM Client Engineering and Technical Sales teams from the Czech Republic, AddAI built an AI assistant for a customer in the banking sector that they then piloted. The assistant utilized the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methodology, coupled with watsonx.ai, to deliver relevant and precise responses in the Czech language for frequently asked questions (FAQs) on topics ranging from account access to payments, pricing and account services. Through intensive optimization efforts, the implementation team ensured that the answers generated by large language models (LLMs) met a high standard of accuracy and language fluency. To optimize end-user experience, the team integrated watsonx.ai with watsonx Assistant, and was able to deliver instant replies on a user-friendly front end.

“We use watsonx.ai to access selected open-source large language models like Llama 2 to enhance and contextualize information from our databases and present it to the end customer through the watsonx Assistant chatbot in an accurate and conversational manner. In our case watsonx.ai generates its answers to users’ questions through RAG,” explains Klaudia Miezgova, watsonx developer at AddAI.Life.

Additionally, Add.AI included IBM Watson Discovery in this pilot for its banking customer. The team used publicly available bank documents such as contracts, terms and conditions and price lists and tuned Watson Discovery to understand domain-specific questions and expressions. “We were able to obtain very accurate answers, including snippets from the document used as a reference or basis of the answer. This happened automatically, without the need to build and set the dialog manually,” notes Chromy.

 
85%

accuracy rate for answers generated via AI

 
50%

reduction in unanswered queries

 
 
 Achieving 85% accuracy rate
  

“We always track, measure and test new ideas to see how they work in real-life situations. That way, we can improve them quickly,” explains Chromy. “In this case, we took a set of testing queries, for which we had the correct answers pre-defined in our hand-built AI assistant which was powered by watsonx Assistant. We then fed those queries to the new assistant which was powered by both watsonx Assistant and watsonx.ai. That one had no pre-built dialogues and had to come up with the answers by itself, using the provided documentation and skill it had as a large language model. It responded with 85% accuracy compared with the pre-defined answers of the former version. With much less work input. So now we know that it is on a good track.”

Through this new assistant, AddAI also helped its customer achieve a 50% reduction in unanswered customer queries. Moreover, when answering customer questions, an AI assistant powered by watsonx.ai is designed to provide a more detailed and actionable answer than was previously possible.

“We have been able to tune the model to query complex data sets and then summarize the data it collected in a much more effective way. For example, the previously mentioned banking customer uses the assistant to deliver fee information to its customers. Rather than serving up raw data that requires the user to analyze the output and infer the next step, the assistant can deliver a clearly summarized answer with helpful next steps for the user to consider. This was not possible before watsonx.ai,” explains Miezgova.

This is just the beginning. Going forward, AddAI is confident it can reduce the implementation time on any new AI assistant by up to 30% given they can now use generative AI to help prepare the assistant to be questioned by end-users. The team expects this to significantly shorten the amount of time it takes to test and optimize an assistant before it is ready to be shared with end-users. AddAI also expects it can provide next-level, more knowledgeable assistants, even without the need of developing each dialogue (response) manually, using this new approach with watsonx.ai and watsonx Assistant.

 
About AddAI
 

AddAI.Life (AddAI) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a Czech-based startup, and an IBM Business Partner, established in 2019 and headquartered in the natural surroundings of Řevnice, a town close to the capital, Prague. The firm focuses on the development of AI Virtual assistants that have natural-sounding dialogues and work with context of the conversation. They can integrate into various channels (web, mobile app with voice, customer support line, Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Assistant, and others).

Partners

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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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?

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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.

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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 !

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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.

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Check out our latest news

Testimonials

Geert Goethals
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
Bridgestone EMIA
Untitled design (1)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-57-AM
Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
Untitled design-Nov-22-2023-08-42-05-3178-AM
Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
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Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
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Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
Geert Lejon
Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
Cognizant
Kevin_Ledegen
Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
SDWorx
Gunter-Van-Craen_Small
Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
Deloitte
Emmanuel Gob
Emmanuel Gob
CIO
DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
CIO
Colruyt
Untitled design (4)-Dec-13-2023-10-53-15-5032-AM
Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
Dell Technologies
benoit dewaele
Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
Vandemoortele
Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
SMALS
Thierry Driesens
Thierry Driesens
CIO
TVH
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Koen Vandaele
CIO
Delen Private Bank
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
Steven Vermeulen
CIO
Digitaal Vlaanderen
Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
1726588748718
Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
Untitled design (2)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-68-AM
Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Koen Van Loo
Koen Van Loo
CIO
Group S.
Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
Zoom
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Steven De Haes
Steven De Haes
Dean
Antwerp Management School
Marleen Thorré
Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
Mitsubishi Chemical Group
christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
CEO
Inès De Bien
Inès De Bien
Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
Hendrik Deckers
Founder - MD
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
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Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
Untitled design (1)-Nov-22-2023-08-56-42-6802-AM
Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event Manager

Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!