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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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How Siemens increased productivity and made CX more human with AI

Europe’s largest manufacturing company needed a way to centralize data and automate high-volume requests. With Zendesk and Ultimate, they were able to free up agents so they had more time for human-to-human interactions while also streamlining productivity.

Siemens at a glance

The customer

Siemens is Europe’s biggest manufacturing company, serving customers from large enterprises to small sole traders in a wide range of industries.

The market

They serve a global customer base in regions including France, Spain, Poland, the US, Germany, Nordics and the UK.

The support team

What started as a small deployment with one support team has now expanded to over 600 Zendesk licences across all their regions.

The channels

Siemens offers automated support through ticket automation and a seamless integration with their CRM, Zendesk.

The situation

For Siemens, CX as a differentiator has always been a core value. But with agents relying on email inboxes, spreadsheets, and other applications to track customer data, delivering on that value was a challenge.

The solution

With Zendesk Enterprise Suite and Ultimate’s ticket automation solution, Siemens found a holistic way to view and manage all customer data and automate support across channels.

Getting started with Zendesk + Ultimate

Following the successful implementation of the Zendesk platform, Siemens wanted to further improve the customer experience through the integration of AI. The company opted to automate with Ultimate because of a few key factors.

The first being that Ultimate could build an AI solution directly into Zendesk. The second reason addresses the challenge of having multiple languages. With Ultimate’s polyglot AI model, responses to customer questions are made directly in the native language, as opposed to translating into English first. The integration of Ultimate also enables the individual regions to implement AI at a pace that works for them.

“When we look across all our customer contacts, about 30% of them are data requests or information requests. We felt that with a good AI solution, we could automate that. So within three years, we want 15% of our responses to be automated. While this may seem conservative, we firstly want to ensure we are providing a really great customer experience, and then gradually push it out,” says Steven Franklin, Head of Global Customer Services at Siemens.

To integrate AI into Zendesk, Steven and the Siemens team worked closely with their Zendesk Customer Success Executive, Peter Eshkeri, together with the team at Ultimate. “We have been on a journey with Zendesk, from the early days of deploying it in a small team. Today we have over 600 licenses and it’s deployed across all our regions. Bringing Ultimate into this partnership, I think we have a really compelling solution for our customers,” says Steven. It’s a partnership grounded in shared values and goals. Together, solutions are developed to streamline the customer journey.

“We don’t operate as three separate companies, we operate as one company working together to find the best means of solving a problem."

Steven Franklin
Head of Global Customer Services, Siemens

CSAT score: 86%

Productivity increase in Nordics: 23%

Languages: 7+

AI use case spotlight #1: Providing proactive support

Steven and his team found that negative customer experiences often happen when a customer has been given an answer, but there’s an obvious follow-up that has been ignored or hasn’t been picked up.
Zendesk, Siemens and Ultimate jointly developed an integration in which the AI would respond to high-volume requests automatically, such as proactively sending a copy of invoices to a customer.
In addition to sending proactive messages, the AI could detect what else the customer was asking and preempt some of those questions with appropriate responses, as well as gathering information and context for the human agents.

AI use case spotlight #2: Freeing up agent time for value-added interactions

Siemens wanted their agents to be able to concentrate on valued human-to-human interactions, rather than focusing on low-value transactions, such as sending invoices or standard information.
By integrating with their back-office systems, their bot could access customer data and provide it to their customers without agent involvement.
Automation has resulted in reduced agent handle times, since the bot can handle basic requests as well as populate the ticket with data to help the agent work more efficiently — resulting in a streamlined customer journey and enabling value-add interactions with customers.

The success story

A holistic solution

The strong partnership between Zendesk, Ultimate and Siemens means that they operate seamlessly as one company, not three — working together to find the best means of solving a problem.

Freeing up agent time

As well as automating responses to common queries, Siemens’ bot uses AI to populate tickets with data. This speeds up handling times and gives their agents more time to focus on value-added customer interactions.

Better data visibility

Instead of using different platforms and applications, all customer data is in one place, so agents can stay within Zendesk. In this omnichannel environment, including phone, email, and WhatsApp, they can efficiently communicate and answer customer queries.

Productivity gains

Since introducing Zendesk and Ultimate, Siemens have been able to resolve tickets faster, exchange tickets between departments more smoothly, and expedite customer onboarding — resulting in 23% increase in productivity in the Nordics and almost 2x the productivity in France.

Next on their automation journey

With the help of Zendesk and Ultimate, Siemens is on track to achieving a holistic global digital customer journey. As AI has been introduced at different speeds across their various markets, some regions are further ahead and are already experiencing productivity gains. This is translating into increased customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). For instance, the Nordics region is hitting an 86% CSAT rating versus an 83% industry benchmark.

Steven says, “Ultimately, we want to get to the point where we have a holistic global digital customer journey. With Zendesk as the foundation and the various apps and integrations such as Ultimate’s AI sitting on top of that, we are getting closer and closer to achieving that.”

Technologies

Ultimate’s polyglot AI model Zendesk platform with AI integration

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.