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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 ticket automation helped Lush reach a 60% first contact resolution rate

Global handmade cosmetics brand Lush was hesitant about automating their support — but needed to clear their inbox of FAQs and give agents more time to connect with customers. Here’s how they went from support automation skeptics to AI enthusiasts.

Lush at a glance

The customer

Lush is a global cosmetics brand offering fresh, handmade beauty products.

The market

HQ’ed in the UK, they have branches in 21 countries — and stores operate in additional regions under franchise.

The support team

170 agents provide support in 15 languages to Lush customers around the world.

The channels

Customer care is available 7 days a week via phone, SMS, and email.

The situation

Lush needed to scale their support to meet growing demand — without growing their customer service team.

The solution

Ultimate’s ticket automation solution and a seamless integration with their existing CRM: Zendesk.

Getting started with Ultimate

Customer-centricity is at the heart of how Lush operates. That’s why they started out as support automation skeptics. “We’ve always resisted too much automation because we never wanted to replace personal interactions,” says Naomi. But once they saw the substantial effort ticket automation would save them — giving agents more time to engage in meaningful conversations with customers — the support team soon became AI enthusiasts.

It took just 16 days for Lush to go live with ticket automation, and on his first day Marvin (as the team named their bot) answered 37% of tickets. But Lush’s support department doesn’t measure success by traditional efficiency measures. Instead, they focus on what customers are saying. In the week after launching, despite higher numbers of complaints over Black Friday and delivery disruption due to UK Royal Mail strikes, CSAT was at 93%.

Get started with automation

“With the pandemic and now a global recession, we’re not in a position to make our Customer Care team bigger and bigger. So we needed to make agents’ jobs easier by taking away the repetitive questions.”

Naomi Rankin
Global Customer Care Manager, Lush

First contact resolution rate: 60%

Minutes saved per ticket: 5

CSAT score: 93%

AI use case spotlight: freeing their inbox of FAQs

The support team in UK and Ireland was already using Zendesk macros (prepared responses) to answer FAQs, but agents were still swimming in repeat requests.
Lush went live with 4 intents to cover their most repetitive queries: sales and discounts, donations, order dissatisfaction, and discontinued products.
With Marvin taking care of common customer questions, the team reached a 60% first contact resolution (FCR) rate — giving agents more time to work on complex cases that require their skills.

Learn about our industry-leading AI

AI use case spotlight: scaling support without scaling the team

Lush’s support department was struggling to keep pace with rising volumes as the company continued to expand, but hiring additional agents wasn’t an option.
As well as deflecting FAQs, Marvin can request customer information upfront and add tags and labels to incoming tickets, giving agents the context they need to solve issues faster.
These efficiency gains save Lush roughly 5 minutes per ticket and 360 agent hours each month — savings that free up their support team to dedicate more energy to meaningful customer interactions.

Contact our AI experts and start saving

The success story

Seamless Zendesk integration

Our ticket solution fits right inside Lush’s existing tech stack, so personalization isn’t lost with automation and there’s no risk of data silos.

Multilingual

For a global business like Lush, multilingual support is a must — luckily, our industry-leading conversational AI can speak 109 languages.

Intelligent triage

Automatic ticket tagging and pre-filling makes agents’ jobs easier and removes the possibility of human error: meaning accurate data and reporting.

Easy to train and maintain

It took just 16 days for Lush to go live with ticket automation and the team can continually iterate to improve the bot’s performance.

Next on their automation journey

Building on the success of their English-language bot, the team is aiming to launch ticket automation in German next. After that, Lush plans to localize their automated ticket support in other English-speaking regions such as Australia. Eventually, Naomi wants to have bot managers taking care of ticket automation in every region Lush operates in.

Technologies

Ultimate: Ticket Automation Zendesk: A CRM Platform

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.