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Belgium 19-3-26 Country Members Physical french

Vendor Detox: La consolidation vaut-elle le risque ?

Moins de Partenaires : La consolidation vaut-elle le risque ? Le problème est la prolifération des fournisseurs : trop d'outils causant de la complexité, une taxe d'intégration paralysante et de la redondance. La Taxe d'Intégration est le coût caché (en temps, en échecs et en ressources) d'essayer de faire fonctionner ensemble des systèmes disparates. Cet échange se concentre sur des stratégies éprouvées pour simplifier de manière agressive le parc technologique, consolider les fournisseurs et élever certains fournisseurs clés au rang de partenaires stratégiques.

Belgium 24-3-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Killing Zombie Projects: Knowing when to stop, restart, or quietly let go

Every organisation has them, projects that keep running long after their purpose has faded. No one remembers who asked for them, but shutting them down feels riskier than keeping them alive. And eventually, people stay assigned, budgets stay allocated, and energy drains into work that no longer matters. Inertia at its finest. Ending a project is rarely a technical decision. It’s emotional, political, and often tied to past promises or personal reputation. The longer something runs, the harder it becomes to admit it’s time to stop. Yet clearing that backlog of half-dead initiatives is often the only way to make room for new ones. So how do you decide when to pull the plug? What signals show that value is gone, and who gets to say so? How can governance encourage honest calls without punishing those who make them? Let’s discuss how to end gracefully, refocus teams, and turn closure into confidence rather than blame. Bullet in the head? Is that how you kill a zombie, or was it a silver bullet in the heart? A closed conversation on how to make progress by learning to stop.

Belgium 26-3-26 Invitation Only Virtual english

Measuring Value in AI Initiatives: Defining ROI, accountability, and measurable outcomes in complex environments

AI projects continue to multiply, but proving their value remains difficult. Most organisations can track activity, not impact. Dashboards count pilots and models, yet few translate to measurable business outcomes. The result is familiar: success stories without clarity on what they actually delivered. The real issue is measurement. Traditional ROI metrics fail when AI changes decisions more than results. Financial indicators miss the operational gains, while qualitative benefits often sound too vague to defend. Without clear evidence, budgets come under scrutiny and confidence erodes. This session focuses on how to connect AI work with business outcomes through structured metrics, governance, and accountability. We’ll explore how value tracking evolves from experimentation to scale, which indicators earn trust at board level, and where measurement stops being meaningful. A closed exchange for comparing methods, tools, and lessons learned in defining, proving, and sustaining AI impact.

March 24, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Killing Zombie Projects: Knowing when to stop, restart, or quietly let go

March 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Measuring Value in AI Initiatives: Defining ROI, accountability, and measurable outcomes in complex environments

March 31, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Composability in Practice: Building modular systems that stay coherent as they grow

Composability sounds elegant in theory: small, independent parts that come together to form something greater, but in practice, it’s messy. What happens when modules overlap, APIs evolve differently across domains, and governance struggles to keep pace? What was meant to simplify architecture sometimes ends up multiplying it.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.