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Belgium 21-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

From Victim to Victor: Cyber resilience is a means, providing Business Continuity the goal

In an era where every outage, audit, and cyberattack is a test of organisational survival, resilience has become the new currency of trust. While traditional perimeter security with: firewalls, intrusion detection, and scanners, remains essential, it is no longer a sufficient guarantee against modern threats that bypass these layers to penetrate your core systems. Today, enterprises require security and continuity that are built-in, not bolted-on. This CIONET roundtable focuses on the shift from reactive disaster recovery to proactive Business Continuity. Together with experts from HPE Zerto, we will explore how organisations can transform their recovery strategies into seamless continuity models.

Belgium 23-4-26 Country Members Physical & Virtual english

CIOFEST BELGIUM: Leadership in the Agentic Era

AI is no longer confined to supporting human tasks. We are entering the agentic era, where autonomous systems act on behalf of people and organisations. These agents can gather information, make decisions, negotiate terms, and even complete transactions. The implications extend well beyond technology; they touch the very foundations of business models, governance, and leadership. For CIOs and their peers, the rise of “machine customers” and autonomous partners poses new questions: Market impact: How do you compete and create value when some customers and suppliers are machines? Governance: What trust, compliance, and accountability structures are needed when AI acts independently in financial, procurement, or customer-facing processes? Leadership: How should CIOs guide their organisations in redefining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making when agents take over parts of the value chain?Business strategy: What opportunities emerge for new revenue models, platforms, and ecosystems shaped by autonomous interaction? This session shifts the focus from the mechanics of AI agents to the decisions that will shape leadership in the next decade. It is a call for CIOs to prepare for a future where relationships, markets, and strategies are no longer limited to human-to-human interactions, but also extend to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.

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.

April 2, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Taming the SaaS Sprawl: Tracking spend, ownership, and usage before it slips out of control

SaaS gave business units freedom: quick onboarding, no infrastructure, and instant results. But over time, that freedom turned into fragmentation. Each team now buys, renews, and configures its own stack. HR has one platform, finance has another, and marketing probably has ten. The invoices keep coming, usage keeps dropping, and no one is sure who’s accountable for what.

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.

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Character.AI and Google Cloud Partner to Build the Next Generation of Conversational AI

Character.AI is using Google Cloud gen AI infrastructure to deliver new conversational AI features faster.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif., May 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Character.AI, a full stack conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform that gives consumers access to their own deeply personalized superintelligence, today announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud and has selected it as its preferred cloud infrastructure to build and train sophisticated AI models with advanced reasoning and greater accuracy.

The field of generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has made remarkable advancements in recent months and has proven to be a game-changer in AI by serving as the foundational model that outperforms previous algorithms in most natural language and text generation tasks. Character.AI is using Google Cloud generative AI and LLM infrastructure to meet the needs of its rapidly growing community of creators. By combining its own AI capabilities with those of Google Cloud, Character.AI will enhance the customer experience by inspiring imagination, discovery and understanding.

As part of the partnership, Character.AI will use Google Cloud's Tensor Processor Units (TPUs) to train and infer LLMs faster and more efficiently. Google Cloud TPUs are purpose-built to accelerate AI training and inference, speeding up the most computationally-intensive workloads with more than 100 petaflops of performance in a single pod. By leveraging Google Cloud TPUs, Character.AI can take advantage of the same reliable, secure, and highly scalable infrastructure that powers Google Search, YouTube, and other Google services. Character.AI will also employ Google Cloud's new A3 VMs running on NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, a combination that uniquely enables customers to tackle any AI workload with speed and flexibility and provides customer optionality between TPUs and GPUs to meet their needs.

"We've recognized the power and strength of Google Cloud's technology from day one," said Noam Shazeer, CEO, Character.AI. "As we continue our growth trajectory, working with Google Cloud's AI technologies was the obvious choice, allowing us to rapidly expand our compute abilities so we can deliver new features and capabilities to millions of users."

Character.AI today uses Google Cloud for core infrastructure and is leveraging Google Cloud's PostgreSQL-compatible database, AlloyDB, for increased operational uptime, speed, and flexibility. Looking ahead, Character.AI will soon deploy Google Cloud Spanner, a high availability and high performance database, to help scale its service to additional regions.

"We're offering Google Cloud's industry leading infrastructure, Google foundation models and AI tooling to companies across industries so they can build, train and deploy the future of AI creatively, reliably and at scale," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. "Character.AI's cutting-edge conversational AI technology is creating entirely new opportunities to transform how we interact with AI systems, and we are thrilled to be their partner as they continue to scale their vision."

Character.AI was founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who are two of the world's foremost experts in conversational AI. Noam's previous work is central to the current revolution in LLMs, while Daniel's is related to building large-scale NLP and deep learning programs. Bringing together their expertise with Google Cloud's cutting-edge technology will allow Character.AI to scale and bring this intelligence to consumers across the world at scale.

Join the growing community of millions who are experiencing the value of personalized AI at https://beta.character.ai. To learn more about the AI infrastructure powering the Character.ai platform, visit cloud.google.com/tpu.

Additional Resources

Keep up with the latest Google Cloud news on our newsroom and blog.
Learn more about Google Cloud TPUs here.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud accelerates every organization's ability to digitally transform its business. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google's cutting-edge technology – all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

About Character.AI

Founded in 2021 by artificial intelligence researchers and former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI is a conversational artificial intelligence platform that uses large language models, deep learning algorithms that can recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate text and other content, to provide individuals with a personalized artificial intelligence experience. The platform lets anyone create and engage with Characters, allowing users to build their own, personalized use cases and share them with others. For more information, visit: https://beta.character.ai/

SOURCE Google Cloud

Technologies

Google Cloud A3 instances Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud's Generative AI

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.