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Belgium 19-5-26 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. But every promise of AI-driven defence comes with a price. The tools are expensive to train, maintain, and monitor. Mistakes cost more too. False positives drain teams, model drift hides real threats, and poisoned data turns protection into confusion. So now it’s not only about defending networks, it’s about defending the defenders themselves, from fatigue, blind trust, and automation gone wrong. So how do you keep visibility when both sides use the same weapons? How do you detect intent when patterns look human but aren’t? How do you justify cost when failure still happens, just faster? Let’s explore what happens when algorithms face each other on both sides of the firewall, and what new defences emerge when speed alone is no longer enough. A closed conversation about a future where cybersecurity becomes an AI vs AI battle, and humans still have to win.

Belgium 21-5-26 All Members Physical english

Replace, Wrap, or Rebuild? : Core modernization in financial services and insurance, without a full rewrite.

For banks, insurers, and other financial services leaders, core modernization is rarely a simple technology decision. The harder question is what to replace, what to wrap, what to rebuild selectively, and what to leave alone. This round table brings together senior peers to discuss how they are making those choices under real constraints: resilience, control, regulatory scrutiny, delivery speed, vendor dependency, and the risk of getting sequencing wrong. The conversation will focus on practical judgment, where modernization creates value, where it adds risk, and how to move forward without triggering another multi-year transformation cycle. A small-group discussion for leaders looking for clear decisions, credible trade-offs, and peer perspective.

Belgium 22-5-26 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? We know lock-in isn’t only technical, it’s commercial, architectural, and even cultural. Once tools shape how teams work, switching becomes not only costly but politically impossible. So how do you manage dependency without losing leverage? What do you do when moving away costs more than staying? How do you negotiate from a position of weakness? And what governance models help prevent lock-in before it happens? Let’s share how to keep options open, make vendors compete without breaking partnerships, and find leverage even when it seems there’s none left. A closed conversation for those who’ve learned that freedom in IT is rarely free.

May 19, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

May 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

May 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

The Career Path of the Cloud Engineer: From system builder to strategic enabler of digital scale

The cloud engineer’s world keeps expanding. It started with provisioning and automation, but now it touches everything: resilience, security, cost, and even business continuity. What used to be a back-end function has become one of the most visible roles in digital operations. Yet with that visibility comes pressure: constant evolution, constant firefighting, and very little time to step back and ask, “Where is this career actually going?”

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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

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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.

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