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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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Legal & General use AWS AI to transform Customer Experience, Speed, and Productivity

Using AWS, we now have a much more robust, elastic, and event driven architecture.” - Tariq Surty, IT Director, Retail Retirements Division, Legal & General

“Using AWS, we now have a much more robust, elastic, and event driven architecture.” - Tariq Surty, IT Director, Retail Retirements Division, Legal & General

Imagine you have over 5 million customers who send in paper forms amounting to 5,000 pieces daily. To best serve your customers—and to meet regulatory requirements—you need a way to process all these documents quickly and accurately. To meet this challenge, financial services firm Legal & General (L&G) modernized the daily ingestion of thousands of pension documents for its UK retail retirements division (RRD) using Amazon Web Services (AWS). L&G’s UK RRD migrated from its legacy scanning solution to AWS, using artificial intelligence (AI)–powered services. As a result, the division improved document processing speed, compliance with its regulatory service level agreements (SLAs), and staff productivity.

Modernizing Document Management Using AWS

L&G’s UK RRD has 5.2 million workplace pension members who send in more than 1 million paper documents per year, requesting, for example, a change of address or beneficiary. The division must process and respond to each one within a set period. It wanted to make the process more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective. “Using AWS, we now have a much more robust, elastic, and event-driven architecture,” says Tariq Surty, IT director for the RRD at L&G.

The UK RRD, alongside its local AWS team, created an internal proof of concept to ratify use of Amazon Textract, a machine learning (ML) service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, layout elements, and data from scanned documents. The division then engaged AWS Professional Services—a global team of experts that helps companies use AWS—to complete its project quickly and reliably, from designing the proof of concept to scaling into full production.

Improving Processing Speed and Staff Productivity with ML

L&G’s cloud-focused solution for document management is Docusort. It processes documents with ML using Amazon Textract and Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that brings together a broad set of tools for high-performance, low-cost ML. Docusort classifies documents, extracts the relevant datasets, and pushes that data to backend systems to update customer information.

Using AWS, L&G can now process 1,000 documents concurrently in 30 minutes, and with the serverless architecture, its solution can scale up and down to meet any workload. Before, processing was limited by the number of people handling the documents. With these time savings, the UK RRD meets SLA requirements more accurately and consistently. As a result, the division has been able to redeploy five employees, improving business productivity.

Moving Forward with Generative AI

L&G plans to use its Docusort solution as a template for other use cases where ML might be useful. In particular, the company is exploring how to apply generative AI to processes such as managing complaints, supporting the underwriting process, and analyzing customer feedback.

“We’ve learned how to manage, train, and maintain ML models, and we’re in a great place to use generative AI for new use cases now that we have a proven modular, elastic, and serverless architecture, which is really exciting,” says Surty.

Technologies

Amazon SageMaker Amazon Textract

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.