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Belgium 11-12-25 Country Members Physical english

Next Generation Digital Twins - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

Imagine being able to monitor, simulate, and optimise an entire city, factory, or supply chain in real time. Next-generation digital twins are making this vision a reality, transforming how we manage and understand complex systems. By creating dynamic virtual replicas of physical assets and processes, digital twins allow organisations to predict issues, optimize performance, and make data-driven decisions with unprecedented accuracy.This event will explore how digital twins are being used across industries to revolutionize the way we operate and maintain large-scale, intricate systems—whether it’s the infrastructure of a smart city, the efficiency of a factory floor, or the resilience of global supply chains.Examples of Digital Twins in Action:Smart Cities: Urban planners can use digital twins to simulate traffic flow, monitor energy usage, or predict the impact of weather events on infrastructure. This enables cities to optimize resources and improve the quality of life for their citizens.Factories of the Future: Manufacturing plants are leveraging digital twins to monitor equipment in real time, prevent downtime, and optimize production lines. With predictive analytics, factories can avoid costly breakdowns and improve overall efficiency.Supply Chain Management: Complex supply chains, spanning continents and industries, can be modeled as digital twins to track shipments, simulate disruptions, and optimize logistics. Businesses can reduce inefficiencies and respond faster to market demands.Key Themes:Real-Time Monitoring and Simulation: How digital twins provide real-time insights into complex systems, allowing for dynamic response and optimization.Predictive Power: Leveraging AI and data analytics, digital twins help organisations predict and mitigate issues before they happen, from equipment failures to supply chain bottlenecks.Scalability Across Ecosystems: Digital twins aren’t limited to individual assets—learn how they can be scaled across entire ecosystems like smart cities or global supply chains for maximum impact.Building Trust and Security: With digital twins handling critical infrastructure and sensitive data, what are the security and governance frameworks needed to ensure trust in these virtual systems?Why You Should Attend:Next-generation digital twins are no longer just a concept—they are revolutionizing industries by offering a new way to manage complexity. Whether you’re looking to optimize a city, factory, or supply chain, this event will provide practical insights into how digital twins can transform your organisation’s operations and drive future innovation.

Belgium 12-12-25 Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

Everyone wants value for money. But in IT, that value is spread across infrastructure, software, services, and people. Your infra spend is creeping up. App maintenance is eating your budget. New development is exciting but comes with hidden overhead. And people costs, from operations to engineering, remain the largest, most overlooked slice. If you’re under pressure to optimise without compromise, this session brings the right questions, trade-offs, and shared lessons to the table.

Belgium 16-12-25 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table: Mastering Enterprise Service Management

This CIONET Round Table will focus on how the IT department can be the enabler that unlocks organisational efficiencies and helps to improve the employee experience. We will explore how CIOs and Digital Leaders can fundamentally transform the internal service experience by breaking down organizational silos, orchestrating complex cross-functional workflows, and leveraging a unified platform to deliver a truly frictionless experience for every employee.

December 12, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

January 13, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Moving Legacy Systems to the Cloud Efficiently : Balancing cost, risk, and continuity in complex migrations

Migrating legacy systems to the cloud remains one of the toughest balancing acts in IT. Every choice affects stability, cost, and trust at once, and what starts as a modernisation effort quickly turns into a negotiation between ambition and reality. Suddenly budgets rise, dependencies appear late, and timelines tighten as old architectures collide with new expectations. In the end, success depends on sequencing, ownership, and aligning business priorities with infrastructure limits, and not only on technical readiness. Making it work requires more than a plan on paper. Knowing which systems genuinely belong in the cloud, which can wait, and which should stay put shapes the entire roadmap and defines its success. Each refactoring decision sets the level of future flexibility, but it also drives cost and risk. The trade-offs between speed, sustainability, and resilience only become clear once migration begins and pressure builds. Let’s discuss how to plan migrations that stay on track, manage hidden dependencies, and handle downtime with confidence. Let’s also discuss how governance, testing, and vendor coordination keep progress visible and credible. Are you in? A closed conversation for those who turn cloud migration from a disruption into a long-term advantage.

January 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

AI-Driven Development: Redesigning workflows, responsibilities, and trust in the age of automation

AI coding assistants entered development teams quietly, but their impact grows by the day. What started as autocomplete now shapes architecture decisions, documentation, and testing. And when productivity gains are visible, so are new risks: security blind spots, uneven quality, and the slow erosion of shared standards. Teams move faster, but not always in the same direction. The challenge has become integration rather than adoption. And new questions have risen: how do you blend automation into established practices without losing oversight? When is human review still essential, and what should the rules of collaboration between developer and machine look like? As AI tools learn from proprietary code, where do responsibility and accountability sit? Let’s talk about how to redefine those workflows, balancing creativity with control, and protecting code quality in a hybrid human-AI environment. A closed conversation on where AI accelerates progress, where it introduces new debt, and how development culture must evolve to stay credible.

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Exscientia Uses Generative AI to Reimagine Drug Discovery

Exscientia uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the design-make-test-learn (DMTL) cycle to discover new therapies for patients quickly and relatively inexpensively.

“Using AWS, we reduce bottlenecks and accelerate the pipeline.”

David Hallett
Interim CEO and Chief Scientific Officer, Exscientia

Exscientia uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the design-make-test-learn (DMTL) cycle to discover new therapies for patients quickly and relatively inexpensively. Conventional drug discovery methods can take up to 15 years and cost over 2 billion dollars, with an average failure rate of 90–96 percent because scientists hunt for specific drug candidates among 10⁶⁰ bioavailable small molecules.

Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Exscientia’s innovative DMTL solution incorporates in silico design—using generative AI algorithms to design compounds in the cloud—and automated robots that make drug candidates in a lab. “We use generative AI to solve for efficiency and effectiveness,” says David Hallett, Exscientia’s interim CEO and chief scientific officer. “By predicting the molecular features of a safe and effective drug in silico, we minimize the number of costly experiments. Our platform, built in collaboration with the AWS team, is optimized for speed. We can repeat many DMTL learning loops, improving our drug candidates with every iteration.”

Using Generative AI for More Efficient Drug Discovery at Reduced Cost

Working backward from patient needs, Exscientia defines precise target product profiles (TPPs) that specify the complex combination of properties required by a well-tolerated and effective medicine. AI engineers design algorithms that generate panels of potential drug candidates to meet the TPPs. Active learning algorithms help expert designers to select a short list of drug candidates to synthesize in the lab, because they either move the TPPs forward or refine the models for future DMTL cycles.

Exscientia’s algorithms are trained on publicly available pharmacology data and proprietary in-house data generated from patient tissue samples, genomics, single-cell transcriptomics, and medical literature. By encoding data throughout the process and analyzing experimental results and previous design cycles, Exscientia can optimize upcoming design cycles and promote compound designs that are physically synthesizable. Using this synthesis-aware, iterative approach built on AWS, Exscientia makes 10 times fewer compounds than the industry average. “The idea is to iron out chemical liabilities to make safer and more effective drug candidates before we ever test them in patients,” says Hallett.

Exscientia has accelerated drug design by up to 70 percent while decreasing capital cost by 80 percent, compared with industry benchmarks. Using generative AI with other tools, Exscientia not only developed better drug candidates faster but also identified the right drug combinations to trial with patients in the clinic.

Cutting Time and Costs Using Automated Robotics to Make Better Medicines

Exscientia has incorporated cutting-edge chemistry synthesis and biology assay lab equipment with automation robots to avoid manual handling of lab equipment. Thus, its lab—orchestrated by AWS microservices—can operate 24/7 with minimal human supervision, “When our designs are ready, we can push a button, and within a few days, the robots are making the drug,” says Hallett. Maintaining extremely high levels of security and comprehensive disaster recovery, Exscientia will use this automated robotic capability to reduce the make and test timelines resulting from traditional offshore research contracts used across the industry.

As the company closes the loop with its robotic automation lab, it expects further productivity improvements. Data generated in the lab improves algorithmic predictions and speeds up DMTL cycles.

Introducing AI-Designed Molecules into Clinical Trials

Six molecules that Exscientia designed using AI have entered clinical trials. “Using AWS, we reduce bottlenecks and accelerate the pipeline,” says Hallett. “By switching on this highly integrated and automated DMTL loop, we can make drug candidates faster and more cost-effective.”

Technologies

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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.