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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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Facilitating more effective collaboration for the NATO Standardisation Office

PwC’s AI-based solution enables the NSO to address its community more broadly to bring together divergent national views more easily.

Facilitating collaboration

The NATO Standardization Office (NSO) supports a diverse subject matter expert workforce, about 20,000 of whom are registered users on its website, where it provides the collaboration services that enable them to work together on about 1,400 NATO standardization documents that are used by about seven million professionals in 32 nations across the entire NATO alliance to protect a population of one billion. Maintaining this documentation was very labour intensive, as much was done manually. The custodian position also isn’t a full-time role, but a volunteer assignment. To see where artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to help NSO issued a request for proposal (RFP).

Looking to innovate

Explains Rob Trabucchi, Deputy Director, NSO, “We were looking to provide that volunteer part-time workforce with tools to help them make the most of all the information available to them in today's information age. While they have much more information available to make those documents better, at the same time, they can be flooded by that information. So, we needed tools like natural language processing and text analytics to help them manage it all, make the most of it and really make their jobs much more satisfying.”

Seeking reliability

When looking for a provider, NSO had some specific attributes in mind, namely, "someone who really had experience with AI tools and delivering those to a customer like us, an intergovernmental organisation,” Rob Trabucchi recalls. And he adds, we also wanted someone with “experience working with NATO, which would really help to accelerate the product, and third, and perhaps the most important, we were looking for reliability.”

“We had real two-way interaction and outside-the-box thinking with multiple people so we could have a broad interaction.”

Rob TrabucchiDeputy Director, NSO.

Broad interaction

In answer to the RFP, PwC suggested ways in which AI could help meet NSO’s needs and how the technology could best be implemented to be beneficial. We not only had the experience in working with NATO that the NSO was looking for, but could add in business insights based on our broad experience. Enthuses Rob Trabucchi, “There are three things that I really liked about the interactions that I had with the PwC team. The first was that we had very frequent meetings, which meant that we had short intense sprints. I understand that takes a lot more effort. The second thing that I liked about it was that we had real two-way interaction and outside-the-box thinking with multiple people from the team in each meeting, so we could have a good broad interaction. And finally, the team really invested a lot of effort, making sure that everything was in place throughout the deployment of the tool. That took some time to follow up and showed real dedication and reliability.”

Leading the way to the future

The project involved a lot of technical building blocks, including building a prototype to show how a chatbot could help work on the standards in scope and indicate where standards, and related standards, could be found. According to Rob Trabucchi, “the value of this project goes well beyond the NSO to the 20,000 plus workforce. It allowed us, as their primary service provider, to demonstrate to that we’re leading them into the future and providing them with modern services that directly address their needs. It also allowed us to learn from the feedback of our users and pick some of our most dedicated people, who can also be the most demanding, and really deliver a tool that allows them to teach us how to build the next generation of tools.”

Deep thought and good advice

Rob Trabucchi notes that NSO learned a lot from the project. “First of all, reaching out to the community was extremely valuable to us and I think we learned that we want to do more of that. We’d like to spread that out to more as we go forward to more users of diverse types. We also learned that we really have to plan ahead because NATO, as an organisation, is all about bringing together a really diverse set of national views, and that makes our decision making a very deliberate process, a consultative process, which takes time. The third thing we learned is that that consultative, deliberate process has to be balanced or somehow integrated with dynamic innovation, and that takes some real deep thought and good advice.”

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