null

Belgium 27-8-26 AB Members Physical english

Summer Festival: Advisory Board

CIO agendas are crowded: cost pressure, cyber, regulation, talent, data, AI, vendor dependency, business expectations. Most organisations are trying to do too much at once, and the “must-do” work often blocks the strategic work. CIONET only creates value if its agenda matches what CIOs truly need, in the right format, at the right time. The challenge Pick the few priorities that matter most for 2027, then translate them into a clear CIONET agenda. Outcome we leave with A ranked CIO agenda for 2027, and a directly aligned CIONET programme outline (themes, formats, cadence), with a shortlist of speaker and case targets.

Belgium 27-8-26 Country Members Physical english

Summerfest: From Story to Habit

How to align people, shift routines, and prove value Technology transformations often fail not because the tools don’t work, but because people don’t change their work habits. Boards want proof of value, executives want business outcomes, IT wants clarity, and employees want ease. Between these expectations, the CIO’s role is no longer just to deliver platforms; it is to tell the story that motivates people and turn that story into daily habits. This session will explore: The narrative: how to craft a simple, repeatable story that explains the “why” behind change for every stakeholder. From story to routine: practical ways to embed new behaviours through manager rituals, team incentives, and visible leadership. Reskilling and new expectations: preparing teams for evolving roles, from cross-department collaboration to AI-enhanced workflows. Measuring what matters: showing progress in speed, quality, and resilience — not just in licences bought or trainings completed. The aim is to equip CIOs with a leadership toolkit: a story that unites, habits that endure, and proof that convinces even the toughest boardroom.

Belgium 8-9-26 Invitation Only Virtual english

What an AI Architect Actually Does in Practice; Skills, responsibilities, interfaces, and career moves behind one of the most misunderstood emerging roles.

The AI architect role is becoming more visible, and the scope varies across organisations. The challenge is defining what the role owns, where it sits, and how it works with existing architecture, data, security, risk, and business teams. Three pressure points need clarity. - Role definition matters because the position can span solution architecture, data architecture, governance, integration, security, vendor selection, and business process design. - Interfaces matter because the role must connect teams while respecting existing responsibilities. - Skills matter because technical depth needs to be combined with judgement around controls, delivery choices, and operational boundaries. The working question is simple: how do we define the AI architect role so it becomes useful, credible, and connected to delivery? If this role is emerging in your organisation, let’s compare how others are defining it and where they are placing it.

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

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.”

Partners

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.