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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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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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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.

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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 !

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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.