Executive Summit

Leading transformation demands more than adapting to change—it requires a deep understanding of self and the courage to redefine what leadership means. Michelle Mangiapane, CIO of Palm Gruppe, shares her story of rebuilding from the ground up, and how inner clarity and personal values empower leaders and their teams to navigate uncertainty and make bold decisions. After all, those who want to navigate must be able to lead themselves – especially in rough waters.

Join this session to delve into:

• Why knowing and leading yourself is essential before you can lead others
• How values and attitude provide orientation in times of upheaval
• What decision-makers need to boldly take new paths

By 2028, Gartner predicts that 15% of daily business decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents — creating new risk surfaces with direct operational impact. CIOs and CISOs must extend resilience practices to agentic AI by quantifying agent risk, capturing and monitoring agent activity, and preparing recovery playbooks that reverse unauthorized or harmful agent actions. This holistic approach ensures workflows remain intact, data integrity is preserved and business continuity is upheld — even when AI agents misstep.

Join this session to learn:

• How to set resilience standards for AI agents to align with enterprise risk
• Proven strategies for detecting and containing rogue or unintended AI behavior
• Playbooks for rapid rollback and business continuity when AI disrupts workflows

As AI investment surges, organisations find themselves caught between ambitious pilots and the challenge of scaling to production. The barriers to progress are less about technology and more about business dilemmas, organisational readiness, and the pace of change that renders traditional planning obsolete.

Join this session to learn:

• How to empower and lead an AI-enabled workforce amid competing priorities and organisational change
• Practical strategies for embracing the AI development lifecycle and overcoming non-technical barriers
• Approaches to measure, prove, and maximise AI ROI for business impact

Today’s CIOs and CISOs face converging pressures—from geopolitical tensions to personal liability—as they steer their organisations through rapid technological and regulatory change. Success now depends on close collaboration, shared accountability, and a unified approach to risk, resilience, and innovation.

In this boardroom, you’ll discuss how to:

• Build collaborative partnerships across the business
• Refocus teams through automation and integrated data
• Govern AI adoption with trust and human oversight

CISOs are expected to project certainty in an environment where adversaries have never moved faster. AI is actively lowering the barrier to sophisticated attacks, and boards are demanding reassurance — often before the full picture is clear. The real question is no longer whether threats can be detected, but whether security leaders have the cross-domain visibility, automated and agentic response and threat intelligence needed to outpace adversaries.

In this boardroom you will explore:

• Closing AI-driven blind spots across endpoints, cloud and identities before adversaries exploit them
• Responding at speed—when breakout times are minutes, not hours—to protect business outcomes
• Translating threat intelligence into actionable business risks for executive and board confidence

Transforming today’s industry-leading companies for the future, in a landscape fuelled by AI, is a journey that requires synchronised leadership, modern data foundations, an adaptive culture and a bold reimagining of IT. Enterprises that excel in this orchestration will unlock new levels of productivity, personalisation, operational excellence and competitive advantage.

Join this boardroom to discuss:

• How will IT evolve from support function to strategic innovation partner?
• What operating model changes are needed to scale new AI capabilities across the enterprise?
• How will this era reshape CIOs’ roles and create opportunities to shape organisational futures?

In a world defined by volatility and constant transformation, resilience is essential for CIOs and CISOs—both for themselves and their organisations. Yet, personal resilience remains an often overlooked and difficult topic to address openly in leadership circles. Navigating high-pressure roles means knowing where to focus your energy, building habits that separate work from life, and learning to let go of what you cannot control. 

Join Sascha Brock, SVP CISO, DHL & Lale Kof, Head of Information Technology, Digital at Clariant as they share their personal stories and strategies on:

• Navigating personal resilience, including setting boundaries, rituals and realistic expectations
• Fostering resilient teams through mentorship, support and a growth mindset
• Embedding resilience as a core value—shifting from just preventing setbacks to helping people and organisations recover, adapt and thrive

As investment in AI and agentic AI accelerates, CIOs face mounting pressure to balance innovation with long-term cost and dependency risks. With organisations increasingly reliant on hyperscaler platforms, the next wave of adoption could create unprecedented vendor lock-in and spiralling expenses—challenges far more complex than those seen in the cloud era.

Join this boardroom to explore:

• The hidden costs and commercial models shaping adoption
• Risks of vendor lock-in and lack of interoperability among major platforms
• Strategies to ensure informed decision-making and proactive management of future expenses

This year, Gartner predicts 70% of boards will expect CISOs to operate as strategic business partners rather than technical gatekeepers. The CISO role is rapidly expanding: no longer just writing policies or securing IT, but collaborating across product teams, embedding security in DevSecOps and designing resilience from the ground up.

Join this boardroom to discuss:

• Leveraging business acumen to influence decisions at the highest level
• Embedding security into products, processes and organisational culture
• Building a holistic strategy that safeguards people, assets and business continuity

In an era defined by rapid innovation, the most pressing challenges for CIOs and CISOs are not just technological—they are fundamentally about leadership. As expectations rise and change accelerates, technology leaders must provide clarity, direction and stability amid uncertainty. The challenge is leading organisations by shaping strategy, governance and culture in equal measure.

Join this keynote with Dr. René Deist, Chief Digital and Information Officer at EnBW as he shares his experience on:

• Shaping the space between stability and openness—balancing order and adaptability
• Enduring complexity and turning trust into meaningful action
• Building decision-making systems that enable responsible, human-centred leadership