45th CIO Insight Summit

In Future on Fire: Igniting Innovation with Intent, Rob Piascik, SVP, Chief Information & Technology Officer, sets the stage for a candid and energizing exploration of what it means to lead technology organizations at a moment when the pace of change is accelerating faster than ever. As CIOs stand at the fire line, they are no longer simply stewards of systems—they are now the ignition source for innovation, resilience, and organizational reinvention. The keynote challenges technology leaders to rethink their role: moving from reactive operators to strategic firestarters who intentionally choose what to ignite, what to contain, and what to let burn. With artificial intelligence reshaping the boundaries of efficiency, creativity, and risk, the modern CIO must blend courage with discipline, pairing bold experimentation with clear-eyed governance. By examining these forces, Rob frames the urgent mindset shift required to lead through volatility—and positions AI-powered leadership as the cornerstone of competitive advantage in an era defined by both unprecedented opportunity and pervasive disruption.

Building directly on The Catalyst, partner-led working sessions move each stream from diagnosis to design; shaping the practical, prioritised blueprint each theme will carry into execution.

Track 1: From Project to Product: Rewiring IT for Continuous Value
Track 2: Engineering Resilience: Estates That Bend Without Breaking
Track 3: Spending Smarter: A FinOps Playbook for Defensible Tech Investment
Track 4: Cutting the Cord on Legacy: A Modernization Strategy That Pays Its Way

The shift from basic AI assistants to autonomous agents is reshaping the enterprise, turning passive tools into scalable workflows. Real advantage emerges when intelligence is grounded in an organization’s unique, proprietary content. As leaders move beyond early experiments, the priority becomes breaking down silos and establishing governance that ensures agents operate on a reliable foundation.

Join this session to learn how to:

- Prioritize measurable growth beyond LLM hype
- Connect content to unlock meaningful AI performance
- Understand the monetary and labor opportunity costs of AI transformation

AI is rewriting what it means to lead, not just what it means to adopt. In this main-stage keynote interview, Rajvir Madan, CIO & CDIO of Arcutis Biotherapeutics, explores the competencies and principles that separate the leaders who deliver from those who stall. Drawing on his lived experience defining and securing board approval for an enterprise AI strategy, and on the thesis of his forthcoming book The Decision-Outcome Divide, Rajvir confronts an uncomfortable truth: roughly 75% of transformation efforts fail to convert bold decisions into real outcomes.

Expect a candid, practical conversation on closing that gap and explore a new operating model for the CIO, bringing an anxious workforce along through change, and the mindset shifts required to lead, rather than merely react, in the age of AI.

The deadline every board had circled has moved. High-risk obligations under the EU AI Act slipped to December 2027, transparency duties landed on schedule this month, and the net effect for most life sciences organizations has been a governance program that quietly lost its urgency while adoption carried on at full speed. Agents are being wired into discovery and clinical workflows, commercial teams are using whatever tool loads fastest, and in a validated environment the bill for finding out late is paid in remediation rather than embarrassment. Led by the CIO of a leading biotech, this session cuts through to the question the delay has left unanswered: who actually owns AI once it stops being a project and becomes infrastructure. Participants will leave with a clear view of where accountability sits across IT, quality, legal and the business; a practical approach to surfacing shadow AI without extinguishing the initiative behind it; and an operating model that lets adoption accelerate and audits stay dull.

Every AI roadmap eventually collides with the same uncomfortable truth: the model is only as good as the data feeding it, and most enterprise data still lives fragmented across business lines, legacy systems and decades of acquired infrastructure.

This round table tackles the practical, structural work of getting a fragmented data estate aligned before AI can meaningfully act on it. We'll explore where data ownership breaks down across business functions, what it actually takes to reconcile systems that were never built to talk to each other, and how to sequence that work without stalling the AI initiatives already running ahead of it.

Most AI rollouts still lean on top-down mandates, dashboards and compliance-driven usage targets - and most still struggle to get real adoption. This round table starts from a different data point: a workforce where 90-95% of staff use their AI assistant every week, driven entirely by culture rather than a mandate, with usage depth still climbing month over month.

The discussion explores what happens when an AI assistant stops being a tool people are told to use and starts being treated as an active team member on real transactions - and what that shift reveals about the personalization, trust and habit-forming design that separates genuine adoption from a rollout that technically works.

Enterprises have moved past experimentation. The money now going into AI is serious, and boards expect serious returns, yet most technology leaders are still working out how to prove them. This closed-door roundtable, led by Sugato Bose, Chief Enterprise Architect at Medline, tackles the three questions that decide whether an AI programme compounds or stalls: how to structure big-play AI investments so measurable ROI is designed in from the start rather than hunted for afterwards; how to get a grip on tokenomics, understanding, forecasting and controlling the consumption-based economics that can quietly turn a successful use case into a runaway cost line; and how to translate all of it into the language a board funds, so the business case for the next phase of investment writes itself. Participants will benchmark openly with peers under the Chatham House Rule and leave with practical approaches they can apply to their own AI investment cases immediately.

Scaling a single platform across borders collides with a thicket of data, regulatory and operational realities. This session explores how to expand globally while keeping control, balancing standardisation with local requirements on sovereignty, compliance and performance. Leave with practical principles for a global platform that scales without fragmenting or spiralling out of control.

We've optimized our tooling, our architectures, and our threat models, but the biggest untapped advantage in IT leadership isn't technical, it's human. In this radical-perspective keynote, Jason Stockinger draws on 21 years in the military and a parallel career as a corporate CISO to make the case that the leaders who win aren't the ones with the best stack, but the ones who can read, align and unleash people others overlook.

Jason shares hard-won, real-world lessons on three fronts: turning the natural CISO–CIO tension into genuine synergy rather than turf war; building high-performing teams from often-misjudged talent pools, including veterans and neurodivergent professionals; and earning the boardroom's trust by talking outcomes and ROI instead of fear. Expect a candid, human, occasionally uncomfortable look at the leadership habits that quietly make or break security programmes and a set of practical moves each attendee can take back to their own teams and executive relationships.

Exiting the mainframe is one of the most daunting (and most deferred) decisions a CIO can make. This session tells the story of a multi-year legacy exit that actually delivered ROI, with the strategy, sequencing and hard choices that made it work. Leave with a credible blueprint for tackling your own legacy exit and proving the return.

The culmination of the mission-track journey: streams come together to separate what’s real from what’s noise, and to lock in the concrete commitments each theme carries back to the business. The output every delegate leaves with.

Track 1: From Project to Product: Rewiring IT for Continuous Value
Track 2: Engineering Resilience: Estates That Bend Without Breaking
Track 3: Spending Smarter: A FinOps Playbook for Defensible Tech Investment
Track 4: Cutting the Cord on Legacy: A Modernization Strategy That Pays Its Way

Nearly every enterprise now has AI tools; very few have captured real value. That gap is the defining CIO challenge of the agentic era, and it isn't closed by buying more tools, but by rewiring the organization around them. As Gaurav Singal, EVP & CTO of ConstructConnect, puts it: a productivity tool makes you faster at what you already did; an agent changes what you do.

In this keynote, Gaurav shares a candid practitioner's account from the front line of one of the vertical software leaders inside Roper Technologies' portfolio, including an organisation that compressed a quarter's innovation into a 33-hour agentic build, and production agents that turn hours of expert work into seconds. He'll show why agentic AI most rewards incumbents with proprietary data, embedded workflows and hard-won trust, and give CIOs a pragmatic playbook: how to tell agents from tools, where value actually accrues, and how to govern and monetize agents so AI spend converts into growth rather than stalled pilots.