35th TechLeaders EU Summit

For decades IT was measured by uptime and budget discipline. In 2026, with AI reshaping every function and boards demanding measurable growth, that framing is a liability. This opening session reframes the CIO as a direct driver of revenue, margin and competitive advantage - not a cost to be contained. Through candid peer perspectives, it explores how leading IT leaders tie technology investment to outcomes the board genuinely values. You'll leave with a sharper narrative for elevating IT's mandate, practical ways to evidence its contribution to performance, and a benchmark of how your strategy compares across the room.

As a continuation of the Catalyst Mission track, these sessions will establish a strategic blueprint to chart the pathway toward identifying a solution.

Track 1: Prioritizing Transformation: Where to Invest, Where to Consolidate and Where to Stop
Track 2: Building the Resilient Digital Core: Infrastructure Strategies for the Next Five Years
Track 3: Preparing for the Next Major Incident: What High-Performing Security Teams Do Differently
Track 4: The Next Generation Operating Model: Faster Decisions, Better Delivery, Stronger Governance

Modernisation and risk usually pull in opposite directions = every migration, AI workload and new platform widens the attack surface just as Europe's regulatory bar rises under DORA and NIS2. This keynote confronts the central tension of 2026: how to modernise infrastructure fast enough to stay competitive without trading away resilience. It examines where modernisation genuinely reduces risk, and where it quietly amplifies it. You'll leave with a clearer model for sequencing modernisation around resilience rather than against it, practical guardrails for AI-era infrastructure, and a candid read on where your estate is most exposed.

Years of acquisitions, point solutions and pandemic-era buying have left most enterprises with sprawling, costly and fragile technology estates. As budgets tighten and AI demands clean foundations, rationalisation has become a strategic priority rather than a tidying exercise. This keynote shares how Europe's leading CIOs are cutting complexity - consolidating platforms, retiring redundant tools and reducing technical debt - without disrupting the business. You'll leave with a practical approach to identifying what to simplify first, the metrics that make the case to the board, and a benchmark of how your estate's complexity compares to your peers’.

Speed is now the defining competitive advantage - and it's only as fast as the foundations beneath it. Legacy architectures, fragmented data and brittle integration quietly cap how quickly the business can launch, scale and adopt AI. This session explores how modern IT foundations translate directly into faster, measurable business outcomes, not just technical elegance. It looks at what "modern" really means in 2026, and how to fund it amid competing priorities. You'll leave with a clearer link between foundational investment and business velocity, ways to prioritise the foundations that matter most, and a benchmark against peers further down the path.

Most enterprises are layering AI onto processes never designed for it. This keynote shares a different, hard-won approach: reinventing critical business processes to be AI-first and agentic from the ground up — across a sprawling, legacy-heavy landscape of dozens of entities and systems. Starting from value drivers rather than technology, it walks through a five-stage framework that maps each process, locates the real pain points, and defines where AI should run autonomously, augment people, or stay human — proving the model on two deliberate extremes before scaling. You'll leave with a practical blueprint for prioritising, governing and operationalising AI-first transformation that lasts

Security leaders face an impossible-sounding mandate: defend an expanding, AI-accelerated threat landscape while removing friction from a business that wants to move faster. With regulators raising the bar and attackers weaponising AI, cyber resilience can no longer come at the cost of speed. This keynote explores how leading CISOs are embedding resilience into the flow of the business making the secure path the fast path. You'll leave with practical approaches to reducing friction without reducing protection, a sharper way to communicate cyber risk in business terms, and a candid benchmark of how your resilience posture compares across the room.

Continuing your mission tracks, having built the blueprint we now enter the reckoning – a decisive phase where insights are rigorously challenged and crystallised into solution-led outcomes.

Track 1: Prioritizing Transformation: Where to Invest, Where to Consolidate and Where to Stop
Track 2: Building the Resilient Digital Core: Infrastructure Strategies for the Next Five Years
Track 3: Preparing for the Next Major Incident: What High-Performing Security Teams Do Differently
Track 4: The Next Generation Operating Model: Faster Decisions, Better Delivery, Stronger Governance

Most technology transformations don't fail at the vision stage — they fail in the gaps: between strategy and delivery, between the tech delivery and it’s adoption, between the business case and the value promised, between innovation and the security and integration realities that decide what actually reaches production at scale.

Drawing on E.ON's work transforming one of Europe's largest critical-infrastructure businesses, Susanne Ratezenberger shares the holistic, end-to-end framework her team built to close those gaps — treating transformation as a single coherent system spanning strategy, integration, delivery, security and measurable value realisation, not a portfolio of disconnected initiatives. For CIOs, CTOs and CISOs under pressure to convert transformation spend into demonstrable results, this is a candid practitioner's view of what separates the transformations that deliver from the ones that quietly stall.

Most infrastructure was built for yesterday's demands and now strains under AI workloads, data gravity and relentless change. This keynote sets out what genuinely future-ready infrastructure looks like in 2026 — and what separates the leaders engineering for it from the enterprises still firefighting. It examines the architectural choices, investment priorities and operating principles that make infrastructure an accelerant rather than a constraint. You'll leave with a clearer blueprint for where to modernise first, the signals that distinguish future-ready foundations from expensive complexity, and a candid benchmark of how your own infrastructure strategy compares to the leaders in the room.

Most IT operations still run on alerts, escalations and firefighting — a model that buckles as estates grow more complex and the business demands more speed. This keynote charts the shift from reactive to predictive operations, where AI, automation and observability anticipate failure before it hits users. It explores what it genuinely takes to make that leap in 2026, beyond the tooling hype. You'll leave with a practical view of where predictive approaches deliver the fastest return, how to build the data and capability foundations they depend on, and a benchmark of how your operations maturity compares across the room.