Agenda

Agenda

Thursday, November 19, 2026

All times are listed in Eastern Standard Time.

Agenda

CIO Summit & Awards Canada

Thu, Nov 19

8:30AM

IBM Executive Breakfast

8:30AM

Registration, Breakfast & Networking

9:30AM

Welcome Remarks & Ice Breaker

9:50AM

IDC Keynote: Scaling AI for the Agentic Future: Closing the Enterprise Gaps

Enterprises have moved past AI pilots, but scaling agentic AI across the business exposes gaps in governance, talent, data readiness, and infrastructure. This keynote draws on IDC research to show where organizations are stalling and what the leaders are doing differently. CIOs and CTOs will leave with a practical framework for closing those gaps and a clearer view of what it takes to move autonomous, adaptive workflows from experiment to enterprise-wide value.

Bob Parker

Bob Parker

Senior Vice President, Enterprise Applications, Data Intelligence, Services, and Industry Research, IDC

10:20AM

Fireside Chat: Navigating the CIO Agenda – Strategy, Risk, and Growth

Today’s CIO is expected to modernize the technology estate, control costs, strengthen resilience, and drive growth, all at once and under rising scrutiny. This keynote examines how Canadian technology leaders are balancing those competing priorities, from sequencing modernization investments to managing cyber and third-party risk to funding innovation without losing financial discipline. Attendees will gain a clear lens for aligning technology strategy with business outcomes in an uncertain environment.

10:45AM

Networking Break, Business Meetings

11:25AM

Panel: Driving Adaptive and Responsible Innovation

CIOs are under pressure to adopt emerging technologies quickly while keeping governance, cost, and risk firmly in check. This keynote offers an innovation roadmap that treats speed and responsibility as complementary rather than competing goals. Attendees will hear how leading organizations build adaptive operating models, set guardrails that enable experimentation rather than block it, and tie new technology investments to measurable business value and long-term trust.

12:00PM

Discussion Table: Modernizing Legacy Without Disruption: Using GenAI to Accelerate Transformation

12:00PM

Discussion Table: Building the Business Case for an AI Factory: Infrastructure, Cost, and Sovereignty

12:00PM

Discussion Table: Cyber Resilience When AI Expands the Attack Surface

12:00PM

Discussion Table: Third-Party and Supply Chain Risk: Mapping the Dependencies You Don’t See

12:00PM

Discussion Table: AI-Ready Infrastructure

12:00PM

Discussion Table: From Alert Noise to Self-Healing IT: Putting Predictive and Agentic AI into Operations

12:40PM

Networking Lunch

1:40PM

Fireside Chat: Delegating Outcomes: Trusted Agentic IT Operations

As AI agents move from assisting with investigation to taking on operational responsibility, trust becomes an architectural requirement. But trust is personal—what one operator, team, or enterprise is willing to delegate may differ from another, and that trust must be earned over time.
This session explores how identity, role-based authority, memory, governance, and assurance enable enterprises to safely delegate operational work to AI agents. Learn how agents can understand their remit, operate within defined boundaries, recognize when not to act, validate outcomes, and escalate when situations exceed their authority. Through progressive autonomy, capability grants, tiered permissions, guardrails, and auditable behavior, enterprises can expand delegation at their own pace—from recommendation to bounded autonomous action.
The result is trusted agentic operations where autonomy expands as confidence and evidence are earned.
Casey Kindiger

Casey Kindiger

CEO, Droma (formerly Grokstream)

1:50PM

Fireside Chat: The Leadership Dividend: Competing Beyond Technology in the Agentic Era

As AI becomes embedded across every industry, access to technology is no longer the primary differentiator. The next competitive frontier lies in how organizations translate AI investments into sustainable business advantage.
While many enterprises remain focused on deployment and productivity gains, leading organizations are asking a more strategic question:
How do you create lasting differentiation when everyone has access to the same AI capabilities?
This fireside discussion will explore the leadership imperatives shaping the next era of enterprise transformation, including talent readiness, organizational adaptability, trusted governance, ecosystem partnerships and decision velocity. As AI evolves from a technology initiative into a core business capability, leaders must build organizations that can continuously learn, adapt and innovate at scale.
Aligned with IDC’s focus on the rise of agentic systems, the conversation will examine how executive leadership, culture and talent strategies will determine which organizations realize disproportionate value from AI and emerge as market leaders.
Dave Chopra

Dave Chopra

Executive Vice President – Country Head Canada, HCLTech

2:00PM

Lightning Insight

2:05PM

End-User Case Study: Regulated, Not Restricted: How Compliance-Heavy Industries Are Scaling AI

Terry Hickey, Chief Technology Officer at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), shares how his organization is bringing AI into a highly regulated environment where trust, data protection, and fiduciary responsibility come first. He explores how OTPP balances innovation with regulatory expectations, which governance practices have helped move AI from pilot to production, and where compliance requirements have shaped technology decisions. Attendees will leave with practical lessons for scaling AI with confidence in their own compliance-heavy industries.

Terry Hickey

Terry Hickey

Chief Technology Officer, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan

2:40PM

Networking Break, Business Meetings (1:1 Window C)

3:20PM

Discussion Table: Physical AI: Robotics, Digital Twins, and IT/OT Convergence in Operations

3:20PM

Discussion Table: Software in the Agent Era: Rethinking SaaS Portfolios, Pricing, and Vendor Contracts

3:20PM

Discussion Table: Developer Experience in the AI Era: Platform Engineering and AI Coding Assistants

3:20PM

Discussion Table: Beyond the Datacenter: Edge, Network, and Connectivity for Distributed Operations

3:20PM

Discussion Table: Model and Platform Strategy: Hyperscaler, SaaS-Embedded, or Open Models, and How to Avoid Lock-In

3:20PM

Discussion Table: Closing the AI Adoption Gap: Change Management for the Business, Not Just IT

4:05PM

IDC Q&A Panel: AI & Data in 2030 – What Leaders Must Prepare For​

AI and data will fundamentally redefine competitive dynamics, business models, and workforce expectations. Leaders must anticipate disruptive technological shifts, invest in adaptive strategies, and cultivate organizational resilience to harness the full potential of an AI-driven future.

Ashish Nadkarni

Ashish Nadkarni

Group Vice President and General Manager, Global Domain Lead, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC

Stephen Elliot

Stephen Elliot

Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC

Tony Olvet

Tony Olvet

Group Vice President, Worldwide C-Suite and Buyer Insights Research, IDC

Megha Kumar

Megha Kumar

Research Vice President, Analytics & AI, IDC

Sarah Lee

Sarah Lee

Senior Research Director, Manufacturing – AI, Platforms, and Technologies, IDC

Bob Parker

Bob Parker

Senior Vice President, Enterprise Applications, Data Intelligence, Services, and Industry Research, IDC

4:45PM

Networking Cocktail Reception

4:45PM

Raffle Winner Announcements & Closing Remarks

6:00PM

Awards Gala Dinner