Why Attend
The CIO Summit is your gateway to mastering the evolving role of CIOs in today’s digital landscape. This premier event brings together top industry experts to delve into crucial topics that are reshaping the role of IT leaders and their impact on organizational success.
What Will You Gain?
The IDC CIO Summit is where technology meets transformation. Designed for forward-thinking CIOs, this premier event delivers actionable insight, peer connection, and expert guidance to help you lead with confidence in an AI-first, rapidly evolving digital economy. It’s more than a conference – it’s a strategic forum to sharpen your edge, align IT with business outcomes, and explore how resilient, intelligent architectures can power sustainable innovation. Step into the next chapter of digital leadership with the research, tools, and community that will help you navigate what’s next.
Strategic Leadership Insights
Discover how today’s CIOs are stepping up as enterprise strategists – shaping boardroom agendas and driving business value. As IT evolves from a support function to a source of competitive advantage, this session offers essential insight into the leadership mindset, influence, and alignment required to navigate complex change with confidence.
Balancing Act
Learn how today’s CIOs are blending deep technical expertise with strategic business insight to lead transformation from the front. This session explores how to translate tech fluency into enterprise impact – aligning innovation with measurable outcomes, influencing stakeholders, and building trust across the C-suite.
Pragmatic IT Strategies
Get clear on when to build, when to buy – and how to make the right call for long-term agility and value. This session dives into practical decision frameworks that help CIOs balance cost, complexity, and innovation, turning IT strategy into a catalyst for smarter, faster business outcomes.
Resource Optimization
Discover how leading CIOs are making every euro count – streamlining IT spend, reallocating resources, and unlocking capacity for innovation. This session shares actionable strategies to reduce waste, optimize budgets, and reinvest in digital initiatives without disrupting core operations.
Leveraging Emerging Technologies
Explore how CIOs are turning emerging tech into real enterprise advantage. From AI to machine learning and beyond, this session highlights how to move from experimentation to execution – using innovation to accelerate growth, sharpen competitiveness, and lead with confidence.
AI and GenAI from hype to impact
Cut through the noise and unlock real results. This session explores how CIOs are scaling AI and GenAI beyond pilots – embedding intelligence into operations, driving measurable outcomes, and turning innovation into enterprise value.
Expert Strategies and Real-World Applications
Gain trusted insight from those leading the way. This session brings together industry experts and seasoned CIOs to share proven strategies, emerging trends, and practical lessons from the field – all to help you lead with clarity, accelerate transformation, and deliver real business results.
As CIOs across the Adriatics take on a more strategic role, the pressure is clear: deliver innovation, ensure compliance, and prove business value – all at once. This Summit brings together the insight, frameworks, and peer perspectives needed to navigate that complexity with confidence.
Here’s why you should attend:
- Lead as a Business Strategist: explore how CIOs are evolving into enterprise leaders – aligning IT with business goals, influencing boardroom decisions, and driving measurable outcomes.
- Modernize with Purpose: learn how to reduce technical debt, simplify legacy environments, and build agile, future-ready architectures that support innovation and efficiency.
- Scale AI with Confidence: move beyond experimentation. Discover how to operationalize AI and Agentic AI responsibly, closing the gap between ambition and real business impact.
- Build Resilience by Design: understand how to embed security, compliance, and continuity into your IT strategy – strengthening your organization against disruption and evolving regulatory demands.
- Strengthen Trust and Sovereignty: navigate cybersecurity, data protection, and EU regulations such as NIS2 and the AI Act, turning compliance into a competitive advantage.
- Unlock the Power of Data and Ecosystems: create strong data foundations and leverage partnerships to accelerate innovation, improve decision-making, and scale transformation across your organization.
From expert-led sessions to real-world case studies and peer discussions, the IDC CIO Summit Adriatics 2026 is more than an event – it’s your roadmap to navigate complexity, lead with confidence, and turn technology into a true business advantage.
Key Topics
The CIO as a Business Strategist
How can CIOs align technology strategy with business outcomes and influence board-level decision-making to drive measurable enterprise value?
Modernization and Technical Debt
How can CIOs reduce legacy complexity and technical debt to unlock agility, optimize costs, and accelerate innovation?
Agentic AI and the Future of Enterprise Intelligence
How can CIOs move from AI experimentation to scalable, responsible adoption of Agentic AI that drives real business impact?
Cybersecurity, Trust, and Digital Sovereignty
How can CIOs strengthen cyber resilience, ensure compliance with evolving EU regulations, and build trust in an increasingly interconnected ecosystem?
Resilience by Design
How can organizations build adaptive, secure, and future-ready architectures that withstand disruption and support continuous transformation?
Data Foundations for the Intelligent Enterprise
How can CIOs create trusted, governed data environments that enable AI, automation, and smarter decision-making at scale?
Knowledge Hub
The Dynamic Role of the EMEA CIO: Steering the Digital Ship
In the digital business and AI-everywhere era, technology is now a strategic enabler that permeates every aspect of business operations. According to IDC’s Worldwide CEO Survey (February 2024, n = 67), 48% of CEOs in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) now report regularly to the board on the status of digital initiatives, highlighting the strategic nature of digital technologies among businesses.
5 Lessons to Shape Your AI Digital Future: Learning from the Past
A little over a year ago, a new phase of the digital business era began with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT. The generative AI (GenAI) boom is expected to roundly influence what comes next: AI Everywhere. AI is expected to become a driving force of our digital future, impacting individual lives, consumers, citizens, workers, businesses, and society.
Henry Ford said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” What should we learn from the past to determine the way forward?
A Tech Marketer’s Guide in the Age of GenAI – Crafting Unique Narratives
In today’s digital landscape, where AI can churn out content in seconds, marketers face a unique challenge: How can we create narratives that stand out? Let’s explore strategies for crafting compelling and differentiated stories in the era of generative AI (GenAI).
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