EMEA CEOs have high expectations for AI – one-third foresee entirely new operating models, and 15% expect unprecedented market behaviors within 3-5 years. Yet only 9% of European organizations report measurable results from most AI initiatives. Progress is slowed by resource competition, regulatory uncertainty, ROI challenges, and unclear use cases. This keynote explores how CIOs can build strong foundations for an outcome-driven, agentic AI future.

In today’s world of rapid technological advancement and geopolitical disruption, sovereignty has become one of the most critical topics on the CIO agenda. It is far more than a single, isolated issue — it is inherently multidisciplinary, shaping strategic direction while enabling effective risk management.

CIOs are ultimately responsible for execution – and this is entirely achievable. Robust technical solutions across these domains already exist and are readily available.

Looking ahead, another key topic emerging on the CIO agenda is self-driving IT: systems powered by agentic AI that increasingly serve and operate IT itself. This represents an irreversible shift and a defining direction for the future of IT.

Professionals across industries are in search for solutions to effectively prevent fraud while ensuring legitimate customers never feel the friction of fraud prevention. This requires combatting account takeover, unauthorized access, and new account fraud by integrating fraud prevention directly into the user journey. Many times, this involves incorporating friction when and where it is needed by building adaptive user journeys that evaluate and act on risk signals at key points such as registration, login, profile management, and transaction (either payment, check-out or subscription activation).

One of the hardest balancing acts the CIO must accomplish is supporting enterprise AI adoption and innovation while securing systems and data in line with the organization’s risk appetite. What forces are driving enterprise security strategy and how can the CIO ensure that it aligns with the organization’s business goals? This IDC keynote will provide insights from global and European research into the key security and trust considerations on the CIO’s agenda.

(v) – speed is a derived physical quantity that describes the motion of an object, and at the same time it is the most critical factor in defending against Agentic AI cyberattacks. How can we increase internal resilience, accelerate defense, and simultaneously slow down AI attackers? We will explore this from the perspective of the VCF 9 platform.

We live in the age of AI. Every company is talking about leveraging AI, and most have at least a few tentative attempts at integrating it into their business processes behind them. At the same time, we observe that very few are able to step out of the shadow of PoC and make AI an integral part of their business. In this talk, we will introduce 3 fundamental pillars that help companies achieve a functional and long-term sustainable AI solution.