For more than 25 years, Luise Bang has led transformation in some of the Europe’s most complex industries — rail, defence, aerospace, energy and telecom — serving on executive committees at Bombardier, Airbus Defence & Space, MHI Vestas and Vodafone. Now shifting into a portfolio of board roles, she brings a unique perspective on strategic clarity, organisational resilience and leadership under pressure. In this opening keynote, Luise argues that strategic shifts are never elegant or comfortable — but they are essential. Technology doesn’t create transformation; leaders do. CIOs today hold the real power to shape the next decade by removing ambiguity, driving alignment and leading with courage.

Expect a keynote that is bold, honest and energising — and a call to action for CIOs to lead with courage, clarity, and conviction.

Frontier AI models can now find vulnerabilities, write working exploits and chain them into complete attack paths at machine speed – and the same capability is available to adversaries. Cisco has run these models against its own portfolio, analysing roughly 1.8 billion lines of code across more than 25 languages in eight weeks, work that would historically have taken years. Adele Trombetta and Chris Barnard discuss what changes when patching becomes a continuous operating rhythm rather than a quarterly project, why reachability matters more than severity score, and how CIOs build the investment case for infrastructure that can keep pace.

AI investment is accelerating, but enterprise value remains elusive. Most organizations struggle to translate AI activity into measurable business impact—not because the technology fails, but because the operating model doesn’t change. The strategic question has fundamentally shifted: organizations are no longer asking “How can AI help us work better?” but rather “What becomes possible now?” Agentic AI expands the entire option space for strategy and operations, unlocking new degrees of freedom. However, winners won’t be those who automate the most or bolt agents onto legacy systems. They’ll be those who reimagine the possible—who exploit the new strategic option space agentic AI creates and build the enterprise architecture to support transformational impact.

Building digital foundations that support AI at scale while remaining resilient, adaptable and ready for future business and technology change.