FutureTech Summit
Scaling AI Across Cloud and Enterprise Platforms
Architecting the Intelligent Enterprise
The IDC UK FutureTech Summit is the premier event for CTOs, IT architects, and technology leaders shaping the next era of enterprise IT. AI is no longer a side initiative, it’s becoming core to business growth.
Over half of CXOs expect revenue gains from AI, and 77% of CIOs rank implementation and scaling of AI as their top priority for 2026. To succeed, organizations must recalibrate, not just tools, but mindset, architecture, and leadership. This decisive pivot moves enterprises from isolated pilots to scaled deployments, demanding data, systems, and people ready to support autonomous, AI-driven operations. IDC research shows IT budgets for AI, cloud, and edge will rise to 15-30% by 2027, signaling a region-wide commitment to modernizing technology foundations and accelerating innovation.
Agenda
This event provides foresight into what’s next for Europe’s digital future, showcases IDC research and real-world innovations, and delivers practical frameworks to help leaders turn complexity into opportunity and build AI-ready, scalable, and sustainable digital ecosystems.
IDC Analysts
Archana Venkatraman
Archana Venkatraman is a Senior Director for IDC’s European Datacenter Research. She covers datacenter technologies including software-defined infrastructures, storage and data management, virtualization, containers, hyperconverged infrastructure, infrastructure performance monitoring, systems management, application development, and cloud services.
Archana also leads IDC’s European thought leadership program on open source technologies. She also contributes to European Digital Transformation, DevOps, Blockchain and IoT research practices.
Before joining IDC, Venkatraman was the datacenter editor at Computer Weekly, the digital magazine and website for IT professionals based in London, where she focused on datacenters, server virtualization, storage, open source technologies, software-defined infrastructures, and cloud computing, liaising with enterprise CIOs and technology vendors to develop deeper insight into the enterprise IT industry. Venkatraman has a master’s degree in journalism from Mumbai University.
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:55 am
Opening Panel Discussion: Data Resilience and Cyber-Preparedness in the AI Era
As AI transforms the enterprise landscape, organisations face a new generation of cyber risks alongside unprecedented opportunities for innovation. This panel will explore how businesses can strengthen data resilience, modernize cyber-preparedness strategies, and build trust in an increasingly AI-driven world. Industry leaders will discuss evolving threat vectors, the role of AI in both cyber defense and attack, regulatory and governance considerations, and practical approaches to safeguarding critical data and operations. Attendees will gain insights into how organizations can move beyond reactive security models toward resilient, adaptive frameworks fit for the AI era.
One Day Event 9:40 am
IDC Keynote: The AI Platform Imperative: Architecting for Scale, Speed, and Autonomy
In the fast-evolving AI economy, mastering platform innovation is key to unlocking transformative business value. This presentation offers a strategic roadmap for building AI-ready technology foundations and leadership capabilities. We’ll explore critical building blocks for scalable, secure AI workloads, followed by designing resilient cloud-native and hybrid infrastructures for sustainable AI innovation. Finally, we’ll examine the rise of agentic AI systems enabling autonomous decision-making across IT operations, governance, development, and observability. This presentation equips the C-suite and technology leaders to recalibrate their platform strategy and confidently lead their organizations into the AI economy.
Filippo Vanara
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:15 pm
Closing Panel: Designing AI-Native Architectures: Agility, Openness, and Resilience
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, traditional IT architectures are being reimagined to support the scale, speed, and complexity of AI-driven operations. This panel will explore what it means to design AI-native architectures that are agile, open, and resilient by design. Industry leaders will discuss strategies for integrating AI across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling interoperability through open ecosystems, modernising data and application infrastructures, whilst building resilience against evolving operational and security challenges.
One Day Event 3:55 pm
IDC Research Insight: Agentic AI: The Next Frontier in Automation and Orchestration
Agentic AI is emerging as the next evolution of enterprise automation, enabling intelligent systems to make decisions, coordinate actions, and execute complex workflows with increasing autonomy. This presentation will explore how organisations are leveraging agentic AI to transform orchestration across IT operations, business processes, customer engagement, and decision-making. IDC will present on the technologies driving this shift, including multi-agent systems, generative AI, and autonomous workflow management, as well as the opportunities and risks associated with greater AI autonomy. This presentation will also examine governance, trust, and operational considerations organizations must address to successfully scale agentic AI initiatives and unlock measurable business value.
Speakers
Ian Plummer
Ian Plummer leads customer engagement at Alkira, helping leaders transform their networks for the cloud and AI era. He partners with global enterprises to align technology with strategy, simplify operations, and unlock growth. With leadership experience at Capgemini and Orange Business Services, Ian brings a strong track record in digital transformation to ensure customers realise measurable outcomes from Alkira’s network-on-demand platform.
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:40 am
Why are we running our networks in physical colocations when our applications and data are increasingly situated in the cloud?
Enterprise networks were built for a different era of static data centres and predictable traffic, and they are struggling to keep pace with a business landscape that is multi-cloud, distributed, and constantly evolving.
This session shares real customer use cases showing why enterprise organisations are turning to Networking On Demand to modernise – and the business value they’re seeing in return: faster time to market, stronger resilience, and the flexibility to scale without being slowed down by infrastructure.
Ilkka Turunen
Ilkka Turunen is the Field CTO at Sonatype. His background is in software and systems engineering, acting as an architect for several commercial projects. He’s helped define everything from software design to webscale infrastructure architectures and regularly works with companies across the world to understand and improve their software supply chain and continuous delivery pipelines.
Nimmi Patel
Igor Kovalev
Shanthi Nachiappan
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:55 am
Opening Panel Discussion: Data Resilience and Cyber-Preparedness in the AI Era
As AI transforms the enterprise landscape, organisations face a new generation of cyber risks alongside unprecedented opportunities for innovation. This panel will explore how businesses can strengthen data resilience, modernize cyber-preparedness strategies, and build trust in an increasingly AI-driven world. Industry leaders will discuss evolving threat vectors, the role of AI in both cyber defense and attack, regulatory and governance considerations, and practical approaches to safeguarding critical data and operations. Attendees will gain insights into how organizations can move beyond reactive security models toward resilient, adaptive frameworks fit for the AI era.
Nick Beer
Tyler Lowe
Tyler Lowe helps organisations build workplaces that support their people to learn, grow and take care of their health and wellbeing. He’s the founder of Loving Life, a workplace wellbeing company he started in 2015, and he delivers programmes, workshops and keynotes on the mindset and habits that help people support their wellbeing and perform their best. His view is a simple one. When organisations provide the right support to look after their teams, they’re happier, healthier and more productive. Tyler is also a former ambassador for The King’s Trust, recognised by King Charles at Buckingham Palace for his business, Loving Life.
Naomi Garratt
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:15 pm
Closing Panel: Designing AI-Native Architectures: Agility, Openness, and Resilience
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, traditional IT architectures are being reimagined to support the scale, speed, and complexity of AI-driven operations. This panel will explore what it means to design AI-native architectures that are agile, open, and resilient by design. Industry leaders will discuss strategies for integrating AI across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling interoperability through open ecosystems, modernising data and application infrastructures, whilst building resilience against evolving operational and security challenges.
Dave Michels
Jean Carlos
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:55 am
Opening Panel Discussion: Data Resilience and Cyber-Preparedness in the AI Era
As AI transforms the enterprise landscape, organisations face a new generation of cyber risks alongside unprecedented opportunities for innovation. This panel will explore how businesses can strengthen data resilience, modernize cyber-preparedness strategies, and build trust in an increasingly AI-driven world. Industry leaders will discuss evolving threat vectors, the role of AI in both cyber defense and attack, regulatory and governance considerations, and practical approaches to safeguarding critical data and operations. Attendees will gain insights into how organizations can move beyond reactive security models toward resilient, adaptive frameworks fit for the AI era.
Ryan Preece
Heamanth Raina
Krishnan Chandrasekharan
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:15 pm
Closing Panel: Designing AI-Native Architectures: Agility, Openness, and Resilience
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, traditional IT architectures are being reimagined to support the scale, speed, and complexity of AI-driven operations. This panel will explore what it means to design AI-native architectures that are agile, open, and resilient by design. Industry leaders will discuss strategies for integrating AI across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling interoperability through open ecosystems, modernising data and application infrastructures, whilst building resilience against evolving operational and security challenges.
Dominic Redmond
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:55 am
Opening Panel Discussion: Data Resilience and Cyber-Preparedness in the AI Era
As AI transforms the enterprise landscape, organisations face a new generation of cyber risks alongside unprecedented opportunities for innovation. This panel will explore how businesses can strengthen data resilience, modernize cyber-preparedness strategies, and build trust in an increasingly AI-driven world. Industry leaders will discuss evolving threat vectors, the role of AI in both cyber defense and attack, regulatory and governance considerations, and practical approaches to safeguarding critical data and operations. Attendees will gain insights into how organizations can move beyond reactive security models toward resilient, adaptive frameworks fit for the AI era.
Graham O’Sullivan
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:55 am
Opening Panel Discussion: Data Resilience and Cyber-Preparedness in the AI Era
As AI transforms the enterprise landscape, organisations face a new generation of cyber risks alongside unprecedented opportunities for innovation. This panel will explore how businesses can strengthen data resilience, modernize cyber-preparedness strategies, and build trust in an increasingly AI-driven world. Industry leaders will discuss evolving threat vectors, the role of AI in both cyber defense and attack, regulatory and governance considerations, and practical approaches to safeguarding critical data and operations. Attendees will gain insights into how organizations can move beyond reactive security models toward resilient, adaptive frameworks fit for the AI era.
Duncan McTavish
Ray Stephens
Claire Lebarz
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:15 pm
Closing Panel: Designing AI-Native Architectures: Agility, Openness, and Resilience
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, traditional IT architectures are being reimagined to support the scale, speed, and complexity of AI-driven operations. This panel will explore what it means to design AI-native architectures that are agile, open, and resilient by design. Industry leaders will discuss strategies for integrating AI across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling interoperability through open ecosystems, modernising data and application infrastructures, whilst building resilience against evolving operational and security challenges.
Priti Mhatre
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:15 pm
Closing Panel: Designing AI-Native Architectures: Agility, Openness, and Resilience
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, traditional IT architectures are being reimagined to support the scale, speed, and complexity of AI-driven operations. This panel will explore what it means to design AI-native architectures that are agile, open, and resilient by design. Industry leaders will discuss strategies for integrating AI across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling interoperability through open ecosystems, modernising data and application infrastructures, whilst building resilience against evolving operational and security challenges.
Simon Lewis-Jones
Emma Datny
Emma is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Checkmarx, where she focuses on AI supply chain security, software supply chain security, and AppSec posture management. With a background in go-to-market for DevOps, trust & safety, and cybersecurity, she brings a sharp perspective on how the industry is evolving and what it means for the teams building and securing software today.
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:05 am
AI Can Scale Software Creation. Can You Scale Trust?
AI is transforming how software is created, tested and secured, enabling organisations to build at unprecedented speed and scale. But as development moves from AI-assisted to increasingly autonomous, a new challenge emerges: how do you trust what AI creates? This session explores why discovery alone is no longer enough, and what it takes to secure software at machine speed. We’ll examine how deterministic analysis and AI reasoning can work together to improve coverage and confidence, why context and prioritisation are critical to cutting through growing security noise, and why independent governance matters when AI is both writing and assessing code. As AI scales software creation, security must evolve from finding more vulnerabilities to providing the evidence, context and control needed to scale trust.
Mark Buss
Mike Mead
Mike Mead is Technical Director at Scale Factory, where he’s spent the last 12 years helping organisations undertake large scale cloud migration and transformation projects. He’s a certified AWS Solutions Architect Professional and has worked across the cloud ecosystem for over 15 years.
Thomas Barns
Thomas is a hands-on leader with 20+ years’ experience designing and scaling complex, mission-critical systems and the organisations that support them. He has led strategic programmes for clients across e-commerce, banking, and public infrastructure, including easyJet, Bread Financial and the NHS, scaling Covid testing capability to six million tests per day. He leads the design of services that unlock real value from cloud and AI investments helping clients reduce cost, improve reliability, and build capability in their teams.
Event Sessions
One Day Event 11:20 am
The AI Value Equation: How to stop it going wrong?
Demonstrating value from AI is hard. Scaling it is harder. As adoption grows, cost, performance and business outcomes start pulling in different directions, and most organisations lack a clear strategy to handle the trade-offs. Drawing on Capacitas’ work as a technology optimisation partner to a global travel platform and a leading consumer app, both operating at global scale, this session sets out the equations that will shape company growth in the AI era: where value leaks away, why it gets harder at scale, and what the organisations getting it right are doing differently.
James Cross
2026 Prediction
By 2027, 55% of G1000 CIOs will be tasked to create enterprise AI value playbooks, featuring expanded ROI models to define, measure, and showcase AI impact across efficiency, growth, and innovation.
Main Themes
AI-Ready Infrastructure Modernization
Strategies for upgrading legacy systems and building scalable, secure, and high-performance platforms for AI workloads.
Cloud-Native and Hybrid Architectures
Best practices for adopting cloud-native, hybrid, and multicloud environments to drive agility, resilience, and compliance.
Edge Computing for Real-Time Intelligence
Leveraging edge infrastructure for low-latency AI inferencing, operational efficiency, and data sovereignty.
Data Platforms and Integration
Building unified, secure data architectures that connect cloud, edge, and on-premises sources for real-time analytics and business value.
Responsible and Scalable AI Adoption
Frameworks for ethical AI governance, regulatory compliance (EUAI Act), and scaling AI from pilot to production.
Skills, Talent, and Change Management
Addressing the cloud and AI skills gap, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and driving successful transformation.
2026 Prediction
By 2027, G1000 organizations will face an up to 30% rise in underestimated AI infrastructure costs, driving CIOs to expand the scope of FinOps teams to optimize expenses and enhance business value.
Venue
etc.venues’s County Hall space is as stunning on the inside as it is on the outside, with over 68,000 sq ft of multi use event space over two floors for conferences, meetings and events.
In a great location with breathtaking views over The Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and the London Eye, its also only a few minutes away from Waterloo Station.
Knowledge Hub
Smarter Software Sourcing in the Age of AI
AI is reshaping more than operations — it’s redefining how organizations source software. CIOs now lead procurement strategies that demand speed, strategic alignment, and machine-augmented decision-making. In a world where every tool promises GenAI, smart sourcing is no longer tactical — it’s transformational.
Drive Growth for Your AI-Enabled Products
For marketers driving adoption of AI-enabled products, differentiation is no longer optional, it’s essential. To capture attention, build trust, and accelerate buyer decisions, you need a strategy that aligns sales activation, brand positioning, and customer engagement—at scale.
Responsible and Secure AI: The Key to AI-Fueled Growth
As Asia/Pacific businesses accelerate their digital transformation journeys, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a core innovation enabler. From identity and access management (IAM) to risk-based trust frameworks, AI is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape. However, as AI adoption grows, so do concerns around security, trust, and compliance.
The CIO Imperative: Six Priorities for the AI-Fueled Organization
Technology is no longer just an enabler – it transforms how organizations function, compete, and deliver value. Specifically, AI is now fundamentally changing business processes, operations, and experiences, something that presents CIOs with both challenges and opportunities. As a result, the role of the CIO and IT must evolve beyond an enabling function.
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