Insights from award-winning IT projects, presented by CIOs
2026 Agenda
Thursday, September 17
Exclusive photoshoot session for CIO 100 winners. Grab lunch, recharge, and connect with peers as you gear up for the day ahead before the conference content officially begins.
Start the day with an essential introductory briefing on the agenda before official proceedings begin.
For the past three years, the enterprise has been fueled by FOMO the frantic race to integrate every new LLM and pilot every emerging AI tool for fear of falling behind. But as we enter the era of “Agentic AI” and industrial-scale deployment, the most successful leaders are discovering the power of JOMO. This opening address explores the transition from reactive innovation to intentional leadership. It’s a call to move beyond the pressure of “doing everything” and instead find the “Joy of Missing Out” on the hype, focusing resources on the 10% of technology that will drive 90% of your business transformation.
Nick Jonsson shares his deeply personal journey from outward corporate success to executive loneliness, burnout, alcoholism and rock bottom – and the transformation that followed. Through his own story, delegates’ will discover the foundation of Holistic Leadership and the Five Steps that transformed his life: Surrender, Purpose, Connection, Goals and Discipline. The session challenges leaders to look beyond titles, performance and external success, and reflect on the human being behind the leader. Delegates’ will explore how physical, mental, emotional and social wellbeing directly influence leadership performance, decision-making, relationships and high-performing teams.
The “GenAI Paradox” of 2026 is clear: while 80% of enterprises have deployed AI, only 11% are seeing material impact on their earnings. The reason? Most are still stuck in the “Copilot” phase tools that assist individuals rather than transform workflows. The solution lies in Agentic AI. This session provides a high-level architectural blueprint for moving from passive prompts to autonomous agent teams. We will break down the leading 2026 frameworks including LangGraph for stateful workflows and Microsoft AutoGen for multi-agent orchestration and address the “Three M’s” of scaling: Memory, Multi-agent coordination, and Machine-speed governance.
India’s largest enterprises are rethinking how they engage 650M+ customers on messaging and social platforms — not with better chatbots, but with autonomous AI agents that handle entire customer journeys end-to-end. In this keynote, Gaurav Agrawal unpacks how the Meta Business Agent platform is enabling enterprises to automate high-value interactions across acquisition, service, and retention at scale. This isn’t incremental improvement — it’s a fundamental re-architecture of enterprise customer engagement. Learn what CIOs need to know to lead the shift from pilot to production.
As autonomous AI agents redefine the business landscape, trust and resilience have become the ultimate competitive advantages. This keynote explores how organizations can build robust, ethical frameworks to navigate the shifts of the new agentic economy. Attendees will discover actionable strategies to maintain human oversight, secure digital ecosystems, and foster deep stakeholder trust. Join us to learn how to turn technological disruption into a sustainable foundation for future growth.
A quarter-century of enterprise tech strategy packed into 25 high-velocity minutes. This rapid-fire session cuts through the noise to deliver the battle-tested leadership lessons, architectural pivots, and hype-filtering strategies that outlast any tech cycle. Skip the fluff and discover the timeless IT fundamentals required to lead your organization through the next era of transformation.
Grab a coffee or tea and take this this time to recharge and expand your professional network. Engage in tech exchange meetings, connect with CIOs and partners.
As generative and agentic AI shift from experimental pilots to core enterprise drivers, the pressure on underlying IT architecture is peaking. Join HPE for an exclusive High Tea executive session, designed for select forward-thinking CIOs. Over tea and refreshments, we will explore the practical realities of scaling AI from managing high-performance networking to ensuring hybrid cloud security and sovereignty. Connect with peers to share candid strategies for building a scalable, future-ready AI – native networking infrastructure.
As boards demand AI ROI while IT budgets stay flat, CIOs must find creative ways to fund their digital future. This roundtable explores an unexpected funding source hiding in plain sight: your existing Java estate. Discover how modernizing your Java platform cuts cloud costs by 20%+, slashes Oracle licensing costs up to 70%, and dramatically hardens your cyber-resilience against automated AI threats. Tarun Lalwani, Technical Lead at Azul, will share real-world APAC benchmarks, opening the floor for peers to discuss how to self-fund an agile, risk-free AI roadmap by optimising enterprise infrastructure from within.
From AI assistants to business agents, AI is evolving from answering questions to understanding intent and taking action across business journeys. AI agents can create meaningful impact across customer experience, commerce and business operations, and Meta Business Agent enables more personalized, conversational, and seamless interactions between enterprises and their customers. The roundtable will offer a closer look at how Meta is approaching the next generation of AI-powered business interactions and what this shift could mean for enterprises in India.
As AI reshapes enterprise operations, network security has become the foundation of trust, resilience, and control. Effective policy-driven network management helps organizations govern AI-powered workloads, protect sensitive data, enforce compliance, and respond to evolving cyber threats. In the age of AI, robust policy control is no longer optional. It is critical for securing digital infrastructure and ensuring business continuity.
In the AI era, data has emerged as the most valuable business asset, fueling innovation, automation, and competitive advantage. However, enterprises must move beyond simply collecting data to strategically building robust data foundations, safeguarding critical information from evolving risks, and unlocking new revenue opportunities. This session explores how organizations can create AI-ready data ecosystems, establish strong governance and security frameworks, and transform data into measurable business value. Learn how leading enterprises are leveraging trusted, well-managed data to accelerate AI adoption, drive smarter decisions, and create sustainable growth in an increasingly data-driven economy.
The CIO 100 Special Awards will recognize select technology leaders who have successfully implemented AI-Native networking across high priority areas.
The CIO 100 Special Awards will recognize select technology leaders who have successfully implemented Cloud Security across high priority areas.
The CIO 100 Special Awards will recognize select technology leaders who have successfully implemented Zero Trust Technology across high-priority areas.
The CIO 100 Special Awards will recognize select security leaders who have successfully implemented Data security across high priority areas.
The CIO 100 Special Awards will recognize select technology leaders who have successfully implemented AI innovation across high-priority areas.
The Game Changers Awards will recognize technology leaders who have used IT innovatively to bolster technology and drive business value at their organization.
Friday, September 18
AI governance alone is no longer enough. As AI agents gain identities, permissions and autonomy, enterprises need to secure them at runtime, continuously validate identity, control access and respond at machine speed. The goal is not to slow AI adoption, but to make it safe to move faster.
Organizations are moving beyond simply digitizing documents to unlocking actionable intelligence from enterprise data. AI-powered Tungsten Intelligent Automation transforms unstructured information into real-time insights, automates complex workflows, and accelerates decision-making across the business. By combining intelligent document processing, workflow orchestration, and generative AI capabilities, enterprises can reduce operational costs, improve accuracy, enhance compliance, and empower employees to focus on higher-value work. The result is a more agile, data-driven organization where information flows seamlessly from capture to action, enabling faster decisions and better business outcomes at scale.
For years, CIOs have lived in a state of compromise: siloed, highly-governed data for compliance versus fragmented, ungoverned data for AI experimentation. In 2026, this “dual-speed” data model is no longer sustainable. With the DPDP Act entering its final countdown and Agentic AI demanding real-time access to enterprise context, the mandate has shifted to Data Governance 2.0. This roundtable explores the transition to a Unified Data Layer a “Living Semantic Memory” that enforces global compliance standards as code while providing the high-velocity data access required for autonomous AI agents to deliver actual ROI.
Discover how an intelligent data platform can become a strategic enabler for enterprise AI by unifying data, governance, and automation at scale. Learn how organizations can reduce operational costs, improve retrieval accuracy, accelerate decision-making, and unlock measurable business value through trusted, AI-ready data that drives productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage.
As enterprises race to deploy custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models, vector databases, and autonomous AI agents, enterprise data architectures are facing unprecedented security strains. Traditional perimeter and human-centric IAM frameworks cannot safeguard unstructured data pipelines or manage machine-speed API interactions.
This intensive masterclass delivers a pragmatic architectural blueprint for CIOs and enterprise technology leaders. Attendees will explore how to integrate Zero Trust principles directly into data ingestion and LLM pipelines combining continuous Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), granular machine-identity governance, and automated access containment. Step beyond the AI hype into practical, production-grade security designs that protect corporate IP and maintain strict compliance without slowing enterprise innovation.
Kickstart Day 2 by fueling for success over a premium networking breakfast.
Start the day with an essential introductory briefing on the agenda before official proceedings begin.
IT leaders take the helm to mainstream AI as per 2026 State of the CIO Study, as enterprises move beyond AI experimentation to transformative use cases that deliver measurable business value. In its 25th annual State of the CIO research, Foundry canvassed 662 IT leaders and 249 lines of business users to understand CIOs’ evolving role and their agenda for the coming year. Chime in for the special editorial keynote that will provide a detailed rundown on Tech Investments, Changing CIO role, Business Priorities, Impact of AI, Era of Agentic.
Delivering a flawless, high-touch customer experience across thousands of touchpoints requires marrying traditional retail with intelligent systems. In this keynote, Amuleek Singh Bijral unpacks how Chai Point leverages proprietary technology, IoT brewing hardware, and machine learning to unify the omnichannel consumer journey. Discover how predictive AI, real-time quality automation, and smart demand forecasting eliminate operational friction to create hyper-personalized, consistent customer delight at scale.
Networks have become the foundation of business resilience and innovation, with the shift from managing networks to enabling autonomous, self-driving operations. Building a network that is modernized with AI and purpose-built for AI workloads has great advantages, like reducing operational complexity while improving performance and reliability. Tech leaders expect business outcomes with RoI from autonomous networking, while embedding security from the start in today’s evolving threat landscape. The panel will explore how CIOs and technology leaders can leverage self-driving networks and AI-powered automation to deliver always-on digital experiences for customers, employees, and partners, while building infrastructure that can autonomously adapt to tomorrow’s business demands
In this fireside chat, Meta’s Prache Agarwaal will unpack the real journey: navigating compliance, earning board buy-in, integrating with legacy systems, measuring ROI, and scaling what works. A candid conversation for CIOs evaluating where AI agents fit in their technology roadmap and how to accelerate time-to-value without compromising governance.
The race to integrate AI has moved faster than the frameworks designed to manage it. In 2026, CIOs find themselves at a crossroads: 76% report that “unchecked AI” is now a primary enterprise risk, yet the pressure from the Board to deliver value has never been higher. This session moves past the hype to address the “Implementation Complexity” that is causing 40% of organizations to miss their 2026 AI goals. We will dissect the most pressing threats of the year from Agentic AI hijacking to Model Inversion and discuss how to build an “Innovation Engine” that is both fast and architecturally sound.
As AI reshapes enterprise IT, CIOs face a new challenge: turning intelligence into meaningful business outcomes while maintaining the visibility, governance and control enterprises demand. This conversation explores what it takes to build an AI-ready IT foundation, from understanding the dependencies between assets, applications and business services to orchestrating workflows across the enterprise. We’ll examine why trusted systems of record remain critical in the age of AI, how organizations can move from reactive operations to greater resilience, and why a single front door for employee services is becoming essential. The discussion will also explore the shift from traditional SLAs toward experience-led measures and what this means for the next generation of enterprise IT.
As enterprise GenAI adoption accelerates, data-hungry LLMs are clashing directly with strict purpose-limitation rules. This keynote explores the structural frameworks, data masking techniques, and governance models needed to innovate with AI without triggering massive regulatory fines
Data is what makes AI worth using. Especially sensitive data. We need Data to be available to LLM’s , to prompts. A new approach to safe AI usage is needed where protection travels with sensitive data itself and adjusts as risk appears. And that’sthe future we have been building at Forcepoint AI Data Security.
Grab a coffee or tea and take this this time to recharge and expand your professional network. Engage in tech exchange meetings, visit the booths at the expo zone and connect with award-winning CIOs and partners.
In 2026, the organizational chart is being redrawn. As Agentic AI moves from “helper” to “owner” of end-to-end workflows, CIOs are facing a radical shift in talent management. We are no longer just hiring developers; we are hiring “Agentic Architects” to manage a fleet of digital workers that operate 24/7 without burnout. This high-level panel brings together industry leaders to discuss the transition to a Hybrid Workforce, exploring the legal, cultural, and operational reality of an IT department where your most productive “employee” doesn’t have a heartbeat.
As AI assistants and autonomous agents become integral to the modern workplace, the human attack surface is expanding rapidly. This session explores how organizations can protect both people and AI-driven workflows by adopting a human-centric security strategy that reduces human risk, safeguards sensitive data, and enables secure collaboration in an increasingly agentic workforce.
An AI factory brings together compute, data, models and software to produce AI services at scale. Its success is measured not simply by the number of GPUs deployed, but by how efficiently it delivers useful tokens as units of work produced by AI models.
As AI factories consolidate valuable enterprise data, models and intellectual property, security, governance and cyber resilience must be built into the architecture from the outset. This session explores how VAST provides a unified, secure data foundation for production AI. We will also examine how collaboration across GPU cloud providers, model builders and software platforms turns AI infrastructure into scalable, secure and commercially viable services.
The old security mantra was “Trust but Verify.” In 2026, that approach is a liability. As enterprises become a sprawl of multi-cloud environments, remote workforces, and autonomous AI agents, the traditional network perimeter has been replaced by a single, dynamic boundary: Identity. This roundtable explores the shift from “Location-Based” security to “Identity-First” Zero-Trust Architecture. We will discuss how to manage the 2026 explosion of Non-Human Identities (NHIs) which now outnumber human users 5-to-1 and how to implement continuous authentication that can stop a breach at the moment of a “vibe shift” in behavior.
In 2024, we gave AI a voice; in 2026, we are giving it a seat at the table. The transition from Generative AI (content creation) to Agentic AI (task execution) represents the single biggest architectural shift in the history of the enterprise. It is the move from “AI as a feature” to “AI as a workforce.” This keynote explores the strategic mandates for the Agentic Era discussing why LLMs alone are no longer enough and how CIOs must re-architect their data, security, and governance to support autonomous systems that can think, plan, and act on behalf of the business.
Join us for a delicious lunch where you can connect with newfound contacts! Take a seat and savor your meal while networking with peers and visit the booth in the expo zone.
In the rush to automate, the “Human-in-the-Loop” has often been treated as a safety net rather than a strategic partner. As we enter 2026, the most resilient enterprises are those moving toward Hybrid Intelligence where AI handles the scale and humans handle the nuance. This roundtable explores the shift from AI as a “tool” to AI as a “teammate.” We will discuss the architectural and cultural changes required to synchronize AI efficiency with human empathy, ensuring that “Digital-First” doesn’t become “Human-Last” for your customers and your workforce.
The honeymoon period for AI experimentation is over, and the invoice has arrived. In 2026, AI-driven infrastructure from specialized H100/B200 clusters to the high-frequency API calls of autonomous agents is consuming a disproportionate share of the IT budget. For many CIOs, the “hidden costs” of data egress, vector database scaling, and token bloat are threatening to wipe out the ROI of their AI initiatives. This roundtable explores the next generation of FinOps 2.0: a disciplined, automated approach to managing the high-velocity costs of the AI era without throttling innovation.
As the era of basic Generative AI experimentation gives way to strict mandates for quantifiable business value, Indian enterprise leaders are shifting focus from simple chatbots to Agentic AI autonomous systems capable of orchestrating complex workflows and driving real-time operational decisions. However, scaling these autonomous agents requires moving past legacy silos to build an integrated, highly contextual data fabric that can fuel advanced AI systems safely and accurately. This session brings together pioneering technology leaders to deliver a realistic architectural roadmap for overcoming the data bottleneck, managing technical debt, and establishing the robust governance frameworks necessary to deploy production-grade AI that drives undeniable enterprise ROI.
As organizations embrace digital transformation, IT support is evolving beyond traditional automation toward intelligent, AI-driven operations. The future of IT support lies in leveraging machine learning, predictive analytics, and autonomous systems to proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve issues before they impact users.
In remote operations, intelligent platforms enable real-time monitoring, self-healing capabilities, automated workflows, and enhanced decision-making, reducing downtime and improving service quality. AI-powered virtual assistants, predictive maintenance, and data-driven insights allow IT teams to shift from reactive support to strategic business enablement.
While enterprises pour millions into large language models and cloud platforms, productivity often stalls at the physical endpoint. CIOs in 2026 cannot afford fragmented, unmanageable hardware environments that introduce friction into daily operations. This session focuses on turning enterprise collaboration into an intelligent, centrally managed service. We will discuss how embedded edge AI in conference hardware reduces latency and network overhead, how cloud-based device orchestration eliminates IT maintenance bottlenecks, and how workspace telemetry delivers real-time data on room utilization and energy efficiency to drive smarter infrastructure decisions.
The CIO of 2026 is no longer a “Service Provider” to the business; they are a “Risk Architect” and “Resilience Officer.” As the boundaries between technology, legal compliance, and core operations vanish, the mandate has shifted from maintaining uptime to ensuring survival in a volatile, AI-driven landscape. This panel of veteran leaders will discuss the “New Normal” of the C-suite exploring how to balance the aggressive pursuit of Agentic AI with the sobering realities of the DPDP Act and the escalating threat of autonomous cyber-attacks. We will dive into the new leadership playbook for 2026: building an organization that doesn’t just “bounce back” from disruption, but “bounces forward.”
The concluding session shifts the focus from Nick’s transformation to the delegates’ own leadership journey. Using the Five Steps to Holistic Leadership delegates’ will apply the principles to their own lives through an interactive coaching experience supported by their overnight reflections and Limitless Life Assessment. Together, they will explore the impact of Executive Loneliness, vulnerability, trusted relationships and Psychological Safety while identifying meaningful goals and daily disciplines that support sustainable leadership. The objective is not simply inspiration, but transformation.
Grab a coffee or tea and take this this time to recharge and expand your professional network. Engage in tech exchange meetings, visit the booths at the expo zone and connect with award-winning CIOs and partners.
The rapid emergence of agentic AI and next-gen technologies across a modern organization is impacting the foundational layer of IT – the network. The traditional network operations can no longer keep pace with business demands, and tech leaders are leveraging AI-powered automation to maintain peak performance. Enabling innovation is a mandate for CIOs while minimizing operational complexity and at the same time securing users, devices, applications, and data everywhere. The roundtable will delve into how tech leaders are driving efficiency, resilience, and measurable business outcomes to transform into a self-driving network and thus preparing for the next decade of AI-powered transformation.
In an increasingly digital world, business success depends on the seamless convergence of compute, networking, storage, and ecosystem partnerships. A connected enterprise creates a resilient, intelligent, and scalable technology foundation that drives operational excellence, accelerates innovation, enhances security, and enables organizations to unlock greater value from their data, people, and business relationships.
As enterprises move from GenAI experimentation to agentic AI, the next challenge is operational trust: how can AI help run critical services without sacrificing visibility, governance, or accountability? This session explores how CIOs can combine unified observability, predictive intelligence, and goal-oriented agents—agents designed around measurable outcomes such as reducing alert noise, accelerating root-cause analysis, improving service availability, or generating compliance evidence—rather than generic question-and-answer experiences. The discussion will examine how to connect signals across hybrid and multi-cloudenvironments, translate business goals into bounded actions, and apply human approval and security guardrails before automation is allowed to act.
As enterprises enter the Agentic Economy, CIOs face a defining challenge: moving beyond basic task automation to systems that autonomously interpret, decide and act without compromising trust or resilience. This executive roundtable serves as a collaborative forum to evaluate strategic pathways and to examine the critical frameworks and methodologies for navigating this transition. We will debate where autonomy drives the most value, which decisions require human oversight and how trusted data and governance can transform IT from reactive ticketing into an intelligent, outcome-led model.
Orchestrating this transformation requires a strong foundation like TCS Enterprise Manager. Acting as the Agentic AI OS for IT Ops, it provides the unified observability, dynamic guardrails and seamless orchestration needed to bridge the gap between intelligence and secure execution.
Ultimately, the goal is not autonomy everywhere, but the rightdegree of autonomy for the rightwork. Aligning with Gartner and BCG, this is a fundamental I&O operating-model shift where autonomy must be graduated, earned through demonstrated performance, and anchored in human accountability, not just model intelligence.
As artificial intelligence accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks, security architectures designed for human-speed response are no longer sufficient. Enterprise security stacks have grown increasingly fragmented, operating dozens of disconnected solutions that leave dangerous blind spots and overwhelm security teams with disconnected consoles. To reduce operational complexity and improve cyber resilience, CIOs must move away from isolated products and transition toward a coordinated, system-wide defense. This closed-door session explores the roadmap to an integrated security system leveraging unified telemetry, synchronized automated controls, agentic AI, and open integrations to achieve rapid threat containment and robust AI workload governance.
The Hall of Fame awards will recognize CIOs who have received the CIO 100 award for 3 or more consecutive years while serving at the same organisation.
The Fearless 100 awards will recognize 100 CIOs for outstanding leadership & Innovation.
Saturday, September 19
In 2026, downtime is no longer an option; it’s a systemic failure. As we move toward the “Year of Truth for AI,” the network has evolved from a passive pipe into a self-aware entity. This roundtable explores the shift to Predictive Operations (AIOps) where AI doesn’t just alert you to a crash but “self-heals” the infrastructure before the crash occurs. We will discuss the transition from static thresholds to dynamic, intent-driven networking that autonomously manages traffic spikes, remediates configuration drifts, and closes “exploit gaps” in real-time, ensuring 99.999% reliability for the autonomous enterprise.
As cyber threats grow in sophistication, frequency, and scale, organizations must move beyond traditional security approaches and embrace cyber resilience as a strategic business imperative. This session explores how enterprises can strengthen their ability to anticipate, withstand, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents while maintaining business continuity. Learn how leading organizations are leveraging AI-driven security, Zero Trust architectures, proactive risk management, and resilient recovery strategies to stay ahead of emerging threats. Discover practical approaches to building a resilient security posture that protects critical assets, minimizes disruption, and enables confident digital transformation in an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Start the day with an essential introductory briefing on the agenda before official proceedings begin.
The enterprise AI playbook has shifted from passive chatbots to autonomous Agentic AI systems capable of executing complex workflows. This session moves past the generative AI hype to address the real-world engineering, governance, and infrastructural shifts required to manage multi-agent architectures. Join us for a candid discussion on the critical “North Stars” guiding IT leaders as they transition from copilots to fully orchestrated, scalable enterprise automation.
As artificial intelligence reshapes the travel landscape, building an agile, sovereign, and scalable travel tech stack is critical. In this special keynote, Suresh Khadakbhavi breaks down the blueprints for AI-driven, privacy-preserving travel ecosystems. Attendees will gain actionable perspectives on leveraging intelligent automation, biometric credentials, and connected platforms to set a global benchmark for seamless transit.
The next FinOps challenge isn’t just tracking AI spend, but understanding which workflows create it, how agents amplify it, and whether the business value justifies the cost. As AI shifts from copilots to embedded workflows and autonomous agents, one user request can trigger multiple model calls, retrieval steps, retries, orchestration layers, and infrastructure events. Success requires shifting from traditional IT budgeting to FinOps-style discipline where consumption, value, and governance are actively managed in real time. The keynote talks on the five ways CIOs can build that discipline before AI costs spiral.
In 2026, your security is only as strong as your least-secure vendor. As we move toward a hyper-connected ecosystem of Agentic AI and automated API exchanges, the “Surface Area” of the enterprise has exploded. This roundtable explores the shift from annual “Security Questionnaires” to Continuous Vendor Oversight. We will discuss how to build a 2026 Supply Chain Resilience framework that extends your Zero-Trust architecture to every partner in your stack ensuring that a compromise at a third-party provider doesn’t become a catastrophic entry point into your core environment.
AI is moving beyond copilots to autonomous agents that reason, decide and act across the enterprise, creating new challenges around identity, access, visibility and control. This session explores how leaders can embrace AI autonomy while establishing trusted agent identities, securing AI at runtime and responding to threats at machine speed. Drawing on the latest thinking in AI Detection & Response, Continuous Identity and the Agentic SOC, it will examine how security can become the foundation for accelerating AI adoption—without sacrificing trust or control.
Cyber threats don’t wait for periodic audits, assessments or quarterly reviews and the data proves it. Drawing from 31K vulnerability reports across 100+ organisations, this keynote reveals how Com Olho is uncovering the next generation of cyber risk across live systems and industries. With over 4.5K+ Critical and Severe findings discovered on production systems, 2.3K confirmed vulnerabilities touching real personal data, and the median programme seeing its first confirmed critical vulnerability in under 20 hours, the session shows how ethical hacker intelligence, client telemetry and AI together can surface risk faster, learn continuously, and go beyond the limits of legacy tools.
As Indian enterprises move from isolated GenAI pilots to multi-agent production systems, CIOs face severe friction between compute demand, cloud unit economics, and business value. This 10-minute masterclass unpacks how leading engineering teams are optimizing LLM inference costs through intelligent model routing, hybrid sovereign infrastructure, and automated FinOps guardrails. Enterprise IT leaders will walk away with a practical blueprint to scale autonomous multi-agent workloads with predictable margins and enterprise-grade SLA governance.
As organizations navigate rapid technological disruption, evolving customer expectations, and increasing business complexity, the role of the CIO has expanded beyond IT leadership to become a key driver of business transformation. This session explores how modern CIOs are balancing innovation, cybersecurity, data strategy, and operational resilience while enabling AI adoption and digital growth. Gain insights into the leadership, strategic vision, and change management capabilities required to drive enterprise success in a constantly evolving landscape.
In 2026, the “Pilot-to-Production” chasm is where AI ROI goes to die. While 90% of organizations have successful GenAI experiments, fewer than 20% have successfully integrated Agentic AI into their core value chain. The challenge isn’t the model it’s the “Enterprise Fabric.” This roundtable explores the shift from “Isolated Intelligence” to “Intelligence at Scale.” We will discuss how to build a unified AI backbone that handles governance, cost-control, and real-time data liquidity, allowing you to deploy autonomous agents across the business without reinventing the wheel for every use case.
![Vishal Gupta, Senior Vice President - Deputy Chief Technology Officer, National Securities Depository Limited [NSDL], Speaker at the CIO 100 Awards & Conference India](https://event.foundryco.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/09/Vishal-Gupta-170x170.png.webp "Vishal Gupta")
Grab a coffee or tea and take this this time to recharge and expand your professional network. Engage in tech exchange meetings, visit the booths at the expo zone and connect with award-winning CIOs and partners.
In an era defined by autonomous AI, regulatory shifts, and relentless disruption, the modern CIO can no longer afford to simply manage infrastructure they must actively engineer enterprise agility. This keynote examines how tech leaders can dismantle operational inertia, bridge executive silos, and champion a culture of continuous transformation. Attendees will walk away with strategic blueprints to translate technological disruption into decisive business velocity and long-term organizational resilience.
This high-impact, hands-on workshop tailored specifically for enterprise technology leaders navigating rapid digital transformation. CIOs will leverage human-centric design thinking methodologies to dismantle complex IT challenges, bridge organizational silos, and identify high-value innovation opportunities. Through collaborative problem-framing and rapid prototyping, the participants will walk away with an actionable blueprint to align technology roadmaps directly with strategic business outcomes and end-user needs.
A session to honor the strategic alliances and collaborative spirit that fuel our collective success. We extend our deepest gratitude to our partners for their unwavering support and vital contributions to the industry.
Get an exclusive sneak peek into Foundry’s flagship CIO events for the remainder of 2026 and 2027 as we look ahead to what’s next for the executive community.