CIO 100 Leadership Live Agenda
Explore the latest event agenda below, and check back soon for updates.
Wednesday, February 4
CIOs continue their business leader trajectory as they play a multi-faceted role in AI transformation — one that requires strategic vision, a collaborative mindset, and change agent skills.The CIO roundtable will share practical insights, use cases, expert viewpoints on how AI is transforming the digital infrastrcuture of an organisation ?
The accelerating pace of technical innovation is driving rapid turnover in the skills necessary for organizational success, leaving IT leaders and individual professionals uncertain about where to place their upskilling bets.The CIO roundtable will share practical insights, use cases, expert viewpoints on how agentic AI is transforming their organisation and leading to business growth ?
CIOs are not opting for an out-of-the-box approach to cyber risk management that isproactive and dynamic, moving beyond basic compliance to embrace arisk-based,secure by designstrategy. This involves building security into products and services from the start, focusing on mitigating the most critical risks, and embedding a security-aware culture across the organization to continuously adapt to new threats.The CIO roundtable will share practical insights, use cases, expert viewpoints on their innovative approaches to cybersecurity stratgey in an AI – everywhere world.
AI will still dominate IT leaders’ agenda, but it shouldn’t at the expense of vast amounts of burgeoning, off-Broadway tech. While 2026 will continue to be about AI, especially agentic AI, it’s important that CIOs examine every technology adjacency in their business and IT outlook. What are six strategic imperatives as tech investments for CIOs and tech leaders to focus in 2026?
CIOs are well positioned to take up that charge, marshalling their tech-centric, business orientation to sketch out roadmaps, define deployment plans, and orchestrate change management strategies designed to drive success in what could be a make-or-break AI moment. What’s the road ahead?
The emergence of AI marks a point of inflection in the evolution of the top tech exec position, with greater strategic responsibilities and career growth on the horizon for those who embrace the challenge that change brings. Over a few short years, AI will transform organizations, org charts, and roles. The CIO position will not be exempt.
AI’s emergence as a transformative force is spurring CISOs to rethink how their teams operate to harness the technology’s potential and better defend its use across the organization.This increasing use of AI for security process is transforming CyberOps, boosting the effectiveness and productivity of security professionals, and changing how cybersecurity work gets done.
By framing potential security incidents in terms of business impact, IT can speak the language of business around cyber risk and reduce potential disruption to operations.
From escalating AI-enabled threats to budgets that don’t scale alongside expanding threat landscapes, security leaders are reshaping their agendas to address several key long-standing and emerging concerns.The CISO job is tough, and it’s getting tougher: 66% of security leaders surveyed for the 2025 State of Cybersecurity report from professional association ISACA said their roles are more stressful today than they were five years ago , CISOs are dealing with rising risks, competing priorities, limited budgets, and more. The Captains’ table discusses the top three issues / concerns faced by CIOs / CISOs and their teams in 2026 and why ?
Human-centered identity systems were never designed for the coming wave of autonomous AI agents. CISOs face a reckoning over how to rebuild identity systems to counter the risks.CISOs must build trust at machine speed.
AI-driven ZTNA could free teams from endless security firefighting — if companies can break through the complexity holding them back.The choice isn’t which AI-powered ZTNA solution to implement. It’s whether your organization is ready to think about access control as a business accelerator rather than a security constraint. That mindset shift is most important of all.
Thursday, February 5
The definitive report on the state of the CIO — published annually for over 25 Years, capturing the insights and trends shaping tech leadership. CIO.com’s 25th annual2026 State of the CIO research, which surveyed 900+ IT leaders and 250 LOB professionals, confirms IT leaders are ramping up their strategic focus this year, in part to convert early AI experimentation into initiatives that deliver measurable business results. Know more on changing CIO role, advent of Gen AI , new tech priorities, business climate for 2026
As the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act reshapes India’s regulatory landscape, the simultaneous explosion of GenAI introduces complex new privacy challenges. This session explores the intersection of compliance and innovation, offering CIOs a roadmap to navigate legal nuances without stifling growth.
Agentic AI’s reasoning and planning capabilities can help supercharge your IT org by making decisions and handling tasks with little or no human intervention.How can agentic AI help your organization work faster and more productively? Discover eight ways this powerful new technology can be used to speed operations and cut costs.
AI agents are helping companies work as one fluid system, cutting friction, boosting people’s impact and reshaping how businesses run from the inside out.
Forget tweaking your tech stack — if you’re not rebuilding for agentic AI, you’re already falling behind the next wave of enterprise disruption.our role as CIO is to engineer the foundation — a resilient, adaptive and scalable stack — that turns this generational tech into a competitive advantage.What are the foundational considerations for architecting your Enterprise IT for the age of autonomous agents?
The agentic AI revolution has already started, and your “digital transformation” just became legacy tech.While you’re still debating whether to implement chatbots, the smart money is already building autonomous AI armies. In the agentic AI revolution, where your competitors aren’t just automating tasks, they’re orchestrating entire business ecosystems to run themselves.
Agentic AI is changing how work gets done — LLM gateways help enterprises keep it scalable, safe and cost-effective.What sets agentic AI apart is its ability to perform complex, multi-step tasks autonomously. This trend matters because agentic AI will reshape how work gets done and organizations need to adapt to a future where their employees must work with AI agents as their co-workers.
The rapid rise of AI capabilities is ramping up the pressure for business transformation and cloud strategy.Gen AI may be creating the pressure, but with the right mindset, it can also be part of the solution.Effective Gen AI implementation requires an outcomes-focused approach supported by AI-ready data operations and aligned with the organization’s overall risk appetite. Here’s a end user keynote on how to ensure your Gen AI journey is headed in the right direction.
Cloud offerings tailored to their verticals have given IT leaders industry-specific features and an expedited route to the cloud. Now they are enabling easier experimentation with generative AI.While seemingly providing commoditized feature sets, industry clouds have been proving their business value in part by laying the foundation for innovation at companies across a range of industries. Going vertical with cloud solutions gives many companies advantages they would not have had otherwise, including a quicker route to the cloud and purpose-built features that cater to their specific needs.
As organizations discover new opportunities created by AI, many are investing significantly in GenAI, as part of their cloud modernization plans.They are using the considerable power of this fast-evolving technology to tackle the common challenges of cloud modernization, particularly in projects that involve the migration and modernization of legacy applications — a key enabler of digital and business transformation.
Most GenAI pilots flop, but with better security, oversight and smart integration, enterprises can finally turn experiments into real impact.While data quality has emerged as a major concern, experts are also concerned about surrounding issues — including security, observability, evaluation and integration. These are non-negotiable for GenAI security and success.
From developing meaningful business relationships to establishing cultures of continuous learning, CIOs must recast IT’s missions and objectives to help fuel transformational AI success.IT organizations holding on to pre-genAI charters and objectives may find their businesses lagging behind the competition and stakeholders voicing frustration over IT’s leadership.
Modernizing the application stack is critical and, increasingly, businesses see GenAI as the key to success. The solution—GenAI—is also the beneficiary. Indeed, more than 80% of organizations agree that scaling GenAI solutions for business growth is a crucial consideration in modernization strategies.
Old systems hold your data hostage. Modernizing them is tough, but essential. How do you upgrade without crashing your business?Businesses must either find a way to migrate off of their legacy platforms entirely or modernize the platforms in ways that reduce complexity and risk while still keeping critical services running.
In an era where technology evolves at breakneck speed, a business’s capacity to compete and survive in the digital economy relies on its IT competencies. application rationalization isn’t about discarding the past; it’s about streamlining the present to build a foundation for a future-proof, efficient application ecosystem. Here’s a CIO panel on how to make application portfolio modernization and rationalization (APMR) a key differentiator.
Smart investments are the most important balancing act we must support between near-term gains, quick wins and long-term vision for the AI-enabled enterprise. CIOs need to start with data quality, then build platforms for machine learning and genAI. With Agentic AI becoming mainstream across companies, tech leaders must offset shiny objects with practical innovation for long-term value.
It’s hard to find any business function today that isn’t touched by Gen AI—or the possibilities of AI. And as organizations scramble to realize AI’s promise and capabilities, it’s clear that cloud computing plays a vital role.
As we head into 2026, sustainability is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a core component of IT strategy and budget allocation. This session explores how CIOs can shift from reporting on ESG to driving it, embedding green principles directly into technology procurement and infrastructure.
A CIO’s guide to networking infrastructure involvesaligning with business goals, conducting a current-state analysis, and developing a future-proof strategy. Key steps include evaluating modern needs like AI support, cybersecurity, and cloud integration, assessing infrastructure against business objectives, and creating a strategic roadmap that includes modern capabilities like Wi-Fi 7 and private 5G where applicable. A focus on talent, vendor consolidation, and leveraging network infrastructure for competitive advantage is also crucial.
With a cloud networking solution that works across multiple providers, network teams can design self-service capabilities that allow cloud and DevOps teams to build and manage networks without compromising security.Cooperation between traditional infrastructure teams and cloud teams is even more important as enterprises embrace multi-cloud architecture, where complexity and risk are increasing.
Not every system is built for the AI era. As new models and workloads push the limits of what legacy environments can support, IT leaders are rebuilding the IT stack for an AI-first world. It’s an evolution thatmeans re-evaluating which legacy systems are holding you back, embracing hybrid flexibility, and building a secure foundation that’s designed for intelligence at scale.
Network modernization gives an organization a flexible and cloud-optimized network – as one of the first steps for digital transformation.Each organization will have its own entry point to network modernization as CIOs embark on their digital transformation, or in the midst of one, the time to rethink about transforming their networks is now a top priority.
Data is foundational, providing businesses with the knowledge required to achieve goals and drive new business models, products, and services. By exploring the ways data can be leveraged for the benefit of the organization, CIOs can drive new initiatives, generating additional untapped value for main stakeholders from partners to customers, to employees, and even the broader world.
Data is now a living organism driving company success. To thrive, businesses must embrace AI-powered, automated data management across five critical pillars – Data Platform, Data Enginnering,Analytics & Reporting,Data Science & AI, Data Governance.
The rapid pace of innovation makes it tough to identify data that’s crucial for long-term requirements. CIOs must focus on business strategy and gather information that helps the board achieve its desired outcomes.AI requires a gut-busting diet of data. Whether it’s structured or unstructured information, CIOs must create the technological foundations to ensure their organization has the data its AI-enabled services require.
AI and data are feeding each other — build the right strategy and you’ll unlock smarter decisions, better agility and a real edge.Developing a new age architecture that harnesses this relationship is critical for organizations striving to achieve agility, accuracy and competitive advantage in the era of intelligent automation.
Data management is no longer a backend operation. It has become a strategic cornerstone for shaping innovation, efficiency and compliance. As enterprises scale their digital transformation journeys, they face the dual challenge of managing vast, complex datasets while maintaining agility and security. The evolution of cloud-first strategies, real-time integration and AI-driven automation has set a new benchmark for data systems and heightened concerns over data privacy, regulatory compliance and ethical AI governance demand advanced solutions that are both robust and adaptive.
In a sea of competition, the best way for businesses to stay ahead of the curve comes down to how well they can tap into the data that already exists within their organization.With data, an organization can do super powerful things with AI and machine learning, like building models that do everything from enhancing fraud detection capabilities to identifying gaps in the market for the organization to separate from the pack.
As VPNs become low-hanging fruit for AI-fueled cyber attacks, CISOs and CIOs are showing signals a dramatic enterprise shift toward zero trust frameworks. The Captains’ Table will analyse new risks in the context of enterprise concerns, plans, and their adoption of zero trust strategies to secure the hybrid workforce and enable secure connectivity to private applications.
AI agents are helping companies work as one fluid system, cutting friction, boosting people’s impact and reshaping how businesses run from the inside out.data, decisions and experiences can flow intelligently across every layer of the organization when the right architecture and mindset are in place. That’s the next frontier of transformation and it’s already taking shape.The CIO roundtable will share practical insights, use cases, expert viewpoints on how AI agents is transforming their organisation and leading to business growth ?
In 2025, generative AI has generated fervor and fear in almost equal measure. But that level of ingenuity is deeply unsettling for many consumers, who perhaps prefer to know that the humans are still at the wheel. How can CIOs ground the complexity of genAI systems in a way that supports meaningful transparency and social responsibility, along with building the trust in gen AI technologies and tools That in turn will help organisations build trust with their customers.