Technology & Innovation Forum EMEA

AI And The Tech Ecosystem

AI ROI: Productivity Alone Is Not Enough

As organizations accelerate AI investments, the pressure to demonstrate meaningful returns continues to grow. But is productivity improvement alone enough to justify the billions being invested across the AI ecosystem? Join this session to explore the connection between AI ROI, the emerging risks of an AI bubble, and the factors that will determine long-term value creation.

Join this session to:

Understand the relationship between AI investment, ROI, and the emerging risk of an AI bubble.
Learn why productivity alone may not justify AI spending and how adaptability, innovation, and business agility contribute to long-term value.
Explore practical frameworks and scenario planning tools to assess AI investments, manage risk, and drive sustainable business impact.

Speakers:
Michael O'Grady, Forecast Analyst, Forrester
Ash Pal, VP, CIO Executive Partner, Forrester

AI Redefines How Enterprises Engage The Tech Ecosystem

Enterprises are fundamentally rethinking how they select, engage, and manage technology partners. Traditional sourcing models are collapsing in an AI-led delivery environment defined by outcome-based pricing, dynamic partner ecosystems, and resilient sourcing strategies. AI is reshaping the IT services and business process outsourcing industries by transforming commercial constructs, partner selection criteria, governance models, and value realization in an increasingly intelligent and autonomous sourcing landscape. Join this session to:

Rethink sourcing and vendor management strategies for an AI-led ecosystem
Define the modus operandi to select and manage next-gen tech partners
Be clear about your build-and-buy sourcing and location strategies for tomorrow

Speakers:
Graham Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, Smart DCC
Jeffrey Rajamani, Senior Analyst, Forrester

3:50 pm – 4:20 pm BST

Case Study Sessions

Join case study sessions to hear real-world stories, solutions and insights.

4:30 pm – 5:45 pm BST

Technology & Innovation Forum EMEA Certification: High-Performance IT Strategy 2026 (Pre-Registration Required)

Workshop: Navigate Your Way To High-Performance IT

High-performance IT is the pursuit of continuously improving business results through technology. It rests on the intersection of technical excellence and business confidence; when both are strong, IT becomes a true business driver rather than a cost center or constraint. This workshop will help you assess your relationships with your business stakeholders and your technical ability to deliver. You’ll also determine how to chart the path from misalignment to a highly trusted and adaptive IT organization, leaving with a clear action plan to apply to your own organization. Join this session to:

Understand the detailed drivers behind business confidence and IT technical excellence
Learn how to assess relative strengths and opportunities to build a pathway to high performance

Speakers:
Manuel Geitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Frederic Giron, VP, Senior Research Director, Forrester

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm BST

Deep Dives

AI And The Tech Ecosystem

AEGIS Powers Trusted AI At Scale

Agentic AI is accelerating innovation, but it is also overwhelming leaders with fragmented frameworks, inconsistent guidance, and rising governance demands. AEGIS cuts through this complexity, providing a unified, regulation-aware blueprint to help you govern AI systems and agents with clarity, accountability, and trust. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to align your AI governance strategy to core standards while addressing emerging risks from agentic architectures and regulatory pressure. You will leave with a practical, scalable approach to governing AI that reduces complexity while strengthening trust and control across your organization.

Join this session to:

Simplify AI governance by aligning to a unified framework that maps to major regulatory and risk standards
Move from fragmented, static policies to continuous, adaptive governance for AI systems and agents
Prioritize high-impact controls and build a scalable foundation for trusted, compliant AI across the enterprise

Speakers:
Enza Iannopollo, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Stephanie Balaouras, VP, Group Director, Forrester

The Sovereignty Chimera: Why Pragmatism Wins In A Fragmented World

Organizations want to insulate their IT stacks from the impact of geopolitical volatility. But after two decades of optimization for globalization, most architectures are too deeply dependent on foreign technologies to enable full sovereignty. This session introduces a pragmatic approach to improving your digital sovereignty posture. Learn how to correctly frame your sovereignty challenge, prioritize what to fix, and make informed trade-offs about what dependencies to accept. The key decision is not whether to achieve full sovereignty, but how much sovereignty is enough. Get it wrong, and you will waste budget on ineffective “sovereignty washing” initiatives. Get it right, and you will build a resilient IT foundation that can withstand geopolitical disruption, without sacrificing performance, innovation, or cost efficiency. Join this session to:

Identify which risks truly matter and apply control selectively, aligning sovereignty efforts with business criticality and risk exposure
Learn how to balance resilience, cost, and innovation, not eliminating dependencies altogether

Speakers:
Graeme Scott, CEO and Founder, GAEA AI
Martha Bennett, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Dario Maisto, Principal Analyst, Forrester

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm BST

Welcome Reception

Join us for an opening night reception full of networking, fun, food and refreshments.

5:45 pm – 9:00 pm BST

Executive Leadership Exchange Dinner (Invite-Only)

Join fellow ELE leaders for an invitation-only dinner designed to foster candid conversation, meaningful connections, and the exchange of ideas shaping the future of business and technology. More information to come.

Thursday Oct 1

8:00 am – 9:00 am BST

General Breakfast

9:00 am – 9:15 am BST

Welcome Remarks

Join host and VP, Principal Analyst Paul Miller as he kicks off day two of Technology & Innovation Forum EMEA and sets the stage for another day of insights, inspiration, and practical takeaways.

Speakers:
Paul Miller, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

9:15 am – 9:35 am BST

Keynote: The AI CIO: Redefining High Performance for the Next Decade

Agentic AI takes autonomous actions and makes decisions inside your enterprise. This breaks operating models built on humans deciding and systems executing. The cognitive operating model shifts the enterprise from processes and apps to decision rights, defining what AI decides, where humans intervene, and how outcomes stay governed at scale. CIOs who successfully make this pivot move faster and turn strategy into action with control. Join this session to:

Understand why AI breaks traditional IT operating models
Redesign decision rights across humans and AI
Govern faster, adaptive, and continuously learning systems

Speakers:
Manuel Geitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester

9:40 am – 10:00 am BST

Guest Keynote: More Information To Come

More information to come!

10:05 am – 10:25 am BST

Keynote: The Future Of Software: From Packaged Apps To Generated Business Capabilities At Scale

Agentic software development lowers the cost of creating software and will change the economics of business applications. For enterprise software, core systems of record remain critical, but surrounding workflows, integrations, and experiences become easier for clients to generate or compose. Build versus buy becomes build, buy, or generate. Clients can move faster, tailor processes more precisely, and differentiate without destabilizing the core. Organizations that align operating models to this approach increase output without proportional hiring, translating intent into execution through governed, capability-driven systems. Join this session to:

Understand how agentic development reshapes business application value
Identify which capabilities to own and which to source
Make disciplined build, buy, and generate decisions

Speakers:
Diego Lo Giudice, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

10:30 am – 11:10 am BST

Networking Break

Enjoy refreshments and snacks while networking with peers.

10:40 am – 11:40 am BST

Workshop: From Automation To Adaptive Process Orchestration: The Next Chapter For Enterprise Operations (Pre-Registration Required)

Almost three years of AI agent implementations have proven that a revolutionary AI-first and AI-only approach to operating model changes doesn’t work for most organizations. Organizations working successfully towards autonomous operations prefer an evolutionary approach, which Forrester calls Adaptive Process Orchestration (APO). APO flexes to variation, blends deterministic and probabilistic actions, and connects any endpoint. Bernhard will unpack what it practically takes to adopt and scale agentic AI and present a reference architecture that brings APO to life. Join this session to:

Understand the basics of Adaptive Process Orchestration.
Get to know the best practices in AI agent adoption and scaling from other organizations.
Learn how to prioritize and approach APO by applying the APO reference architecture.

Speakers:
Bernhard Schaffrik, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Rowan Curran, Principal Analyst, Forrester

11:10 am – 11:40 am BST

Breakout Sessions

Celebrating Excellence In Tech Strategy & Enterprise Architecture

Join us as we honor the 2026 Technology Strategy Impact and Enterprise Architecture Award winners, organizations setting the standard for aligning strategy, architecture, and business outcomes. This session will showcase their journeys — from shaping forward-looking tech strategies to modernizing enterprise architecture — highlighting the decisions, practices, and impact driving agility, innovation, and measurable value. Join this session to:

Learn what distinguishes best-in-class tech strategy and EA practices
Hear how leaders connect strategy, architecture, and execution to deliver results
Gain practical ideas to elevate your technology roadmap and architecture function

Speakers:
Frederic Giron, VP, Senior Research Director, Forrester

From Performative To Proven: Data And AI That Delivers

Not all data and AI initiatives are created equal. So, what makes something truly stand out? In this session, we’ll demystify what “best-in-class” looks like and highlight the patterns, decisions, and outcomes that separate meaningful impact from performative progress. Through candid examples and expert insight, we’ll explore what award-worthy excellence looks like behind the scenes — and how you can bring those same principles to your own organization.

Join this session to:

Distinguish between hype-driven and high-impact AI initiatives
Learn how leading organizations scale AI with purpose and accountability
Gain a clearer benchmark for what “good” really looks like — and how to get there

Speakers:
Sudha Maheshwari, VP, Research Director, Forrester

You Cannot Deliver Sovereignty Without The CISO

Boards now treat sovereignty as a strategic priority, yet most organizations make infrastructure and procurement decisions with zero, or belated security input. While critical, without a thorough security and risk focus, these decisions can introduce measurable security regressions, across operations, tooling, and people. This session explores how minimal viable sovereignty significantly benefits from CISO’s early input to balance sovereignty ambitions with security outcomes.

Join this session to:

Identify where sovereignty initiatives can come at cost of security capabilities, including detection, response, and identity.
Understand how sovereignty decisions can increase security risk when CISOs are involved too late in the process.
Learn how to embed security early in sovereignty planning, and how to balance sovereignty goals with defensible security trade-offs.

Speakers:
Madelein van der Hout, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Analyst-Led Roundtables

Use Data, Insight, And Agents To Drive Supply Chain Resilience

Supply chain has evolved from a back-office function into a core driver of enterprise performance, with leaders who treat it strategically outperforming their peers. Yet many organizations remain constrained by fragmented systems that create silos, slow decisions, and limit resilience. Come to this roundtable prepared to discuss how to simplify application portfolios and leverage automation to unlock end-to-end visibility, enabling faster, smarter, and more integrated supply chain operations.

Speakers:
George Lawrie, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

AI ROI Reality Check: Separating Value From Hype

AI promises transformational impact, but proving return remains a challenge. In this peer discussion, share experiences, compare approaches, and explore how organizations are evaluating AI investments, managing risk, and building a stronger case for sustainable value creation.

Speakers:
Michael O'Grady, Forecast Analyst, Forrester

How Agentic Is Your Software Development?

Join a lively discussion as we explore the rise of Agentic Software Development. How is the adoption AI enabled software tools and/or agentic development platforms changing your software development workforce. What’s in it for your business?

Speakers:
Diego Lo Giudice, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

11:50 am – 12:20 am BST

Breakout Sessions

Unpacking The Cognitive Operating Model

Enterprise operating models built for digital transformation assume human-only workforces, application-centric architectures, and process logic encoded in deterministic workflows. Agentic AI breaks all three. Technology and business leaders need an operating model that treats human and AI cognition as a single governable portfolio — and aligns architecture, organization, and governance around it. Forrester’s Cognitive Operating Model provides that foundation: a reference framework for the enterprise transition from digital operating models to cognitive ones. Join this session to:

See where digital operating models break first. Application-centric architectures, role-based org design, and deterministic process logic each become a structural barrier to scaling agentic AI — and they fail in a predictable order.
Learn the four components of the Cognitive Operating Model. A skills-based architecture, a three-plane technology stack, cognitive-hybrid organizational models, and the governance contexts that bind them into a coherent whole.
Assess your readiness to transition. Identify which of your operating model assumptions will fail first, and how to sequence the architectural, organizational, and governance changes that follow.

Speakers:
Leslie Joseph, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Build AI Context With Knowledge Graph

Do not attempt to scale agentic AI without a knowledge graph foundation. Knowledge graphs act as the enterprise’s digital twin of meaning — grounding autonomous agents in governed, contextual, and explainable business knowledge. Without this layer, agentic AI initiatives risk fragmentation, inaccuracies, hallucination, and limited enterprise value. Join this session to:

Clarify the roles and relationships of ontologies, semantics, and knowledge graphs in modern AI-ready data architectures
Understand how knowledge graphs improve the accuracy, governance, and scalability of agentic AI
Learn pragmatic, low-regret steps to building a knowledge graph aligned to enterprise priorities

Speakers:
Indranil Bandyopadhyay, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The Future Is Now: Agentic AI Redefines Responsible AI

Agentic AI is redefining responsible AI, shifting it from static governance frameworks to real-time oversight of increasingly autonomous systems. As AI agents act across workflows, systems, and decisions, technology, security, and risk leaders must ensure they are explainable, accountable, and continuously observable in operation, not just in design. This session explores how responsible AI evolves into a dynamic control layer that governs agent behavior, enforces policy, and aligns outcomes to business risk appetite in real time. It will also help leaders cut through market hype to identify the solutions and capabilities required to scale trusted AI.

Join this session to:

Learn how to govern agentic AI systems with real-time observability, policy enforcement, and continuous control
Ensure explainability, accountability, and trustworthiness as AI agents make autonomous decisions across systems
Identify and prioritize the responsible AI capabilities and solutions needed to scale AI safely and confidently

Speakers:
Enza Iannopollo, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Analyst-Led Roundtables

Evolve Into The AI CISO Or Face Extinction

Join a lively discussion as we explore how AI will change the role of the CISO and the security organization over the next five years and how you can prepare yourself, your team, executives, and budget to thrive in the new era.

Speakers:
Jinan Budge, VP, Research Director, Forrester

Skilling For The Future: Building The AI-Ready Workforce

Join a conversation to see how forward-thinking organizations are readying and reskilling their workforce to seize the AI advantage.

Speakers:
Fiona Mark, Principal Analyst, Forrester

When AI Goes Wrong: Building Enterprise Resilience

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in business operations, the consequences of failure can extend far beyond technology teams, impacting customers, employees, finances, reputation, and enterprise risk. Join this interactive discussion to explore how organizations are preparing for high-impact AI failures, defining their AI risk appetite, and building resilience across the enterprise.

Speakers:
Stephanie Balaouras, VP, Group Director, Forrester
Sudha Maheshwari, VP, Research Director, Forrester

11:50 am – 1:20 pm BST

Executive Leadership Exchange (Invite-Only)

AMA: Operationalizing AI At Forrester

11:50 am- 12:20 pm

Join our ELE AMA featuring Michael Facemire, Forrester’s chief technology officer. Go beyond the hype to hear how Forrester has truly operationalized AI across the business — and where there have been challenges. Bring your toughest questions and get candid insights into what’s working, what’s not, and what it really takes to turn AI into client value.

Speakers:
Michael Facemire, Chief Technology Officer, Forrester
Greg Willrich, VP, Executive Partner, Forrester

ELE Lunch & Executive Keynote

12:20 -1:20 PM

Join your ELE peers for lunch and a conversation with an executive peer as they share perspectives on navigating change, leading teams, and responding to evolving business priorities in today’s dynamic environment.

12:20 pm – 1:20 pm BST

Networking Lunch

1:20 pm – 1:50 pm BST

Case Studies

1:55 pm – 2:55 pm BST

Workshop: Build A Plan For AI-Ready Data (Pre-Registration Required)

AI initiatives can only move as fast as the data foundation behind them — but AI-data readiness is not just a technology or data platform effort. It is a broader enterprise capability that requires alignment across Strategy, People, Process, Data, and Technology. In this interactive workshop, Build a Plan for AI-Ready Data, attendees will learn what it takes to prepare trusted, governed, accessible, contextualized, and actionable data for AI, GenAI, and agentic AI.

Participants will assess their organization’s AI-ready data maturity across five critical competencies: strategy, people, process, data, and technology. This broader assessment is essential because gaps in any one area can slow AI adoption, reduce trust, or limit the ability to scale AI responsibly. Through guided breakout exercises, attendees will identify readiness gaps, surface key dependencies, and prioritize the actions that matter most. By the end of the session, attendees will leave with a practical 90-day action plan to strengthen their AI-ready data foundation and accelerate more reliable, scalable AI outcomes.

Speakers:
Indranil Bandyopadhyay, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Adam Forde, VP, Executive Partner, Forrester

2:10 pm – 2:55 pm BST

Breakout Sessions

Make Skills The Foundation Of Your AI Journey

Human and AI cognitive capabilities are converging. Managing them as separate concerns, with different vocabularies, different systems, and different governance, won’t work in an agentic world. Technology and business leaders need a shared framework for the human and nonhuman capabilities that make up reinvented work. A skills-oriented agentic architecture (SOAA) provides that foundation: doing for agentic AI what SOA did for digital. That means a unified human-agent skills registry, skills managed as products, and skills intelligence that reveals the true impact on work, the workforce, and the broader labor market. Join this session to:

Understand the SOAA model, why use case framing is the wrong unit of analysis for agentic work, and how SOAA creates alignment between technology and business.
Build the right stack with skills intelligence, registries, context management, and orchestration that cut agent sprawl and sharpen governance.
Make your investments durable. Apply product discipline to human and agent skills as part of a composable agentic portfolio built to deliver on the Cognitive Operating Model.

Speakers:
Peter Yeung, Chief Information Officer and Global Data Protection Officer, Optimizely
Fiona Mark, Principal Analyst, Forrester

AI Platforms Are Transforming Themselves And The Way Enterprises Build And Deliver Value

Enterprises are rushing to build the next generation of agentic applications to create emerging value. They also want to reinvigorate, reimagine, and reinvent their existing processes with tools and platforms that allow them to do so regularly and reliably. Enterprises are using AI platforms to help them architect and deliver agentic applications that are making a real impact to the business and doing so with reliability and explainability. Join this session to:

Understand the expanding and changing landscape of AI platforms
Learn what emerging agentic architectures built with AI platforms look like
Hear different approaches enterprises can take to rationalize AI across their current platform investments

Speakers:
Rowan Curran, Principal Analyst, Forrester

AI Redefines GRC To Empower Agile, Trusted Risk Decisions

AI is reshaping governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platforms from systems of record into orchestrators of business and risk outcomes. AI is already disrupting how risk and cyber practitioners assess and manage cyber and enterprise risk. In GRC functions, AI will shorten decision timeframes to match the speed and agility of businesses’ demand, whilst maintaining trust and quality. This session will explore use cases that can be applied now to speed up your cyber risk program whilst maintaining decision quality.

Join this session to:

Identify where AI capabilities in GRC platforms support continuous risk management and triage to compress decision cycles without adding headcount.
Discover how to make the most of your AI capability whilst adapting your security and risk team’s capability to govern AI generated insights.

Speakers:
Paul McKay, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

3:05 pm – 4:05 pm BST

Workshop: Build The Technical Foundation For Business Outcomes In The AI Era (Pre-Registration Required)

Participants will define target business outcomes, learn to look for new and emerging risks, map the business goals to required human, partner, and technology capabilities, and translate those into platform design patterns across compute, storage, and operations. This session will engage participants on how agentic AI adoption is changing their own business models and what that means for their business’s technology foundations. This will include interactive session to map your business goals to infrastructure capabilities.

Join this session to:

Select a priority business outcome
Define IT infrastructure capabilities
Create metrics for business outcomes

Speakers:
Ash Pal, VP, CIO Executive Partner, Forrester
Eveline Oehrlich, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester

3:05 pm – 3:50 pm BST

Breakout Sessions

Power AI Innovation With Process Intelligence

Process intelligence is no longer just about improving efficiency. It is becoming the foundation for AI‑driven innovation, giving agents the context and control they need to redesign how work happens in real time. Leading firms are using it to unlock new automation patterns, simulate and test innovations, and orchestrate complex workflows across systems and teams. This session shows how to turn process intelligence into an engine for continuous innovation by embedding it directly into AI‑driven operations and transformation. Join this session to:

Use process intelligence to fuel AI-driven innovation, not just process optimization
Identify new opportunities for agent-led automation and orchestration across the business
Embed continuous, AI-powered transformation into your operating model

Speakers:
Bernhard Schaffrik, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The Quantum And AI Opportunity

Interest in quantum computing is heating up, but what is it, and what is its real potential? This session will begin with an overview of quantum computing and its current and future trajectory and then highlight its potential uses with an emphasis on AI use cases, plus myth-busting the hype. Questions from the audience are encouraged!

Speakers:
Martha Bennett, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester