UK CIO & IT Leaders Summit -

TLC Connect CIO & IT Leaders Summit - UK

19th & 20th May 2026

London

19th & 20th May 2026

TLC Connect CIO & IT Leaders Summit - UK

The TLC Connect CIO & IT Leaders Summit, UK brings together senior technology leaders responsible for running, modernising, and scaling enterprise IT under constant pressure.

Over two focused days, CIOs, CTOs, and Heads of Technology will confront the realities shaping today’s IT function: legacy drag, cost scrutiny, AI adoption at scale, delivery risk, and rising board expectations. This is not a summit about vision decks or transformation theatre. It is about making difficult trade-offs, reducing complexity, and keeping the organisation moving forward while the ground continues to shift.

The programme combines real-world case studies, peer-led roundtables, and candid executive discussions focused on what has actually worked, what has failed, and what technology leaders have deliberately stopped doing. Attendees will leave with practical insight on operating model design, platform strategy, AI governance, and translating technology decisions into outcomes the board understands.

Days

Hours

Minutes

Seconds

Key Themes for 2026

Pragmatism Over Promises: The Shift from Transformation to Operation

Operational Resilience Without Reinvention

Keeping core services stable while modernising legacy estates, managing supplier dependency, and absorbing disruption as part of day-to-day operations — not as crisis events.

Reducing Complexity to Regain Control

Simplifying fragmented estates, overlapping platforms, and tooling sprawl to improve decision-making, execution speed, and operational confidence.

AI Beyond Pilots: Ownership, Governance & ROI

Moving AI from experimentation to production with clear accountability, realistic expectations, and governance models that balance value, risk, and cost.

Technology Leadership & Board-Level Accountability

Translating technology trade-offs into outcomes boards understand — cost, resilience, delivery, and risk — and owning the consequences of those decisions.

Elevate Your Technology Leadership

Summit Agenda Overview

Welcome to the TLC Connect CIO & IT Leaders Summit – UK 2026. This invitation-only gathering brings together senior technology leaders responsible for running, modernising, and scaling enterprise IT under constant pressure.

Across two focused days, the UK CIO & IT Leaders Summit examines the practical challenges CIOs face today: operating resilient technology estates, reducing complexity and technical debt, adopting AI beyond pilot projects, and delivering change without disrupting the business. The agenda is grounded in real operating conditions, not transformation theory.

The programme is designed to deliver clarity, honest peer insight, and decision-grade takeaways. Through real-world case studies, candid panel discussions, and peer-led roundtables, attendees will explore what has worked, what has failed, and what leading CIOs have deliberately stopped doing in order to regain control, improve delivery, and meet rising board expectations.

12:00 - Registration

Arrival, registration and networking lunch

13:00 - Chair's Welcome

Welcome and Agenda Overview

Peter Dorrington – Founder – XMplify Consulting Ltd

13:05 -Headline Keynote: The CIO Mandate in Review: Running Enterprise Tech Without a Safety Net

The last 24 months have fundamentally reshaped the CIO mandate. Technical debt has risen by 30–50% across large enterprises (Gartner), cloud waste now accounts for up to 32% of total cloud spend, and AI adoption has accelerated faster than any previous enterprise technology wave, with McKinsey reporting that 65% of organisations now use generative AI in at least one business function.

At the same time, CIOs are operating under unprecedented constraint. IT budgets grew only 2–4% on average in 2025, despite rising expectations around AI, operational resilience, cybersecurity, and data governance. Forrester notes that CIOs now spend over 70% of their time on operational resilience and risk — a sharp departure from the transformation-heavy agendas of the early 2020s.

This session delivers a clear-eyed reality check on what has changed — and what is not reverting. From the operationalisation of AI to the permanence of hybrid work, from escalating cyber exposure to the end of “blank-cheque” transformation, CIOs must now lead with discipline, evidence, and operational clarity.

13:35 - Fireside Chat - From CIO to Chief Business Enablers: How IT Drives Business Value

CIOs are undergoing a profound shift from technology custodians to enterprise-wide value creators. According to Gartner, by 2025 over 80% of CIOs are measured on business outcomes and revenue impact — not infrastructure stability or project delivery alone.

This panel explores how CIOs are stepping into a commercial leadership role: shaping growth strategy, driving operational efficiency, and enabling new revenue models through AI, data, automation, and modern architectures. The discussion will examine how technology leaders are reframing investment decisions in business terms, strengthening cross-functional collaboration, and building operating models where IT becomes a catalyst for enterprise performance rather than a cost centre.

14:20 - Customer Case Study Workshops - Cloud‑Smart Cost Optimisation and FinOps in Practice

Cloud costs are rising faster than most organisations can govern them, driven by expanding AI workloads, data pipelines, and increasingly distributed architectures. For many CIOs, cloud spend has become opaque, fragmented, and difficult to tie back to business value.

This workshop gives CIOs a practical, vendor-agnostic view of how leading enterprises are adopting cloud-smart strategies that balance performance, sovereignty, and cost. Through real-world examples, we will explore FinOps operating models, automated optimisation, intelligent workload placement, rightsizing, chargeback and showback mechanisms, and continuous governance that reduce waste without slowing delivery or innovation.

14:45 - Customer Case Study Workshops - Intelligent Automation: Reclaiming Capacity When Productivity Pressure Peaks

Automation was meant to relieve pressure on overstretched IT and business teams, but the last few years have shown that many deployments failed to deliver the promised productivity lift. CIOs now face rising operational load, shrinking headcount flexibility, and relentless demand for faster cycle times.

This session focuses on the real CIO challenge of 2026: how to use intelligent automation to genuinely free capacity, reduce manual drag, and improve throughput in environments where every hour and every FTE counts. We will examine where early RPA models underperformed, why automation stalled at scale, and how AI agents, orchestration layers, and redesigned workflows can finally close the productivity gap.

15:05 - Networking Break & Vendor Exploration

15:25 - Panel Discussion - Smart Spend, Bold Bets: Rebalancing the CIO Investment Portfolio

Economic uncertainty continues to reshape CIO priorities, pushing organisations to optimise technology spend without slowing innovation. Global public cloud spend is projected to reach USD 723 billion in 2025 (Gartner), yet an estimated 20–30% of cloud expenditure is wasted due to idle resources and weak governance (IDC).

In this environment, CIOs, CISOs, CFOs, and CDOs must work together to rebalance the enterprise investment portfolio — aligning risk, value, and financial discipline while still backing the bold bets that drive competitiveness. This panel explores how senior leaders collaborate to optimise spend, strengthen governance, prioritise data-driven value, and ensure every pound invested supports resilience, security, and long-term growth.

16:10 - Customer Case Study Workshop - Observability 2.0: What CIOs Must Know, Measure and Own

Modern architectures, microservices, serverless functions, edge workloads, AI pipelines, and multi-cloud estates have pushed traditional monitoring well past its limits. This workshop explores how organisations are adopting next-generation observability to gain real-time insight across increasingly complex, distributed environments.

16:35 - Roundtable Discussions

Roundtable Discussion 1: The Hard Part of AI — Decision Rights, Accountability & Control

Many organisations rushed into AI experimentation, but few built the governance, ownership structures, or decision rights needed to run AI safely and at scale. As a result, CIOs are now dealing with fragmented pilots, unclear accountability, shadow AI usage, and rising operational risk.

This roundtable focuses on the structures and guardrails CIOs must put in place to ensure AI is governed responsibly, owned clearly, and operated with discipline — not optimism.

Moderation Questions:

Where should AI governance truly sit, and who is accountable when something goes wrong?
What decision rights or controls have you put in place to prevent AI sprawl and unmanaged risk?
How are you defining model ownership and lifecycle accountability across IT and the business?

Roundtable Discussion 2: Breaking Through Change Fatigue — Why Transformation Culture Still Isn’t Delivering

After years of continuous digital initiatives, restructures, and shifting priorities, many organisations are experiencing deep change fatigue. Teams aren’t resisting technology — they’re resisting more transformation. The result is delivery drag: slowed execution, declining engagement, and an inability to absorb yet another programme, platform, or operating model shift.

This roundtable explores how CIOs can rebuild organisational capacity, reduce friction, and reignite momentum in environments where transformation culture has been stretched thin. We’ll discuss how to simplify change, remove blockers, and create the conditions for progress without overwhelming already saturated teams.

Moderation Questions:

How is change fatigue showing up in your organisation, and where is it creating the most delivery drag?
Which cultural barriers from earlier transformation efforts still persist, and how are you addressing them now?
What practical steps are you taking to reduce overload, simplify change, and rebuild organisational capacity to deliver?

Roundtable Discussion 3: How to Fund Innovation When Budgets Are Tight

Economic constraints are forcing CIOs to rethink how innovation is prioritised and funded. This discussion examines how leaders are reshaping investment models, demonstrating value, and protecting strategic initiatives even as cost pressures rise.

Moderation Questions:

How are CIOs balancing cost optimisation with the need to invest in future growth?
What frameworks help prioritise innovation initiatives with the highest business impact?
How do leaders communicate value to secure ongoing investment?

17:05 - Chair's closing remarks

18:30 - Networking Drinks

19:30 - Gala Dinner and Guest Speaker

08:00 - Registration & Networking Breakfast

09:00 - Chair's Opening and Day 1 Recap

09:25 - Panel Discussion - The CIO Playbook: How to Create Value by Doing Less

CIOs and the IT function are entering 2026 with a new leadership imperative: stop doing the things that no longer create value. 68% of CIOs are actively cutting or sunsetting at least one major technology initiative this year (Gartner), and more than half are reducing vendor portfolios by 20% or more to combat complexity, cost inflation, and cyber exposure.

McKinsey’s 2025 Technology Value Report found that organisations that aggressively rationalise — cutting redundant platforms, eliminating low-value customisation, and halting “zombie” digital programmes — achieve up to 30% lower run costs and 2× faster time-to-value on new initiatives. Meanwhile, technical debt now consumes 28–40% of IT budgets, forcing CIOs to make sharper, sometimes uncomfortable decisions about what to stop funding, supporting, or tolerating.

This session explores the hard calls CIOs are making in 2026: stopping legacy investments, ending low-ROI innovation experiments, reducing cloud sprawl, tightening AI governance, and shifting teams away from work that doesn’t move the business forward.

10:05 - Keynote - Reinventing the Digital Core — Modern Architectures for a High‑Velocity Future

This session will examine how modern enterprises are shifting to composable architectures, event-driven systems, and cloud-smart strategies to accelerate delivery while reducing complexity across increasingly distributed estates.

10:35 - Customer Case Study Workshop - Legacy Modernisation in Practice — Replatform, Refactor or Retire?

A tactical look at modernising monolithic systems, reducing technical debt, and accelerating migration through automation. As legacy estates continue to drain capacity and budget, CIOs are being forced to make sharper, evidence-based decisions about where to invest and where to cut.

This session explores how CIOs are deciding which systems to replatform, which to refactor for long-term agility, and which to retire entirely in order to free up cost, reduce complexity, and create headroom for modern platforms and AI-led initiatives.

10:55 - Networking Break & Vendor Exploration

11:15 - Customer Case Study Workshops - The Cloud Efficiency Mandate: FinOps, Automation and Smarter Workload Strateg

Cloud spend is rising at double-digit rates for most organisations, driven by AI workloads, data-intensive architectures, and sprawling multi-cloud estates. As boards demand tighter financial discipline, CIOs are under pressure to deliver meaningful savings without slowing innovation or compromising sovereignty.

This workshop explores how leading enterprises are adopting cloud-smart strategies that combine FinOps practices, automated optimisation, and intelligent workload placement to reduce waste, improve performance, and regain control of cloud economics at scale.

11:40 - Customer Case Study Workshop - Building Always‑On Operations: The New Reality for Technology Leaders

Operational continuity is now a core CIO responsibility as digital estates expand, interdependencies grow, and disruption becomes routine. UK organisations must maintain uptime, protect critical services, and ensure technology can withstand shocks — from system failures and supplier outages to cyber-driven disruption.

As hybrid work, cloud complexity, and AI-enabled systems increase the risk surface, CIOs need resilience models that go beyond perimeter thinking. This session explores how technology leaders are strengthening continuity through identity-centric controls, real-time visibility, AI-supported detection, and architectures designed to keep the business running even when parts of the system fail.

12:00 - Fireside Chat - The Human Debt Crisis: Burnout, Bandwidth and the Cost to IT Delivery

Burnout has become a structural risk for IT and technology organisations. Mental Health UK’s Burnout Report 2025 shows that 91% of UK workers experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, and one in five required time off due to stress-related mental health issues.

For CIOs, this is no longer an HR issue — it is an operational one. Burnout is driving delivery drag, rising error rates, talent attrition, and declining morale across IT and engineering teams. This session explores how CIOs can recognise early warning signs, reduce systemic overload, and build healthier, more sustainable operating environments without compromising delivery.

12:30 - Networking Lunch & Vendor Exploration

13:30 - Panel Discussion - Simplify to Scale: Transforming the Tech Stack for Speed, Agility and Growth

Legacy modernisation remains one of the most urgent priorities for CIOs as organisations confront the rising cost, fragility, and operational drag of ageing systems. Over 40% of IT budgets are still consumed by maintaining legacy environments, while technical debt has grown by more than 30% in the past five years due to deferred modernisation (Gartner, Deloitte).

McKinsey’s 2025 research highlights that organisations with modern, modular architectures achieve up to 50% faster feature delivery and significantly lower incident rates, directly improving customer experience and operational resilience. This session explores how CIOs can simplify sprawling estates, retire or re-platform legacy systems, and build a flexible, scalable technology backbone that supports long-term digital growth.

The organisations that win in 2026 will be those that treat modernisation not as a one-off project, but as a continuous capability and strategic enabler.

14.15 - Roundtable Discussions

Roundtable Discussion 1: How to Build an AI Operating Model That Actually Works

Many organisations are experimenting with AI, but few have the structures, governance, and accountability needed to scale it. This roundtable explores how CIOs can redesign teams, processes, and decision-making to support AI-enabled operations without creating bottlenecks or unmanaged risk.

Moderation Questions:

What organisational changes are proving essential to embed AI into day-to-day operations?
How are CIOs balancing speed with responsible governance as AI adoption accelerates?
Where are the biggest gaps in skills, ownership, or process that prevent AI from scaling?

Roundtable Discussion 2: How to Build a Culture That Supports Digital Transformation

Technology change is easy compared to cultural change. This session explores how CIOs can cultivate digital fluency, encourage experimentation, and build cross-functional collaboration that sustains transformation over time.

Moderation Questions:

What cultural barriers most commonly slow digital transformation?
How are CIOs building digital fluency across non-technical teams?
What leadership behaviours help embed a culture of continuous learning?

Roundtable Discussion 3: How to Fund Innovation When Budgets Are Tight

Economic constraints are forcing CIOs to rethink how innovation is prioritised and funded. This session examines how leaders are reshaping investment models, demonstrating value, and protecting strategic initiatives even as cost pressures rise.

Moderation Questions:

How are CIOs balancing cost optimisation with the need to invest in future growth?
What frameworks help prioritise innovation initiatives with the highest business impact?
How do leaders communicate value to secure ongoing investment?

15:00 - Networking Break & Vendor Exploration

15:20 - Panel Discussion – Building the Future Workforce: Skills, Technology and the New Productivity Frontier

The rapid acceleration of AI, automation, and digital technologies is reshaping workforce expectations, placing CIOs at the centre of enterprise talent strategy. Organisations with leading digital and AI capabilities outperform laggards by 2–6× in total shareholder returns, yet 54% of employees will require significant reskilling or upskilling by 2027 (World Economic Forum).

Gartner’s 2026 workforce outlook highlights that only 1 in 50 AI initiatives delivers transformational value — largely because organisations lack the skills, operating models, and cross-functional collaboration required to realise impact. This session examines how CIOs can modernise workforce capabilities, redesign ways of working, and build a culture of continuous learning that enables teams to collaborate effectively with AI.

16:00 - Closing Keynote – The Green Technology Mandate: Aligning Digital Transformation with ESG Outcomes

Sustainability and ESG have moved from peripheral initiatives to core strategic priorities, with technology now central to how organisations measure, manage, and reduce their environmental and social impact. Companies with strong ESG performance achieve 10–20% higher operational efficiency, yet over 70% of organisations struggle to meet emerging reporting requirements without modern digital infrastructure (McKinsey, Deloitte).

By 2027, three-quarters of large enterprises are expected to use ESG data management platforms to support regulatory compliance and investor expectations. This session explores how CIOs can embed sustainability into the digital core — leveraging data, automation, cloud optimisation, and modern architectures to drive compliance, efficiency, and competitive differentiation.

16:25 - Chair's Closing Remarks & Key Takeaways

Who Should Attend?

Designed for Enterprise Technology Leaders Driving Business Value at Scale

CIOs & Chief Technology Leaders

Chief Information Officers, Group CIOs, and Technology Directors responsible for setting enterprise-wide technology strategy, modernising legacy estates, balancing cost and innovation, and ensuring IT directly supports growth, resilience, and competitive advantage.

Transformation Leaders

Senior leaders overseeing digital platforms, data strategy, AI adoption, and transformation programmes — accountable for turning technology investment into measurable business outcomes while navigating complexity, change fatigue, and execution risk.

Enterprise Architecture & Platform Leaders

Technology leaders responsible for designing and evolving scalable, resilient architectures across cloud, data, integration, and application estates — focused on reducing technical debt, simplifying complexity, and accelerating delivery at enterprise scale.

IT Operations, Service & Resilience Leaders

Heads of IT Operations, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Service Management responsible for operational continuity, performance, availability, and recovery — ensuring technology estates remain stable, efficient, and resilient in the face of disruption and rising demand.