16th & 17th June 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.
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.
Speakers
Giles Lindsay
Chief Information Officer
Agile Delta
Amy Jones
Chief Transformation Officer
Emerald Publishing
Mark Molyneus
EMEA Field CTO
Commvault
Jeremy Steventon Barnes
Chief Technology & Information Officer
V.Group
Sandy Gill
Associate Director Digital Transformation
London Metropolitan University
Robert Smith
Associate Director of Emerging Technologies and Insights
Flutter Entertainment
Joseph Turnbullt
Director Technology Strategy & Transformation
Save the Children
Jonathan Conn
Digital Technology Director
England Rugby
Eddie Olla
Chief Digital Officer
NHS Coventry and Warwickshire
Tia Cheang
Group Chief Data & AI Officer
Investindustrial
Peter Dorrington
Founder
XMplify Consulting Ltd
Richard Storry
Senior Manager, International Channel Sales Engineering
Druva
Aaron Kalvani
AI Strategist & Advisor
United Nations
Julian Wheeler
Chief Technology Officer
Sports Information Services
Sam Sahana
Chief Digital Information Officer
Walgreens Boots Alliance
Russell Brown
Senior Solutions Consultant
New Relic
12:00 - Registration
Arrival, registration and networking lunch
13:30 - Chair's Welcome
Welcome and Agenda Overview
Peter Dorrington – Founder – XMplify Consulting Ltd
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, in 2025 80% of CIOs were measured on business outcomes and revenue impact.
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 conversation will examine how IT leaders are reframing technology investments in business terms, strengthening cross-functional collaboration, and building operating models where IT becomes a catalyst for enterprise performance, not a cost centre.
Chief Technology Officer
Sports Information Services
Associate Director Digital Transformation
London Metropolitan University
Digital Technology Director
England Rugby
Chief Information Officer
Agile Delta
14:25 - Lightening Round Discussion : Beyond the Breach - Building Cyber Resilience from the Ground Up
Some of the most valuable insight at leadership level comes from open discussion with peers facing similar challenges. This session is designed to create space for honest conversation, practical problem-solving, and shared learning.
Delegates will work in small groups to discuss current priorities, compare approaches, and exchange ideas on the issues shaping today's technology agenda. From AI adoption and modernisation programmes to talent challenges, governance, and operational resilience, the conversation will be driven by the experiences and perspectives in the room.
The session is deliberately informal and discussion-led, encouraging candid peer-to-peer engagement, rapid knowledge sharing, and actionable takeaways that participants can apply immediately within their own organisations.
14:50 - Peer‑to‑Peer Discussion Group
15:10 - Networking Break & Vendor Exploration
15:30 - Panel Discussion - Smart Spend, Bold Bets: Rebalancing the CIO Investment Portfolio
Economic uncertainty continues to reshape CIO priorities, pushing organisations to optimise spend without slowing innovation. Industry research shows that cloud and digital investments are now both essential and increasingly scrutinised. Gartner projected global public cloud spending to reach $723 billion in 2025, while IDC estimates that 20–30% of cloud expenditure is wasted due to idle resources, overprovisioning, and weak governance.
In this environment, the Technology Executive Suite 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 technology leaders collaborate to optimise spend, strengthen governance, prioritise data-driven value, and ensure every pound invested supports resilience, security, and long-term growth.
Chief Digital Officer
NHS Coventry and Warwickshire
Director Technology Strategy & Transformation
Save the Children
Chief Digital Information Officer
Walgreens Boots Alliance
16:20 - Customer Case Study Workshop - Managing the Risk of AI Systems with Intelligent Observability
Deploying AI introduces new levels of complexity across enterprise technology environments. As organisations move from experimentation to production-scale AI, traditional monitoring and management approaches are struggling to keep pace with increasingly dynamic, distributed, and autonomous workloads.
This session explores why technology leaders must build observability directly into their AI roadmaps to ensure system reliability, maintain operational control, optimise performance, and manage cost at scale.
Attendees will gain practical insight into how observability is evolving to support AI-powered applications, helping organisations identify issues faster, improve user experiences, and confidently scale AI initiatives across the enterprise.
Senior Solutions Consultant
New Relic
16:40 - 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?
17:10 - Chair's closing remarks
17:15 - Networking Drinks & Pitch Side BBQ
08:00 - Registration & Networking Breakfast
09:00 - Chair's Opening and Day 1 Recap
09:05 - Opening Keynote - The CIO Playbook
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.
Group Chief Data & AI Officer
Investindustrial
09:25 - Panel Discussion - From Innovation Discipline to Tech Simplification: The CIO Framework for High‑Value Tech
IT Leaders are entering 2026 with a clear mandate: focus innovation on what truly delivers value. With 68% of CIOs cutting or sunsetting major technology initiatives and more than half reducing vendor portfolios, leaders are shifting from broad experimentation to disciplined, outcome-driven investment.
As budgets come under greater scrutiny and pressure grows to demonstrate measurable returns, technology leaders are being forced to make sharper decisions about where to invest, what to scale, and what to stop.
This session explores how CIOs are ending low-ROI pilots, tightening governance around emerging technologies, reducing sprawl, and prioritising the initiatives that accelerate business impact, operational efficiency, and long-term competitive advantage.
Chief Transformation Officer
Emerald Publishing
Group Chief Data & AI Officer
Investindustrial
Chief Technology & Information Officer
V.Group
Director Technology Strategy & Transformation
Save the Children
10:05 - Platinum Keynote - From Cyber Security to Cyber Resilience
The cyber attack surface is evolving exponentially. AI-powered threats are exploiting vulnerabilities faster than ever, while cloud-first architectures have created new exposure points demanding fresh protection strategies.
The question is no longer if your organisation will face an attack — it's when. Will your data be protected? Can your business recover?
Join Commvault EMEA Field CTO, Mark Molyneux, as he explores the modern threat landscape and demonstrates why an optimised cyber resilience strategy is imperative.
You'll discover:
- How AI is transforming attack velocity and sophistication
- Why cloud-first enterprises must rethink security and recovery
- Practical frameworks for ensuring business continuity when threats become reality
- Real-world lessons from the front lines of enterprise cyber resilience
EMEA Field CTO
Commvault
10:35 - Customer Case Study Workshop - Legacy Modernisation in Practice — Replatform, Refactor or Retire?
10:55 - Networking Break & Vendor Exploration
11:15 - Customer Case Study Workshops - The From Backup to Cyber Resilience: Protecting Cloud Data in an Era of Constant Threat
As organisations accelerate cloud adoption, traditional backup is no longer enough. Ransomware, sophisticated cyber attacks, and increasingly distributed data environments require a broader focus on cyber resilience.
This session explores how CIOs can strengthen resilience through cloud-native data protection, enabling faster recovery, greater confidence after an incident, and simplified operations.
We’ll examine the benefits of a SaaS-based approach, the role of immutable recovery in defending against ransomware, and strategies for protecting data consistently across cloud workloads, SaaS applications, endpoints, and data centres.
Attendees will gain practical insights into reducing complexity, supporting compliance, and ensuring rapid recovery when disruption occurs.
Senior Manager, International Channel Sales Engineering
Druva
11:40 - Moderated Peer to Peer discussions and 1-2-1 meetings
12:05 - 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. Companies with leading digital and AI capabilities outperform laggards by 2–6x in total shareholder returns, yet 54% of all employees will require significant reskilling or upskilling by 2027 according to the 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.
AI Strategist & Advisor
United Nations
Associate Director of Emerging Technologies and Insights
Flutter Entertainment
Chief Information Officer
Agile Delta
12:45 - Networking Lunch & Vendor Exploration
13:45 - 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 found that 91% of UK workers experienced high or extreme levels of stress in the previous year, while one in five required time away from work due to stress-related mental health challenges.
For CIOs, this is no longer an HR issue — it is an operational one. Burnout is contributing to delivery delays, rising error rates, talent attrition, and declining morale across technology, engineering, and transformation teams.
This session explores how CIOs can recognise early warning signs, reduce systemic overload, and build healthier, more sustainable operating environments without compromising delivery, performance, or innovation.
Chief Transformation Officer
Emerald Publishing
Associate Director Digital Transformation
London Metropolitan University
14.20 - 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 - Chair's Closing Remarks & Key Takeaways
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