In-Person

Boston CIO Community

Executive Summit

December 2, 2026 | Renaissance Boston Seaport District

December 2, 2026
Renaissance Boston Seaport District

Collaborate with your peers

Get together with Boston's top CIOs to tackle shared business challenges and critical priorities facing your role today. Participate in this one-day, local program with peer-driven topics and interactive discussions with your true C-level peers.

Join your peers to discuss the most critical issues impacting CIOs today:

Re-assessing Investment and Financial Impact of AI

Navigating Transformation, Culture, and Organizational Change

Collaboration across the C-Suite to Enable Technology Innovation and Efficiency

Boston CIO Governing Body

The Governing Body Co-Chairs shape the summit agenda, ensuring that all content is driven By CIOs, For CIOs®.

Governing Body Co-Chairs

Chuck LoCurto

Bryant University
VP & CIO

Ryan Snyder

Thermo Fisher Scientific
SVP & CIO

What to Expect

Interactive Sessions

Hear from CIO practitioners and thought leaders on how they're solving critical challenges impacting your role today in Keynote sessions, and join smaller, interactive discussions with your peers in Breakout and Boardroom sessions.

Community Networking

Make new connections and catch up with old friends in casual conversations during dedicated time for networking designed to better acquaint you with your Boston CIO community.

Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Connect with like-minded peers in a private, one-on-one setting through Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

Agenda

Executive Boardroom Sessions

Navigating Risk, Unlocking Reward — AI Security and Governance

 Effective AI governance enables innovation with confidence, not just control. Organizations must align governance with business risk, uphold ethics and protect data as AI scales.

In this session, you’ll explore:

  • Urgent AI-specific risks shaping today’s threat landscape
  • How to assess and strengthen your organization’s AI governance and risk posture
  • Best practices for building secure, resilient AI infrastructure and data

Frontier AI Models — When Attack Speed Outpaces Operations

 AI can now find and exploit a vulnerability in minutes — faster than any patch cycle or IT team can respond. For CIOs, this is a business risk, not just a security issue: the gap between attack speed and response speed can now disrupt operations. This is where autonomous remediation comes into play.
Join this session to learn:

  • Why the gap between attack speed and IT response is now a business risk
  • How automatic remediation cuts risk without more headcount or work
  • What this shift means for how you prioritize risk, budget and technology

Rewriting the Build vs. Buy Playbook

 As AI transforms business operations and erodes longstanding biases, CIOs face renewed questions about how to balance building in-house solutions versus buying from vendors. What does today's decision framework look like as executives weigh multiple variables including speed, scalability, competitive advantage, and proprietary control?

Join this session to discuss:

  • Reassessing build vs. buy in the context of AI innovation
  • Weighing competitive advantage against cost, speed, and risk
  • Anticipating future orchestration models for hybrid technology strategies

A Practical Framework for AI-Ready Enterprise Data

AI has plenty of intelligence. What it lacks is enterprise context. To act with precision, AI must understand how a business operates.

Join this session to discover:

  • Transforming fragmented data with a real-time System of Context
  • Scaling AI with greater accuracy, accountability and business impact
  • Aligning data strategy with enterprise AI initiatives

Navigating the Cost and Dependency Trap of Innovation

 


Keynote Session

AI Authority Drift — Closing the Governance Gap

 Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase. No longer limited to generating insights, modern AI systems are beginning to act — initiating workflows, interacting with applications, and making decisions at machine speed. As agentic AI systems become operational participants inside enterprise environments, this session explores how enterprises can safely scale AI by establishing governance across identity, authority, behavior, and data, while enabling innovation without introducing unmanaged risk.

Attendees will learn:

  • How to control the authority, behavior, and data access of autonomous systems operating across complex digital ecosystems
  • The emerging governance model, enacted through a real-time control plane, to address authority drift, misconfigured permissions, and unintended AI behavior
  • A practical framework and architecture for governing AI at enterprise scale


Gartner Keynote Session

How AI Changes the IT Operating Model

AI is accelerating changes to IT operating models. As technology becomes easier to build and deploy, creativity and problem solving become core competencies, and IT shifts focus from delivery efficiency to ongoing innovation. Organizations seeing the greatest impact are redefining ownership, breaking down functional silos, and creating new ways of working that bring business, technology, and risk leaders together around shared outcomes.

Join this keynote to explore:

  • How AI is merging accountability for business, technology, and risk outcomes
  • Why cross-functional teams are becoming the default model for delivering value at speed
  • How trust is becoming a competitive advantage in a technology-driven enterprise


Breakout Sessions

Securing Identity Against AI Threats

 As AI rewires the enterprise threat landscape, identity has emerged as the primary vector of cyber risk. AI-driven deepfakes, automated attacks and unmanaged AI agent identities render traditional perimeters obsolete. This session explores the governance, operational resilience, and cultural shifts required to secure digital identity infrastructure against next-generation threats without choking business agility.

Join this town hall to discuss:

  • Analyzing the weaponization of Gen AI against corporate identity perimeters
  • Balancing robust next-generation security controls with organizational business agility
  • Establishing foundational governance frameworks to secure autonomous AI agent personas

Breakout session

 

Integrating Enterprise Agents — A Practical Playbook for CIOs

AI agent adoption cannot happen in isolation from existing applications, APIs, MCPs, and governance models. To move from experimentation to execution, CIOs require a practical playbook to separate the signal from the noise.

Join this session to explore how to:

  • Evaluate where agents add meaningful value versus introducing risk
  • Address practical adoption tradeoffs across real operating environments
  • Gain a concrete framework for evaluating enterprise fit


We look forward to seeing you at an upcoming in-person gathering

Gartner cares about the health and safety of our community. If you are feeling unwell, please refrain from attending the conference. At this time, Gartner does not have any health-related requirements in place for attendance. Should this change, we will follow up with updated guidance.

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Community Program Manager

For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.

Rachel Van Duyne

Community Program Manager

rachel.vanduyne@gartner.com