8th Chief Digital & Data Officer Hong Kong Summit
Due to Super Typhoon Ragasa impacting HK on the original event date, CDOTrends' 8th annual Chief Digital & Data Officer Hong Kong Summit is now rescheduled to 20 Nov.
AI has gone from an experimental wonder to the lifeblood of many Asian enterprises. While it is driving today’s transformation, innovation, and growth, some feel that the laser focus on AI is at the expense of other digital and transformation initiatives.
An added challenge is that AI is evolving, fast, which makes deriving true quantifiable value difficult. As chief digital officers, chief data officers, and AI leaders search for tangible, positive returns from their AI investments, the new developments continue to shape the landscape and its ROI potential. With Agentic AI in sight, strengthening the IT infrastructure, accelerating data accessibility, and refining governance for building trust have become top C-level goals.
The 8th annual Chief Digital & Data Officer Hong Kong Summit brings together digital, data, IT, e-commerce, CX, and AI leaders to explore technology value creation, critical technological advancements, and upcoming Digital trends. Through peer-to-peer discussions, thought leadership presentations, and real-world experience sharing, the Summit looks to unearth the latest best practices in driving data accessibility, infrastructure readiness, digital revenue, ROI, speed, and governance.
Why Chief Digital & Data Officer Hong Kong Summit is Different
- Create business impacts and outcomes through digital and data initiatives
- Achieve agility and digital capability for pre-digital, legacy-laded enterprises
- Craft seamless experiences for customers and employees to drive human-centricity
- Build data and AI capabilities through structure, talent and tech
- Explore exponential technologies for monetization opportunities
AGENDA
As AI reshapes everything from operating models to automation platforms, digital leaders face conflicting pressures: scale versus control, speed versus stability, innovation versus integration. The challenge is no longer just adoption; it’s governance across a rapidly diversifying stack of models, tools, and agentic systems. In this keynote, Forrester analyst Frederic Giron will unpack the real trade-offs CDOs and CTOs must navigate to move beyond pilot-stage AI and embed intelligence into the core architecture of the enterprise. You will learn how to build toward autonomous operations without sacrificing oversight, trust, or strategic flexibility.
Most AI deployments in Hong Kong are internal and efficiency-focused. Aside from chatbots, most external, customer-facing use cases remain work in progress. With trust, accuracy, and personality as hurdles, some believe that embedded AI could be detrimental to CX. What is undebatable is that AI’s full potential is yet to be realized. This panel will examine:
- What is stopping the external deployments of AI?
- How to unlock the other half of AI value through CX?
- Beyond chatbots: What are the next customer-facing use cases and POCs prime for deployment?
- How to manage potential relationship challenges due to conflicting results/recommendations between human staff and AI staff?
- How do we build consumer trust in AI by minimizing hallucination and improving reliability?
Moderator:
Agentic AI promises to revolutionize productivity and efficiency. It is also a step towards the eventual goal of AGI. Yet, with the existing data and infrastructure as foundations, are enterprises ready for this next iteration of AI? This panel will discuss:
- Potential real-world applications of agentic AI in enterprises
- Overcoming tech debts for Agentic AI: Data, IT, and readiness
- Autonomous vs human intervention: The pros, cons, and feasibility of removing humans from the loop
- Creating relevant oversight mechanisms to responsibly mitigate risks in Agentic AI
Panelists:
You've heard the promise of Agentic AI. But in Hong Kong's high-stakes financial market, is your data infrastructure ready? Studies have shown that legacy infrastructure, along with data hygiene, can be silent roadblocks to AI adoption. It also directly impacts your ability to unlock new revenue streams from algorithmic trading, real-time risk modeling, and personalized client services.
In this exclusive Executive luncheon, leaders from Digital Realty and BT International will shift the conversation from the theoretical "what" and "why" of AI to the more strategic “how”. Delving deeper into the insights and learnings from a morning panel discussion on Agentic AI and AGI, this luncheon will discuss the immediate challenges of latency, regulatory risk, and capacity that FSIs face. Subject matter experts will examine the role of the network as the invisible foundation to enable AI workloads to perform at scale. You will also hear how a major financial services giant utilized Connected Cloud Colocation, which combines BT's global network reach with Digital Realty's high-performance data hubs and standardized global contracting model, to accelerate its AI journey.
Key discussion areas:
- Tackle data gravity more effectively: Learn how you can take better control of the flow of market data and client information, and remove barriers from deploying compliant AI models at speed and scale across the region.
- Where to start rewiring for an AI-Ready infrastructure: Learn best practices for transforming your data centers into high-density, AI-ready innovation hubs and where to invest to meet the demands of next-gen risk modeling and algorithmic trading.
- Architect with the Connected Cloud: Gain an in-depth look into a recent real-world FSI implementation to learn how Digital Realty’s partnership with BT simplified complex interconnections, accelerated the company’s AI strategy, ensured regulatory compliance across all jurisdictions, and removed potential licensing headaches.
- Put the network at the core: Understand how BT’s Global Fabric delivers secure, high-capacity, and resilient connectivity designed for the AI era - with instant provisioning and embedded security that legacy networks cannot match.
- Drive strategic ROI: Hear how you can leverage Digital Realty and BT’s strengths to reduce operational risks and gain a competitive edge in a fast-evolving AI landscape.
Speakers:
Moderator:
Enterprises are relying on Agentic AI to unlock autonomy, speed, and cost savings. Yet, without appropriate governance, it also brings opaque decisions, data misuse, and unintended actions. This session will explore:
- Building trust on data governance
- Prioritising agents by Risk vs Impact
- Implementing a layered governance stack
- Embedding human oversight by design
AI is now the lifeblood of Asian enterprise and companies are embarking on AI journeys. However, these journeys are lagging behind the pace of tech advancement due to a range of factors. This panel will examine the ways to overcome various hurdles in realising the AI potential, including:
- Anticipating how the business landscape will be impacted by AI
- Exploring AI use cases that are financially impactful and viable
- Solving persistent data accessibility, ownership, quality, and governance issues
- Modernising legacy systems, architecture, and infrastructure
- Building and accumulating talents and skills in both technical and general employees
Moderator:
Many enterprises adopt tech solutions rather than develop their own in-house. With the accelerated pace of change, in a polarizing world where technological sovereignty is on the rise, IT purchasing decisions can be pivotal to business successes. This session will discuss:
- Adopting the right solutions amidst accelerated tech evolution
- Navigating geopolitical realities and risks
- Overcoming uncertainties of yet-to-be-established regulatory requirements
- Looking beyond the latest hype for other technology on the horizon
With the introduction of agentic AI, some organic team members will inevitably be replaced by inorganic ones due to productivity gain. While certain companies are rightsizing as they scale and deploy AI, others are backtracking with costly moves to rehire. This panel will explore from a digital and IT perspective:
- Is AI mature enough to displace humans?
- For productivity-gain POCs, how can we determine that they are successful, and that they will stick, at scale?
- For CDOs and CIOs, how should we handle initiatives where the optimal business outcome is to reduce headcounts?
- How can we strike a balance between hiring, firing, and upskilling?
SPEAKERS
