IT Talks 2025 Speakers

Kathy Miller: Bridging the Gap: Fusing IT and Business Teams

We're thrilled to unveil a transformative approach to collaboration—Fusion Teams—designed to break down silos and accelerate innovation across our organization. By combining the strengths of IT professionals and business experts into unified, cross-functional teams, we’re driving faster development, smarter problem-solving, and superior customer experiences. These teams work with shared accountability, real-time feedback, and low-code tools to deliver solutions that truly meet business needs. With built-in governance and a focus on measurable value, Fusion Teams are the future of agile, secure, and impactful digital transformation.

Let’s embrace the fusion and shape the future—together.

Room 1 - Auditorium - ground floor

Thibault Vandenbussche / Hakim Mostefaoui

Thibaut Vandenbussche / Hakim Mostefaoui: Unlocking business value with Observability

Moving from traditional infrastructure and application monitoring towards modern observability is more than a technical upgrade, it represents a fundamental shift that can drive significant business value for an entire organisation. In this session, we'll showcase how observability has helped us solve complex challenges and how it's helping to align our technical teams with business goals. We'll also explore the future of observability and the role of AI.

Room 2 - Restaurant - first floor

Geoffrey Van Meirhaeghe: B2B UX ≈ B2C UX — Consumer design delights, enterprise design empowers. Wisdom is knowing when to use each.

Designing for business software has always meant walking a fine line. On one side lies the promise of consumer-style simplicity: clean, intuitive tools that make even the most complex workflows feel effortless. On the other is the undeniable need for enterprise-level depth: powerful systems capable of handling the real work companies depend on. Too often, B2B design has swung to extremes — either borrowing blindly from B2C playbooks or clinging to outdated enterprise patterns. In this talk, Geoffrey Van Meirhaeghe cuts through the noise to show where simplicity truly works, where complexity is non-negotiable, and how the two can coexist.

Room 3 - Meeting room ‘Gullegem’ - first floor

Gregory Van Dorpe: Modernize business applications at scale in the era of AI & Low-Code

Dive into the world of Low-Code and discover how it empowers faster application development. We'll explore its key benefits, learn where to use it for optimal results, and offer a glimpse into the future with Low-Code & AI.

Room 1 - Auditorium - ground floor

Ann-Sophie Deweer & Gaël Van Kerckhove - Shaping the future of TVH New Services with remote machine monitoring & troubleshooting

At TVH, innovation is about creating value for our customers throughout their service journey. In this session, we'll explore how our New Services improve machine uptime with GemOne telematics, and increase technician efficiency via TVH Knowledge Hub. Together, these solutions have the power to redefine the service process. Join us to see how TVH is shaping its next leap of growth.

Room 2 - Restaurant - first floor

Julien Contarin: Smart event streaming: avoiding the mistakes everyone makes

It’s easy to get event streaming working. It’s much harder to get it working well. Whether you’re building on Kafka on Confluent Cloud for the first time or scaling an established pipeline, there are common traps that can slow you down, cost you money, or send your architecture into chaos. In this session, we’ll cut through the marketing gloss and look at the real-world mistakes teams make—schema missteps, partitioning pain, underestimating retention needs, and more—and show you how to avoid them. You’ll leave with practical, field-tested tips, a checklist of anti-patterns to dodge, and a clearer path toward building robust, scalable event streaming systems without learning everything the hard way.

Room 3 - Meeting room ‘Gullegem’ - first floor

Julie Marescaux / Stijn Stabel: Data - A transformation Story at Scale

Data is a powerful force, and at TVH, we're not just managing it—we're transforming it. This presentation will highlight the incredible journey our data team has taken, from scattered to centralized, and becoming a strategic asset. We'll explore the challenges and opportunities presented by the continuous growth of our data landscape, and unveil a new data strategy designed for efficiency and impact.
This isn't just about technology; it's about our people. We'll focus on how our data organization works, adapts, and leads the way in this evolution. Get ready to explore a new way of thinking about data—one that empowers us to innovate and stay ahead.

Room 1 - Auditorium - ground floor

Maxim Deweerdt: AI Threat Landscape and Defenses

AI is omnipresent in all business functions, including in the workflows of cyber attackers. In this presentation, we will walk you through some of the most prevalent use cases for AI during cyber attacks, AI abuses and how to defend against them.

Room 2 - Restaurant - first floor

Tim Verheyden: Don't fall into the fake news trap!

Now that AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, VEO3, and a host of other apps are accessible to everyone, fake news and disinformation are reaching new, explosive, and creative levels. Images and voices that never existed are being generated effortlessly and disseminated on a massive scale. We live in an era where alternative facts are no longer an exception, but a strategy.The storm of fake news really took off during the 2016 US presidential election and continued to rage through the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, where disinformation became a powerful weapon in Putin's hands. Today, the battle for the truth is raging harder than ever, with propaganda wars all over the world. In this talk, VRT journalist Tim Verheyden takes you behind the scenes of fake news. How are disinformation campaigns set up? Who is pulling the strings? And more importantly, how can we arm ourselves against this digital manipulation? An essential look at a world where nothing is what it seems.

Room 1 - Auditorium - ground floor