Toronto Chapter - Control the Chaos, Capture the Value: Practical Decisions for the CIO's AI Agenda

Description

From a CIO's perspective, your employees are already using AI, whether IT has approved it or not. Meanwhile, agentic AI is moving from vendor demos into production roadmaps faster than most governance models can adapt. CIOs face two pressures at once: enabling the business without losing control, and preparing infrastructure, budgets, and teams for AI systems that don't just answer questions but take action.

This session takes a practical, decision-focused look at both. It starts with the questions that determine success before any code is written: which projects to pursue, and when to build versus buy. From there, we'll cover how to put a governance framework in place that brings shadow AI into the open instead of driving it further underground, and how to create a clear IT support path for the tools employees actually want to use. The second half turns to agentic AI: how to audit readiness, where AI should run, and what the real total cost of ownership looks like once hardware, scaling, and ongoing operations are included.

Expect a candid, architecture-level discussion that includes routers, RAG, and agent design, along with the realities of on-premises versus cloud deployment. You'll leave with frameworks you can apply to your own AI roadmap the following week.

Key takeaways

• A practical lens for choosing the right AI projects and making build-vs-buy decisions
• How to design a governance framework that reduces shadow AI without stifling adoption
• What an "agentic audit" reveals about your organization's readiness for autonomous AI
• A clearer picture of AI total cost of ownership, including how to plan and manage a hardware budget
• Straight talk on sizing and design choices: routers, RAG, agents, and on-premises vs. cloud trade-offs

Speaker: John Encizo, Field CTO and Director of Enterprise AI for North America, Lenovo

John Encizo is the Field CTO and Director of Enterprise AI for North America at Lenovo. He started in IT doing desktop support for a hospital during the Y2K years and has since worked his way up through the ranks, serving as a systems administrator, server engineer, Solution Architect and global SME on Lenovo infrastructure platforms. As an expert generalist, he focuses on business, technical and AI strategy through the lens of digital transformation, process optimization, solution architecture and design thinking. He often consults with customers on infrastructure platforms and datacenter design strategies by analyzing future trends, working with organizations to identify technology and process gaps and helping executive leaders re-imagine their use of business technology as a transformation engine.

Agenda

6:00 - 7:00pm – Arrival & Networking Reception

7:00 - 8:00pm – Presentation – Q & A

8:00 - 8:30pm – Networking

Hors d’oeuvres & Beverages to be served

Open to CIOCAN Members & their *Qualified Non-Member Guests
(*CIO/CISO/Senior IT Executive in a Leadership role and their direct reports)

Thank you to our Sponsor