During the 7th edition of Ready For IT, which was held from June 2 to 3 in Monaco, AI occupied a central place in the program, with the objective of concretely helping decision-makers to succeed in its deployment.
The 7th edition of Ready For IT, organized in Monaco on June 2 and 3, 2026, took place in a particularly complex context for the approximately 400 IT decision-makers present. Coming mainly from ETIs and large SMEs, these decision-makers face a major challenge: they must implement AI in their organization, without risks and with limited budgets. “I notice that the subject that guests at the show talk about the most is AI: how to secure it, how to set up charters for its use, how to raise awareness of its risks, etc.,” indicates Christophe Charbonnier, CIO at the MPSA group and member of the Provence Méditerranée IT Club.
“There is a situation of stress at the budgetary level and, since this winter I would say, the arrival of AI has really materialized. In relation to AI, the community was full of uncertainties coming to this edition,” observes Maria Iacono, director of the event. This is why numerous round tables were devoted to AI, its effective management and the control of its risks. And the content of these round tables clearly appealed to decision-makers: “As in previous editions, Ready For IT really manages to be innovative in its meet-ups”, indicates Hélène Tyack, DPO and member of the Circle of Women in Cybersecurity.
Common front of CIOs, CISOs and DPOs
The round tables also highlighted a rapprochement of IT functions that were previously more distant, now united around issues related to AI. “During this edition, I noticed that CIOs and CISOs are strengthening their ties. They have every interest in working together to deploy AI agents and secure them,” remarks Maria Iacono. But that’s not all: “We see that the IT departments have changed their posture: they also work more closely with the business lines to understand and support their needs.” Christophe Godefroid demonstrated this during a meet-up dedicated to securing the deployment of AI. This CIO at the Belgian university hospital center Herora has in fact initiated governance made up of a committee responsible for anticipating business needs in terms of AI, and selecting the projects best able to respond to them.
DPOs and chief data officers are also becoming essential in the eyes of CIOs and CISOs for their expertise in data management, a condition for the effectiveness and security of AI. And for good reason: “If the dataset on which an AI trains is made up of useless or outdated data, the relevance of this AI will be poor. And if the AI trains on sensitive data when it should not, that’s a problem,” specifies Ronan Capmal, AI and data security expert at Rubrik. “I actually observe a strengthened collaboration between DSI, RSSI, DPO, chief data officer. AI is disrupting the organization of the company and data governance: you have to know where you put this and that data, sensitive data and personal data, because it is this data that the AI uses. It is therefore necessary that the DPO is associated with AI governance and that the roles of the DSI, RSSI and DPO are correctly distributed”, indicates Philippe Salaün, president of the French association of corresponding to the protection of personal data (AFCDP).
Many start-ups
Another notable novelty of this edition: the record number of start-up stands. Twelve start-ups presented their solutions, compared to a few in previous years. Among these, we could find Avanoo, which fights against shadow AI, MokN, a solution which protects companies against the theft of identifiers, or even Virtual Browser which offers a secure web browsing offer. “This is the first time that we have twelve start-ups present. This allows us to expose new business opportunities to decision-makers and to give a boost to these new talents. In the future, we want to integrate them more during the event,” says Maria Iacono. A start-up prize was also launched on this occasion. It was won by Yampa, a young company founded in 2024, which provides an agentic platform allowing companies to integrate autonomous AI agents into their customer journeys.
