📅 Thursday, November 26th | 📍 Datashift Leuven Office (Havenkant 8, 3000 Leuven)

Nicky Dries spends her research life studying how people imagine the future of work. Her finding: most of us are behind. We're still picturing scenarios that other organizations are already running. At RBFA, Matteo Balliauw isn't imagining a digital future for Belgian football. He's building it, today. At Telenet Group, Kim Smets is doing the same with data and AI at enterprise scale. What happens when you put a football federation, a telecom giant, and the researcher who studies how we think about the future in the same room? You get a real picture of where the gap between imagination and practice actually sits, and how fast it's closing.

Expect real stories, clear choices, and practical insights by Matteo Balliauw, on where sports meet data & AI, Nicky Dries, on work in the AI future and Kim Smets, on creating meaningful customer experiences with AI.

Our speakers & topics

Matteo Balliauw, Head of Data, Analytics & Insights at Royal Belgian Football Association

Matteo Balliauw, PhD, graduated as a Business Engineer from the University of Antwerp (Faculty of Business and Economics) in 2014 and obtained his PhD in economics in 2020. He then joined the RBFA, where he now leads Data, Analytics & Insights. His team's work has been awarded the UEFA Grow Best Insights Project Award and the FBIN Management Excellence: Best Digital Transformation Project Award.

Matteo's topic: Royal Belgian Football Association in the Digital Era

‍Nicky Dries, Full Professor of Organizational Behavior, Future of Work Lab at KU Leuven

Nicky Dries is Full Professor of Organizational Behavior at KU Leuven (Work & Organisation Studies) and at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo (Leadership & Organizational Behaviour). In Leuven, she runs the Future of Work Lab, studying social imaginaries for the future through media analysis, robotic art and design, virtual reality, and science-fiction film. The Lab's mission is to re-politicize the future of work and stimulate democratic debate.

Nicky's topic: Imagining the (Distant) Future of Work

Kim Smets, Vice President Data & AI at Telenet Group

Kim Smets is VP Data & AI at Telenet Group, responsible for the company's data and AI agenda: the platform, the teams and the use cases that reach customers. Among them is Customer Assist, the agentic chatbot and voicebot now handling a growing share of customer conversations. At Data2Impact he shares how Telenet Group is building these agents, what relevance actually means in practice, and where the value is showing up.

Kim's topic: Customer Assist - Creating relevant customer experiences with our agentic AI chatbot and voicebot

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Strong decisions start with strong conversations... and a well-filled stomach. Join us for great food, drinks & networking.