Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 90 | Page 7

EDITOR’ S NOTE

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Intelligent CIO Europe. This month’ s cover story, which can be found on page 54, features Ian Featherstone, CDO, Custom Support Group.

Customs Support Group, Europe’ s largest customs clearance provider, is revolutionising a traditionally paper-heavy industry through AI-powered Intelligent Document Processing. As Featherstone explains, the company’ s digital journey began in response to paperwork surges, with AI helping transform declarations into a streamlined, value-adding service.
“ The industry as a whole was very paper driven,” said Featherstone, describing how the company set out to digitise a process many viewed as a burden. By automating data extraction but keeping human oversight, Customs Support has enhanced both accuracy and career satisfaction. resilience and innovation without slowing down Digital Transformation initiatives. Nick Harris, CISO of Assured; Matt Riley, Director for Information Security, Sharp UK / Europe; and Paul Inglis, General Manager of EMEA at Ping Identity respond.
This month’ s Get to Know features Mark Holzberg, CEO, Cloud5 Communications. When asked about the current hot technology, he responded:“ I get asked about AI a lot and while AI certainly impacts our business and we use AI tools, it’ s not so much about having the next best thing for us – it’ s about enabling the best things for the customers we support. In fact, I call what we do‘ the plumbing’ – the infrastructure that makes everything else function. For us, it’ s about continuing to deliver a strong backbone that can facilitate new technologies that are important to our clients along with the support necessary for all the technology that goes into a hotel today.
“ AI means they’ re now consistently able to apply their intelligence,” he noted, enabling services like Customs-as-a-Service. With efficiency gains of up to 50 % expected this year, the rollout across 14 European markets sets a new industry benchmark. This journey is not about failure but learning,” said Featherstone.“ Transformation will never be finished – but the important thing is that we keep moving.”
“ Our focus is on being that critical infrastructure and technology support partner that makes all the other innovations possible.” You can read the full article by turning to p73.
Don’ t forget you can read daily news updates on our website. I’ d like to wish you a good month ahead and please enjoy the read!
In this month’ s Editor’ s Question on pages 30 – 33, we ask industry experts how CIOs can ensure compliance,
Joanna England Managing Editor
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