Maarten Eekels
Microsoft Tech Lead @ Cronos & Microsoft MVP + Regional Director
Breda, The Netherlands
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Maarten Eekels is Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Regional Director. Maarten is an experienced Microsoft AI, Cloud and Security advocate and already since 2003 he is involved in implementing Microsoft technologies. Besides that, Maarten is mentoring start-ups and helping founders and leaders break through glass ceilings for growing their business and helping avoid certain pitfalls. Also, Maarten is a regular speaker on both national and international events, like conferences, community events and user group meetings. In his personal life, Maarten is a passionate cyclist and certified wine sommelier.
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From Shadow AI to Trusted Agents: Securing the Non-Human Workforce with Microsoft Agent 365
AI agents are appearing across organisations faster than most IT and security teams can inventory, govern, or secure them. Every agent introduces a new identity, new permissions, new data connections, and potentially a new attack path.
In this demo-driven session, we move beyond the Microsoft Agent 365 overview and follow realistic agents from discovery to production. You will see how Microsoft Agent 365 provides a unified control plane for agents built with Microsoft, partner, and custom technologies. We will discover shadow agents, explore their relationships with users, tools, data, and other agents, assign ownership, apply lifecycle and access controls, and investigate risks such as excessive permissions, sensitive-data access, and prompt injection.
We will also examine how Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Defender work together to protect agents at identity, data, and runtime levels. Finally, we will connect a custom agent using the Agent 365 SDK and make its identity and telemetry visible to administrators.
You will leave with a practical model for taking agents from experimentation to governed enterprise adoption, without bringing innovation to a halt.
Ethics by Design: Making AI Human-Centric from the Start
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s embedded in our daily lives, from personalised recommendations to biometric boarding at airports. But as AI becomes more powerful, so do the ethical challenges it brings: bias, misinformation, privacy erosion, and threats to human dignity.
In this session, we’ll explore why ethical responsibility in AI isn’t just for developers or policymakers. It’s for everyone! We’ll unpack key ethical frameworks, share real-world examples of AI gone wrong (yes, including some laughable ones), and show how Microsoft is embedding responsible AI principles across its products and services.
You’ll leave with practical insights, a few good laughs, and a renewed sense of purpose: to ensure that the AI we build reflects the values we live by.
Data sovereignty in the Microsoft world – let’s review our options
Data sovereignty is becoming more and more important for meeting regulatory obligations, ensuring organisational autonomy, and maintaining trust with customers and stakeholders. This session explores practical strategies available for achieving data sovereignty within the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem. We will review Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud in Europe, Azure Local, and Microsoft 365 Local, highlighting how each option provides regional and local data management. The discussion will also cover key data security features in Microsoft 365, ensuring protection and privacy for sensitive information. I will also provide some guidance for organisations to select the most suitable solution for their specific sovereignty and security needs.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and the content “discoverability” challenge
Overexposure of content and Copilot using confidential content to craft answers in the conversations with users is a real threat to the adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot. In this session, I will describe your options to deal with the “content discoverability challenge” in Microsoft 365. And there's quite a few options available to you. We will talk about restricting search, restricting content discovery, SharePoint Advanced Management options and sensitivity labels. The goal of this session is to give you strategies to enhance your organisation's security posture while leveraging the powerful capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Everyone has a responsibility to drive AI by ethical principles
Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and it is here to stay. Already, we can see AI everywhere around us. Recommendations on Netflix and Amazon, digital assistants on websites and on your mobile phone, and boarding airplanes with face recognition instead of boarding passes. Just a few examples of what I have personally seen. However, AI also poses ethical risks, such as bias, discrimination, privacy violations, or harm to human dignity and rights. Or what about deep fakes, voice cloning, fake images, etc. We have all seen those examples. Therefore, it is crucial that everyone who develops, deploys, or uses AI acts with responsibility and accountability, ensuring that AI is aligned with human values and principles.
In this keynote, I will discuss why everyone has a responsibility to drive AI by ethical principles and what are some of the key ethical principles and frameworks for AI. I will also share some examples and best practices of how you can embed ethics into your own AI products and services. Finally, this session will demonstrate many examples of AI gone “wrong”, because we need to laugh and learn too.
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Maarten Eekels
Microsoft Tech Lead @ Cronos & Microsoft MVP + Regional Director
Breda, The Netherlands
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