8:45 AM
Keynotes
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: In the factory-driven Industrial Revolution, we began to view and measure work as a process. Now, in the AI Revolution, we will need to adopt a different model, where we view and measure work as a story. Building on the neuroscience that makes us wired for story patterns, storytelling uses “story” as a communication strategy, while story thinking uses “story” as an operational strategy. The volume, velocity, and variety of data will be connected to processes but also to the organization’s overall narrative intelligence. Lewis discusses the implications of data visualization through the lens of story visualization, which requires understanding human beliefs and commitments, and provides examples for leadership, change, innovation, healthcare, and organizational design.
10:45 AM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Data is the cornerstone to becoming insights-driven.
Title: Architecting Modern Data Ecosystems: A Journey Through Data Warehousing, Big Data, & Cloud Migration
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Gade explores key strategies for implementing scalable data models, optimizing performance, and ensuring regulatory compliance across various domains, including finance, retail, and manufacturing. He provides insights into practical methodologies for designing efficient data lakes, leveraging cloud technologies such as AWS, and utilizing tools such as Erwin, Hive, and Informatica. The discussion also highlights case studies on successful migrations, such as transitioning from legacy systems to AWS Data Lakes, integrating real-time analytics with ML models, and the application of industry-standard data models for business intelligence.
Title: Reinventing MDM to Power Scalable, AI-Ready Data Architectures
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Traditional MDM (master data management) falls short in today's AI-driven world. Smtih introduces Syncari's Agentic MDM, which transforms MDM into an intelligent, scalable data foundation. Learn how to enable real-time AI integrations, adaptive governance, and data trust to drive business impact.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Vandana Saini, Senior WorldWide Generative AI Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS Yashasvi Singh, Data Steward, Navy Federal Credit UnionDescription: When considering the many aspects of data architecting, a few best practices stand out.
Title: Architecting for Personalization
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Architectural best practices to build and scale the most effective GenAI and agentic AI applications, optimizing on cost and performance, lead to an unparalleled customer experience. Allowing enterprises to cost-effectively deliver personalized and dynamic online customer care applications that captivate their final end users involves leveraging a serverless approach and orchestrating agentic AI.
Title: From Chaos to Clarity: Streamlining Data for Better Decision Making
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: This session delineates best practices for simplifying data processes, improving data quality, and ensuring consistency across reporting platforms. Learn how to standardize data governance frameworks, automate manual tasks, and create a centralized data catalog for better accessibility and control. Discover strategies for effective collaboration between data stewards and business teams to maximize the value of data assets. Whether you're working with SQL databases, Power BI, or other reporting tools, this presentation provides actionable steps to optimize your data management practices, reduce redundancy, and improve data reliability.
Generative AI Boot Camp
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Vinesh Gudla, Staff Machine Learning Engineer, InstacartDescription: Supercharging customer experiences is one aspect of GenAI that holds real promise.
Title: Improving Product Discoverability & Relevance
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Gudla looks at two innovative approaches designed to improve grocery search results by enhancing both relevance and discoverability, with a focus on the development and application of a new product relevance classification model, alongside the strategic integration of LLMs to improve discoverability of novel products. By leveraging the precise categorization capabilities of the ESCI model and the contextual understanding provided by LLMs, Instacart could anticipate and meet consumer needs more effectively. This ultimately led to increased engagement and incremental revenue.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Megh Gautam, Chief Product Officer, CrunchbaseDescription: Companies collect data at a great rate, but it takes AI to enhance how users interact with and derive value from it.
Title: Leveraging AI to Transform Data Into Decision-Making Power
Time: 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
Description: Sharing insights from his journey at Crunchbase, Gautam outlines how its new AI-powered tools are designed to anticipate user needs. He is a strong advocate of the jobs-to-be-done framework, believes that AI solutions should solve real customer problems, and that staying agile via a flexible AI architecture is essential. Join Gautam as he describes Crunchbase's approach.
12:00 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Pete Cooney, Enterprise Lead Data Architect, Jackson National Life Phil Vacca, Practice Leader, PostgreSQL Services, DatavailDescription: To excel at maximizing your data resources, you need to have a workable strategy in place.
Title: Five Secrets to Enterprise Data Success
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: Cooney provides a set of real-world recommendations for the successful development of enterprise data strategy and practice in your organization. Based on more than 20 years of working with data technologies and with more than 10 years in the cloud and AI, he shares some key observations from that experience that will help you stay grounded in the flux of today's data and AI market. The five secrets will be revealed in this session.
Title: Empowering Engineers With a Database DevOps Strategy
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: The popularity of terms like DevOps and platform engineering to describe high-functioning technical organizations is trending. Expanding on the notion that databases are core to a DevOps philosophy, Vacca tells how you can embrace this mindset to reduce barriers between the business and the engineers responsible for maintaining and supporting the data layer, then suggests how and why reality sometimes falls short of the best intentions.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: The future of data lakehouses encompasses many elements, including catalogs.
Generative AI Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Sumit Pal, Strategic Technology Director, Graphwise.aiDescription: Knowledge graphs are key to unlocking the power of retrieval-augmented generation.
Title: Knowledge Graphs: The GPS for AI & LLMs
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: AI’s "disillusionment" phase isn’t an AI problem—it’s a data problem, one that knowledge graphs can solve. They guide AI with precision and context, ensuring a clear path toward trustworthy AI. They prevent wrong turns by organizing and linking data in semantically contextual ways and ensure models don’t just process data, but do it accurately, reliably, and contextually with relevance to limit hallucinations. Pal discusses how knowledge graphs help improve data quality, mitigate AI risks, reduce costs, and prepare enterprises to be AI-ready to reap ROAI (Return on AI Investments).
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Parul Gupta, Senior Production Engineer, MetaDescription: As AI technologies rapidly advance, it's crucial to prioritize responsible AI development.
Title: 50 Shades of Fairness: Overcoming the Dark Side of AI
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: Imagine a world where AI systems perpetuate biases, exacerbate inequalities, and undermine trust. Well, you can stop "imagining," because it will happen if we are not careful while developing such systems. AI technology is full of biases, unfairness, and socio-technical problems that can have unexpected results if not properly understood. Join Gupta on a journey to explore the nuances of fairness constraints that can make or break an AI system's integrity. She invites discussion on real-world scenarios of unfair AI and in-depth learning of what fairness constraints are and how to apply them using open source Python libraries.
2:00 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Having data is one thing, but having a resilient strategy to manage it in an AI world is a decisive factor for success.
Title: Building a Data Strategy for AI-Driven Success
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, a modern organization’s ability to effectively manage its data is a decisive factor in its success. As organizations strive to harness the power of AI and advanced analytics, maintaining high-quality, reliable data has never been more critical. Vasudevan explains how organizations can build resilient data strategies that improve data quality, visibility, and trust while reducing development time, enhancing decision making, and fostering collaboration.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Michael Agarwal, Director & Practice Lead of Cloud Database Services, DatavailDescription: AI technologies are having an immense impact on organizations, including cloud databases.
Title: Are You Picking the Right Database?
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: Learn about the latest trends in database cloud modernizations, including the cloud-native and vector databases offered by AWS and Azure. Learn essential tips to help you pick the right database for your modern application and analytics needs, including use cases and comparing IaaS and PaaS databases, vector databases, and GenAI.
Generative AI Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Alfredo Ramos, Senior Vice President, Platform, ClarifaiDescription: An important component in gaining trust in GenAI models and implementations is retrieval-augmented generation.
Title: Unlocking the Potential of RAG Applications, Challenges, & Innovations
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: RAG is an important tool not only for overcoming the limitations of LLMs but also to optimize GenAI itself. Zeiler explains the architectural and technical components required for production-grade RAG systems, addressing critical considerations such as embedding generation, vector store capabilities, and LLM selection. Learn how input/output modalities influence design decisions and how to navigate edge cases as you scale complexity. Discover practical insights and innovative applications of RAG, along with lessons learned from real-world implementations.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Timothy Spann, Principal Developer Advocate, Zilliz Steve Karam, Principal Product Manager, Perforce DelphixDescription: Geek out over unstructured data, vector databases, LLMs, LangChain, and RAG.
Title: From Air Quality to Aircraft & Automobiles, Unstructured Data Is Everywhere
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: Spann explores how Milvus, a high-performance, open source vector database, can be integrated with open source LLMs to implement scalable and efficient RAG pipelines. He shows how any kind of unstructured data from a variety of sources and types can be processed, queried, and used to feed large language models for smart, contextually aware answers. Look for his example utilizing local OLLAMA, LangChain, Milvus, open source tools, libraries, and Jupyter Notebooks.
Title: Data Meets DevOps: MLOps for RAG and AI Apps
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: DevOps, along with good data, is the foundation for MLOps and building responsible, repeatable AI applications. Karam focuses on data management and compliance for fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and best practices for extending existing application logic into generative AI (without turning everything into a chatbot!).
3:15 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Suzannah Hicks, AI Program Architect & Strategist, Hummingbird HealthcareDescription: People and the culture of organizations affect how decisions are made.
Title: Organizational Data Culture & Decision Making
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: Hicks discusses how the relationship between organizational decision-making styles and data analytics maturity levels impacts organizational data culture. She highlights the significant impact of fostering an organizational data culture on productivity, profitability, and operational efficiency, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decision making, the components necessary to achieve data analytics maturity, and breaks down data siloes. She offers practical recommendations for driving organizational change.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: When it comes to modern data architectures, data mesh continues to play a critical role.
Generative AI Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: The possibilities inherent in introducing GenAI into organizations are exciting but may not address every issue.
Title: GenAI Is Not Always the Analytical Solution You Need
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: GenAI is an exciting and useful technology that is adding value to many enterprise applications. Compelling as it is, GenAI is not always the correct solution for analyzing unstructured data. Sometimes other forms of AI and ML are better-suited to the job. For example, GenAI is great for summarizing the findings of a collection of research documents, but non-generative AI can surface and recommend other documents related to topics of interest. Seuss describes and demonstrates how AI in all its various forms can be combined to analyze unstructured data.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: The delivery of critical AI/ML initiatives enhances clinical efficiency and user experiences in healthcare and elsewhere.
Title: Navigating the Intersection of AI/ML & Healthcare: Project Management for Complex Systems
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: Challenges and strategies for managing AI/ML projects in the healthcare domain exist. Drawing from more than 19 years of experience in software engineering and project management, Mishra delves into the end-to-end lifecycle of AI/ML projects, from conception to deployment. He includes effective risk mitigation strategies, translating stakeholder needs into technical requirements, and fostering cross-functional collaboration among data scientists, engineers, and product managers.
4:15 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Matt Keane, VP, Data Science, AI, Innovation, AflacDescription: Understanding the people involved in decision making around implementing AI within an organization leads to partnership building.
Title: Building Strategic Partnerships to Introduce AI in the Enterprise
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: As AI transforms from a technological novelty to a business imperative, enterprises face a critical challenge: how to effectively introduce and scale AI initiatives across their organizations. Keane challenges the traditional siloed approach to AI adoption by advocating for a powerful trinity of leadership—where the chief technology officer (CTO), chief data & analytics officer (CDAO), and chief financial officer (CFO) form a strategic alliance to drive AI transformation.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Data warehouses are an integral part of modern data architectures.
Title: Future-Proofing Data Warehousing
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: In discussing future-proofing data warehousing, Vayyala considers the impact of data modeling, medallion architecture, and integration. Building an enterprise data warehouse is more than just a technical challenge; it’s a strategic investment in a company’s future. Implementing a robust, scalable, and flexible EDW ensures that an organization has the data it needs to make informed, data-driven decisions.
Generative AI Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: It's tempting to think that GenAI will sell itself, but making the business case for it is still required.
Title: Building the Business Case for Funding GenAI Projects
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: In the modern business landscape, AI and data strategies can no longer operate in isolation. To drive meaningful outcomes, organizations must align these critical components within a unified framework tied to overarching business objectives. Crolene explores the necessity of integrating AI and data strategies, emphasizing the importance of high-quality data, scalable architectures, and robust governance. He outlines three essential steps: recognizing that AI requires the right data to succeed, prioritizing data quality and architecture, and establishing strong governance practices. He provides specific case examples highlighting the importance of a solid foundation and strategy.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Assess the maturity of AI governance capabilities and explore the potential impact of future AI regulations.
Title: AI Governance by Design: Building Your AI Governance Maturity
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: AI governance remains one of the biggest hurdles to realizing the full potential of AI and ML, even in advanced organizations. While governance frameworks exist, they fail to connect high-level principles with the practical actions needed to manage risk effectively across the AI lifecycle. The result is stalled projects, increased risks, and missed opportunities for impact. Carlsson, host of the Data Science Leaders podcast, discusses how firms can bridge the governance gap, assess their governance maturity, and build scalable capabilities that ensure trust, compliance, and accelerated AI adoption.
