9:00 AM
Keynotes
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Andreas Welsch, Founder & Chief AI Strategist, Intelligence BriefingDescription: Transforming AI hype into business outcomes is the objective of getting your business AI-ready. Based on Welsch’s AI Leadership Handbook: A Practical Guide to Turning Technology Hype Into Business Outcomes, he draws on more than 60 interviews he conducted with AI leaders and experts to offer strategic insights into AI implementations with a nine-step approach. Gain practical knowledge on fostering innovation, driving human-AI collaboration, and leading AI initiatives. This AI leadership keynote talk covers strategy, leadership, culture, and security, equipping you with tools to boost AI literacy and achieve measurable business success.
10:45 AM
Emerging Technologies & Trends in Data & Analytics
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Project management skills play a vital role within data-driven organizations
Title: Mastering the Basics of Building a System for Data & Analytics Success
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:30 AM
Description: Data and analytics (D&A) projects often fail at alarming rates, with up to 80% delivering little or no value. The explosion of AI and its transformative potential is reshaping industries, making it imperative for organizations to master the basics of D&A to seize these opportunities. Sax explores a proven system for managing D&A projects that minimizes failure risks and drives meaningful outcomes. He introduces a practical project identification matrix to classify and manage projects effectively, mitigating the top reasons for failure.
Navigating the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Future
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Ravi Teja Madhala, Senior Software Developer Analyst, Mercury Insurance Services, LLCDescription: Find actionable strategies for harnessing Guidewire to build scalable, efficient, and user-friendly applications.
Title: Building Scalable & Resilient Applications With Guidewire: A Developer's Perspective
Time: 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
Description: The intricacies of designing and developing robust insurance applications using the Guidewire platform showcase best practices for PolicyCenter and ClaimCenter configuration, integration strategies, and optimizing business rules for different lines of insurance. The session also covers advanced concepts such as creating custom UI components, managing complex workflows, and ensuring data security and compliance in enterprise-grade insurance solutions.
Data Engineer Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: A critical intersection exists between design and development in software engineering.
Title: Bridging the Gap Between Design and Development
Time: 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
Description: Drawing from his extensive background in Java development, full-stack design, and system architecture, Manda discusses best practices for aligning technical requirements with user-centric design principles and shares insights from his work on cutting-edge technologies, including his transition from legacy systems to cloud-native architectures and his application of Agile methodologies to streamline workflows.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Lulit Tesfaye, Partner & VP, Enterprise Knowledge, LLC Urmi Majumder, Principal Data Architecture Consultant, Enterprise Knowledge, LLCDescription: A semantic layer provides GenAI with a programmatic framework to make organizational context, content, and domain knowledge machine readable.
Title: Implementing Semantic Layer Architectures
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:30 AM
Description: Enterprise AI’s business potential cannot be overstated: By employing standards-based semantic components such as metadata, business glossaries, taxonomy/ontology, and graph solutions, a semantic layer arms organizations with a framework to aggregate and connect siloed data and unstructured content, explicitly provide business context for data, and serve as the layer for explainable GenAI solutions. Tesfaye and Majumder present case studies explaining semantic layer technical architectures and exploring the components that enable enterprise scale data transformation efforts.
11:45 AM
Emerging Technologies & Trends in Data & Analytics
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Advanced techniques driving modern recommender systems include graph neural networks to uncover patterns in user-time relationships.
Title: Discovering the Unexpected: How Recommender Systems Surprise Us
Time: 11:45 AM - 12:00 PM
Description: In today’s world, recommender systems shape what we watch, buy, read, and listen to, seamlessly tailoring experiences to match our unique preferences. This talk takes you behind the curtain of these algorithms, focusing on platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Spotify, to uncover how these systems work, from handling billions of datapoints to making personalized recommendations in real time—and how they can become smarter, fairer, and more impactful.
Navigating the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Future
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: The rise of the proprietary cloud data warehouse helped modernize data warehousing by providing scalability, convenience, and, most importantly, flexibility and openness.
Title: Open Source Alternatives to the Cloud Data Warehouse
Time: 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Description: Once data became available in the cloud, it was possible to use it for more use cases, including user-facing analytics, dashboarding, observability, machine learning, and so on. This led to recurrent performance challenges, a degraded user experience, significant runaway costs, and also vendor lock-in. Steinkamp discusses the role open source technologies (open source real-time analytical databases such as Druid, Pinot, and ClickHouse) and open data lake standards (Iceberg, Hudi, Delta Lake) play in transforming the modern data stack and helping organizations move away from a monolithic cloud data warehouse.
Data Engineer Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Learn how companies can scale their data strategies, fuel advanced workloads, and centralize sensitive information without compromising trust.
Title: Scaling Data Without Breaking Trust
Time: 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Description: Data is the lifeblood of modern enterprises, but with every petabyte collected, the stakes grow higher. Whether it’s customer, patient, or financial data, organizations are under mounting pressure to protect sensitive datasets from exposure while navigating an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. Yet many businesses still rely on outdated approaches that not only stifle innovation but also increase vulnerabilities. Kundavaram unpacks lessons learned from Fivetran’s experience working with global enterprises, sharing actionable insights on bridging cloud and on-prem environments, ensuring airtight data governance, and unleashing the full power of your data—without losing control.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Nathan Bensch, VP, Microsoft Enterprise Services, enVistaDescription: Revolutionize workflows via AI agents.
Title: Secret Agent Man … Now With Actions! Your AI Sidekick for Supercharged Productivity
Time: 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Description: Think of AI Copilot as a top-secret agent with a special mission to automate tasks, streamline processes, and revolutionize your workflow. Discover how to equip your agent with a variety of gadgets (actions) to infiltrate various business processes and uncover opportunities for automation. Learn how to harness the power of AI to maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and achieve remarkable results.
1:45 PM
Emerging Technologies & Trends in Data & Analytics
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Paige Roberts, Head of Technical Evangelism, GridGainDescription: A data integration hub (DIH) can simplify development of multiple front-end applications, providing auditability, simplicity, low latency, and low infrastructure cost.
Title: Get Consistency & Real-Time Latency With a DIH
Time: 1:45 PM - 3:30 PM
Description: Systems of record (SORs) are scattered across large enterprises, each individually fit for a specific purpose. If you want to use that data to digitally transform business, you need to access all your data to drive applications and analytics. A data integration hub (DIH) isn’t another database. It’s an architectural concept that fits in between SORs and front-end applications. Necessary data is provided at real-time speed, and long-term data is reconciled across sources and persisted dependably, regardless of source format. Come to this talk to see some real-world implementations in financial, telecom, transportation, and logistics industries of a DIH. Learn the concepts, tips, tricks, and gotchas.
Navigating the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Future
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Data security has become a top priority as organizations increasingly migrate their operations to the cloud.
Title: Impact of GenAI on Cloud Data Security
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM
Description: With the exponential growth of data stored and processed in cloud environments, the stakes for securing sensitive information are higher than ever. GenAI is emerging as a transformative force in cloud data security, offering innovative solutions to combat threats such as malware, ransomware, and phishing. However, this revolutionary technology comes with its own set of challenges. The dual-edged nature of GenAI in cloud data security provides unprecedented capabilities to detect and mitigate security threats through advanced pattern recognition and automated threat response but also raises concerns about data privacy, ethical usage, and its potential misuse.
Data Engineer Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: AI can streamline your approach to data.
Title: Using GenAI for Efficient Data Engineering
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM
Description: AI is not just transforming data pipelines for applications—it’s also streamlining the process of building these pipelines. AI-assisted tools can automate much of the tedious work traditionally done by data engineers. Join this session to learn about the opportunities to accelerate your data team efficiency and reliability.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: A quick look at building a data project.
Title: Customer Churn Prediction Pipeline With MLFlow & Streamlit
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM
Description: Asnani covers every step of the process of building a customer churn prediction pipeline—from data preprocessing and feature engineering to tracking experiments, building ML pipelines, and training high-performing classification models. The entire workflow is managed within MLFlow, allowing developers to build, track, and deploy pipelines seamlessly. It uses the Streamlit interface to show predictions as a real-time visualization of churn predictions. This session offers a practical and approachable way to implement customer churn prediction for both beginners and experienced data practitioners.
2:45 PM
Emerging Technologies & Trends in Data & Analytics
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficient data management is key to driving strategic insights and informed decision making.
Title: From Chaos to Clarity: Streamlining Data for Better Decision Making
Time: 2:45 PM - 3:15 PM
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.
Navigating the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Future
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Data in the cloud has become commonplace but at what cost?
Description: Join this panel discussion as we consider the advantages and drawbacks of placing data in the cloud. Is it, in fact, the most cost-effective solution? What about privacy and confidentiality? What migration issues exist?
Data Engineer Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Jerry Locke, Snowflake Practice Leader, PerficientDescription: Serverless data engineering refers to designing and managing data workflows using mostly cloud computing resources based on certain events.
Title: The Importance of Serverless Data Engineering
Time: 2:45 PM - 3:30 PM
Description: In a serverless paradigm, developers focus on creating and running data pipelines without managing the underlying server infrastructure. Instead, the cloud provider dynamically allocates resources and handles scaling, availability, and maintenance. Serverless data engineering enables agile, scalable, and cost-effective solutions for modern data workflows. By offloading infrastructure management to cloud providers, organizations can innovate faster and focus more on delivering insights and value from their data.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning (ML) can transform government operations.
Title: Transforming Government Operations by Harnessing AI, RPA, and ML
Time: 2:45 PM - 3:30 PM
Description: With efficiency, cost, and service enhancements being demanded of the federal government, the adoption of AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning (ML) is emerging as a great shift. These technologies can foster innovation and alter the processes and roles of various government agencies. AI-driven systems offer new data analysis possibilities that allow agencies to speed up decision making. These technologies are enhancing processes which include claim processing, records management, and a range of other activities contacted by the citizens, thereby improving the speed and quality of delivery of services to citizens.
3:45 PM
General Session & Closing Keynote
Length: 30 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Brian Pichman, Director, Strategic Innovation, Evolve ProjectDescription: Discover the future of conference engagement with an innovative idea that uses AI to record, transcribe, and build an interactive model around presentation content. Experience a live demo of the AI-powered chatbot used at Data Summit, designed to foster dynamic conversations by asking follow-up questions and providing insightful answers. You can interact with the bot to explore topics, dive deeper into sessions, and learn in a whole new way. This groundbreaking approach extends the value of conversations, making knowledge accessible and engaging.
4:15 PM
General Session & Closing Keynote
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
John O'Brien, Principal Advisor & Industry Analyst, Radiant AdvisorsDescription: Moving beyond speculation to data, this keynote presents analysis and insights from our comprehensive Q1 2025 market study spanning 200-plus organizations. We examine how companies are actually implementing modern enterprise data architectures to support analytics and AI initiatives, revealing current adoption rates, investment patterns, and expected outcomes. Building on our 2023 study's foundation, which tracked early investments in modern data architectures, we survey the evolution of data platforms by adding vector databases, knowledge graphs, and semantic layers. The session cuts through market hype to present evidence-based results and insights on which architectural patterns—from data fabric to data lakehouse—deliver measurable value and how organizations successfully balance AI innovation with enterprise data management and governance requirements.
