Shift Left with Apache Iceberg Data Products to Power AI | Andrew Madson | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

High-quality, governed, and performant data from the outset is vital for agile, trustworthy enterprise AI systems. Traditional approaches delay addressing data quality and governance, causing inefficiencies and rework. Apache Iceberg, a modern table format for data lakes, empowers organizations to "Shift Left" by integrating data management best practices earlier in the pipeline to enable successful AI systems.

This session covers how Iceberg's schema evolution, time travel, ACID transactions, and Git-like data branching allow teams to validate, version, and optimize data at its source. Attendees will learn to create resilient, reusable data assets, streamline engineering workflows, enforce governance efficiently, and reduce late-stage transformations—accelerating analytics, machine learning, and AI initiatives.