D&A leaders struggle to prioritize and justify data management spend, especially amid cloud-driven cost unpredictability. Value stream analysis links data production to direct and indirect business outcomes, driving quantifiable benefits. This session will link core research on cost management and FinOps with a means of using active metadata to measure value resulting in holistic cost optimization.

Palantir is often seen in the market as a high-cost, high-value provider. It offers products and services to develop real-time decision making application for a organization. It forward deploys its engineers in solving customer's use-cases by taking an ontology-driven data integration approach. D&A leaders seeking to understand Palantir’s delivery model would benefit from attending this session.

Overlooked risks and unintended consequences of GenAI can disrupt operations, ethics, security and value realization. CDAOs should understand the second- and third-order effects of GenAI adoption and proactively address hidden challenges to safeguard their organizations’ competitiveness and resilience.

Prioritizing data and AI literacy programs directly impacts the core measures of a firm’s financial performance. Investing in data and AI literacy is the fastest way for D&A leaders to achieve payback in their D&A maturity journey, especially in early stages of maturity.

AI is impacting everything, though often more slowly than expected. Its adoption is shaped by company politics, which leaders cannot avoid. This session offers practical insights and candid answers on navigating AI’s realities in a political environment.

In this session, you’ll explore a reference architecture that serves as a blueprint for future-proofing your data and analytics environment. Through practical, step-by-step guidance, you’ll learn how to align your technology stack with business objectives — whether you're modernizing an existing architecture or building one from the ground up.

State of D&A 2026 (modified version of CDAO Circle session)

Trust in data, strong risk management, robust trust models, and agentic AI are reshaping how enterprises handle data, analytics, compliance, and business value. This session explores the impact of trust on data governance and agentic AI.

Almost every GenAI use case requires organizations to extract, qualify and govern significant volumes of unstructured data. Data management leaders must deliver workflows that orchestrate entity extraction, vector data embeddings and semantic data enrichment with structured data pipelines to deliver GenAI-ready data. Join this session to learn more.

Agentic analytics can deliver transformative improvements in the effectiveness and adoption of analytics for organizations that are ready to adopt it successfully. This workshop will help you assess your current readiness, identify strengths and pinpoint areas for improvement to ensure you are fully equipped to adopt agentic analytics.

Organizations struggle to scale AI governance, mitigate risk, and effect compliance while delivering value in AI deployments. AI governance programs only check the box if they are not adaptive and embedded into the fabric of the AI lifecycle. In this session, you will learn how to define your role in AI governance, assess what technology capabilities are required to govern AI at scale, and make an investment decision in an AI Governance Platform or other technology tool.

More details to come!

Join us for a networking reception on the Exhibit Showcase where you can engage with your peers, Gartner experts, and exhibitors while enjoying delicious food and beverages. Evaluate industry offerings that can move your business forward. Attend a theater session to see technology in action.

AI agents have become one of the most hyped, and most abused, terms in the technology market. Like any good counterintelligence officer, you need to be able to spot agents and assess their impact, risk and value. This session cuts through the hype to the insights you need and a framework for assessing AI agent use cases, tools and risk to help AI agents deliver value for your organization.

GenAI solutions include several choices and trade-offs. A critical decision is: should you build custom AI solutions in-house or buy off-the-shelf products? This session brings together a debate on the trade-offs, risk and rewards of each approach. The session will be based on scenarios and use-cases to highlight key considerations such as cost, reliability , flexibility and speed for different decisions such as LLMs vs. SLMs, RAG vs. AI agents, packaged platform capability vs. bespoke custom solution, packaged vs. open-source.

This session details how Agentic AI will impact existing data management architecture and technologies, which new use cases it enables in data management and engineering, and which skills will be needed or become obsolete. We’ll also cover how to prepare budgets, teams, and operating models for these changes. These are now valid, frequently debated questions as Agentic AI evolves.

In this volatile era of economic uncertainty, D&A leaders need to think outside the box when it comes to cost optimization ideas and cost savings programs. During this session, you will see a case study that shows how Gartner helped a client energize their savings program using a sprint-based theme approach to spark savings ideas.

Most metadata in 2025 will remain passive in approaches with stats, reports, schema and business-developed glossary terms. Yet, organizations must grow their maturity in metadata management. We start with traditional metadata techniques — passive. With AI undergoing confidence issues and the demand to reduce risk, grow AI confidence and provide data assurance, active metadata becomes key.

AI agent adoption transforms data and analytics strategy and operations. In this session, we will examine the top trends across three key themes: agentic D&A, semantics at the core and D&A p latformization.

Have you ever struggled to secure buy-in to a no-brainer MDM strategy? MDM programs exist to support business outcomes, yet business cases often focus on the “how” not the “why,” leaving stakeholders disengaged. In this session, we will explore what constitutes a strong MDM value proposition that will engage stakeholders from the business case, through execution and stewardship.

Productivity of knowledge workers is not a path to financial value. Process recalibration is a prerequisite to value creation. True, sustainable value is trapped behind legacy processes, outdated team structures and the business driven transition approach. This session provides insights to understanding practical approaches of unlock the ROI and how to lead teams through the transition.

More details to come!

In this session, you’ll explore a Lakehouse architecture which is becoming the cornerstone of modern data management initiatives. Through practical, step-by-step guidance, you’ll gain clarity on the purposes of data zones and the design principles of the Lakehouse architecture.

42% of organizations state they want to be more data-driven. But to what end? The next megatrend for D&A leaders to prepare for is “autonomous business,” where operations run unattended, management is heavily augmented with analytical technology, AI agents are customers, products and services are data-driven, all within a programmable economy. Attend this visionary session and walk away with a better understanding of your future.

Urgent investments in AI-ready data and operational use cases have put the spotlight on foundational data management. The Data Fabric has emerged as a long-term data management architecture that you should now pursue for sustained data, analytics, and AI success. This session will help participants understand what data fabrics are and their implications for your data architecture. It will also address how to build and where to buy data fabrics.