This session is designed for both first-time and experienced CDAOs who are new to their organizations. These insights will help you proactively shape and manage your initial weeks in a new role, enabling you to make an immediate impact and build a strong foundation for the future. Are you among the 61% of CDAOs considering a move within the next two years?

This session will explore how generative AI technology will evolve over the next decade, moving from large, general-purpose models to agentic, multimodal and deeply personalized systems. IT leaders will gain foresight into the architectural, ethical, and strategic shifts that will define the next wave of enterprise AI.

AI agents can upend traditional AI use cases and unlock transformative potential, but the real danger isn’t overhyping their power — it’s overestimating your organization’s readiness. D&A leaders must see past the hype, sidestep common pitfalls, and build the foundation needed for true AI success.

Data governance has traditionally encompassed analytics governance, managing most risks and value in traditional analytics. However, AI introduces new risks and considerations that D&A governance may not be equipped for. Should D&A governance evolve to govern AI or is it time for a separate discipline with a fresh mandate? This session explores conflicting accountabilities, leadership and operating models between these disciplines.

CDAOs are often under time pressure to develop an effective data and analytics strategy that aligns with business value. Use these time-saving shortcuts to accelerate the strategy development process while also gaining business relevance and confidence in the process.

Data quality and data observability tools provide significant capabilities to ensure good data for your BI and AI. Data observability tools give organizations integrated visibility into the health of their data, data pipelines and data landscape. Data quality tools enable business users to manage data at its sources by setting rules and policies. Together, these tools help organizations build a strong foundation in data management for BI and AI initiatives.

Leaders responsible for AI must evaluate the potential benefits and costs of new agentic AI use cases. This insight offers a framework, model and specific numbers for building and simulating total cost and key value drivers at scale for AI agent use cases.

National AI sovereignty is a nation-state’s desire to control its own AI, reducing reliance on foreign innovation, talent, and vendors. Ambition and maturity vary globally, creating commercial opportunities and risks. This session explores various nation state approaches of sovereign AI and the public policy initiatives, including global AI regulations, that support them. Attendees will leave with a blueprint to identify value creation strategies while confronting geopolitical uncertainties.

This hands-on workshop is for D&A leaders seeking to unlock AI’s full potential as a professional co-pilot. Learn why mastering prompts is the first step to true AI fluency. Through live exercises focused on real-world D&A scenarios, you will learn the core techniques to build a more efficient and impactful analytics practice. Leave with a tactical toolkit of prompt engineering skills you can use immediately and a clear vision for your strategic AI value.

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AI spending continues unabated and so is the pressure on leaders. CIOs need to demonstrate the value of AI. CFOs need to calculate it. The c-suite needs to collaborate to create real value. Here we present Gartner's framework for a rigorous, repeatable approach to financial operations (FinOps) of AI initiatives. The focus is on the economics of business value, cost and risk of AI, GenAI and agentic AI.

Data management platforms emerge through the convergence of several individual data management capabilities. D&A leaders keen on data platform modernization should join this breakout session to learn about the dynamics of this emerging market and the benefits of reducing architectural silos to meet data demands for both current and innovative use cases.

There are seven key reasons organizations struggle with effective data governance. This session examines what consistently goes wrong and offers practical solutions to help make data governance work for your organization.

AI agents are fundamentally transforming traditional D&A operating models. D&A leaders must recognize this shift and adapt their operating models to integrate AI agents, ensuring AI-ready operations, enhanced value delivery and improved decision making. In this session, we will share three real client cases from Mastercard, Danone and Inspur that demonstrate how organizations have successfully made this transition.

No data? No AI! No metadata? No data! Gartner codified AI-ready data concepts and crafted the language in mid-2022. Practices have evolved for the four AI-ready data modes and 30 expected data evaluation and preparation steps. In this session, we recap the approach combined with how organizations are using AI data readiness as a foundation to evolve toward standardizing data for production AI.

AI leaders must strategically structure their organizations to maximize the business value of AI. This session equips you with practical guidance to build effective and scalable AI operating models and organizations.

Analytics and BI platforms and data Science and machine learning platforms are important technologies that drive insight-driven decision making and allow AI systems to be built and operationalized throughout the enterprise. This session unpacks the Magic Quadrants of both markets and gives inisght on the trends that you should be aware of.

Organizations often struggle to collaborate across analytic silos. By treating metrics as data products as part of a franchise delivery model, data leaders can improve the quality and consistency of analytic content across the organization.

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

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We will discuss the latest issues that heads of data governance must address and provide recommendations to manage and capitalize on emerging opportunities. By understanding key drivers and trends, leaders will be equipped to optimize their data governance strategies.

The enormous potential business value of AI will not materialize spontaneously. AI leaders should guide their organizations toward an era in which AI is not only creating tangible business value but goes beyond to become a critical competitive differentiator and industry disruptor.

AI is drastically changing how organizations do business and operate. As a result, data, analytics and AI must be approached differently, with a focus on value — the organizational capabilities, competencies and processes required to utilize AI and data to redesign workflows and enable decisions orchestrated by both people and machines in near real time. This session gets you grounded on the capabilities of the intelligent enterprise, why it is important and how to pivot toward this model.

RAG has emerged as a powerful approach for building advanced AI systems that combine the strengths of large language models with external knowledge sources. However, RAG solutions struggle with reliability and require a lot of experimentation. This session will address key questions to help determine the best design pattern and optimization for RAG implementations.

Snowflake and Databricks have become significant vendors to many enterprises, with increasing product offerings and broad array of use cases. This session provides attendees with strategies and tactics to negotiate the best contractual deal with Snowflake or Databricks and to pose questions when it comes to dealing with them. D&A leaders need to understand how their organization can best estimate future usage needs, mitigate risk when negotiating with the vendor, discover how to best attain leverage, what is and is not leverage in Salesforce's view, etc.