Jovita Tam, data and AI advisor with a background in engineering, law, and finance, joined Yuliia and Dumke to challenge how organizations approach governance. Jovita argues that data governance is a way of thinking, not a tool you purchase, explaining why culture eats strategy and why most governance programs fail at the checkbox exercise.  Jovita shares her approach to helping executives understand that governance should be an enabler, not an obstacle, and why treating it as purely compliance or cost center misses the point entirely. Jovita's Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jovitatam/

Adnan Hodzic, Lead Engineer and GenAI Delivery Lead at ING, joined Yuliia how ING successfully scaled generative AI from experimentation to enterprise production. With over 60 GenAI applications now running in production across the bank, Adnan explains ING's pragmatic approach: building internal AI platforms that balance innovation speed with regulatory compliance, treating European banking regulations as features rather than constraints, and fostering a culture where 300+ experiments can safely run while only the best reach production. He discusses the critical role of their Prompt Flow Studio in democratizing AI development, why customer success teams saw immediate productivity gains, how ING structures AI governance without killing innovation, and his perspective on the hype cycle versus real enterprise value. Adnan's blog: https://foolcontrol.org Adnan's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/AdnanHodzicLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/AdnanHodzicTwitter/X: https://twitter.com/fooctrl

Ryan Dolley, VP of Product Strategy at GoodData and co-host of Super Data Brothers podcast, joined Yuliia and Dumke to discuss the DBT-Fivetran merger and what it signals about the modern data stack's consolidation phase. After 16 years in BI and analytics, Ryan explains why BI adoption has been stuck at 27% for a decade and why simply adding AI chatbots won't solve it. He argues that at large enterprises, purchasing new software is actually the only viable opportunity to change company culture - not because of the features, but because it forces operational pauses and new ways of working. Ryan shares his take that AI will struggle with BI because LLMs are trained to give emotionally satisfying answers rather than accurate ones. Ryan Dolley linkedin

Elliot Foreman and Andrew DeLave from ProsperOps joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss automated cloud cost optimization through commitment management. As Google go-to-market director and senior FinOps specialist, they explain how their platform manages over $4 billion in cloud spend by automating reserved instances, committed use discounts, and savings plans across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The conversation covers the psychology behind commitment hesitation, break-even point mathematics for cloud discounts, workload volatility optimization, and why they avoid AI in favor of deterministic algorithms for financial decisions. They share insights on managing complex multi-cloud environments, the human vs automation debate in FinOps, and practical strategies for reducing cloud costs while mitigating commitment risks.

Kasriel Kay, leading data democratization at Velotix, joined Yuliia and Dumke to challenge conventional wisdom about data governance and catalogs. Kasriel argues that data catalogs provide visibility but fail to deliver business value, comparing them to "buying JIRA and expecting agile practices." He advocates for shifting from restrictive data governance to data enablement through policy-based access control that considers user attributes, data sensitivity, and business context. Kasriel explains how AI-driven policy engines can learn from organizational behavior to automatically grant appropriate data access while maintaining compliance, ultimately reducing time-to-insight and unlocking missed business opportunities.

Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify and former co-founder of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude), joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss the evolution from data quality to decision quality. Patrick shares his experience building data contracts solutions at Atlassian and later developing analytics tracking tools. Patrick challenges the assumption that AI will eliminate the need for structured data. He argues that while LLMs excel at understanding unstructured data, businesses still need deterministic systems for automation and decision-making. Patrick shares insights on why enforcing data quality at the source remains critical, even in an AI-first world, and explains his shift from analytics to CRM while maintaining focus on customer data unification and business impact over technical perfectionism.Tune in!

Serhii Sokolenko, founder at Tower Dev and former product manager at tech giants like Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Databricks, joined Yuliia to discuss his journey building a next-generation compute platform. Tower Dev aims to simplify data processing for data engineers who work with Python. Serhii explains how Tower addresses three key market trends: the integration of data engineering with AI through Python, the movement away from complex distributed processing frameworks, and users' desire for flexibility across different data platforms. He explains how Tower makes Python data applications more accessible by eliminating the need to learn complex frameworks while automatically scaling infrastructure. Sergei also shares his perspective on the future of data engineering, noting in which ways AI will transform the profession.Tower Dev - https://tower.dev/Serhii's Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssokolenko/

Andrii Yasinetsky, CTO and co-founder of Diadia Health and AI expert, joined Yuliia to share his perspective on the current AI landscape and its future implications. Currently Andrii and his team are building an AI-first healthcare platform focused on metabolic and hormonal health. Andrii talks about how AI is changing both technology stacks and business economics. We discuss what's wrong with AI claims in enterprises and why it doesn't match reality, he points out the decreasing cost of intelligence, and why the middle layer of tech jobs may disappear within five years. Andrii also shares his take on how the recent US administration change has created a "timeline split" that could dramatically accelerate AI innovation, potentially transforming the global economy.Diadia Health - https://diadiahealth.comAndrii's Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasinetsky/

Deepti Srivastava, Founder of Snow Leopard AI and former Spanner Product Lead at Google Cloud, joined Yuliia to chat what's wrong with current approaches to AI integration. Deepti introduces a paradigm shift away from ETL pipelines towards federated, real-time data access for AI applications. She explains how Snow Leopard's intelligent data retrieval platform enables enterprises to connect AI systems directly to operational data sources without compromising security or freshness. Through practical examples Deepti explains why conventional RAG approaches with vector stores are not good enough for business-critical AI applications, and how a systems thinking approach to AI infrastructure can unlock greater value while reducing unnecessary data movement.Deepti's linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedeepti/Snowleopard.ai - http://snowleopard.ai/

Bogdan Banu, Data Engineering Manager at Veed.io, joined Yuliia to share his journey of building a data platform from scratch at a fast-growing startup. As Veed's first data hire, Bogdan discusses how he established a modern data stack while maintaining strong governance principles and cost consciousness. Bogdan covered insights on implementing consent-based video data processing for AI initiatives, approaches to data democratization, and how his data team balancs velocity with security. Bogdan shared his perspectives on making strategic vendor choices, measuring business value, and fostering a culture of intelligent experimentation in startup environments.Bogdan's Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bogdan-banu-a68a237/

Amy Raygada, data consultant and founder of Cosmodata, recently joined the Thoughtworks team. Together with Yuliia, she unpacks what it’s like to work as a data consultant in today’s world, where AI challenges every organization. Amy shared her journey from individual contributor to consultant, offering insights on navigating organizational silos, the similarities between being an individual contributor and a consultant, and how to advise big organizations while making a meaningful impact.Amy Raygada linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-raygada/

Danilo Sato, AI Platform & Engineering Portfolio Leader at ThoughtWorks (16+ years), joined Yuliia and Scott to discuss enterprise AI readiness assessment and how implementation is progressing. Danilo shared a fascinating case study about how technical solutions often face non-technical barriers. He shared his views on data mesh principles intersecting with AI solutions and treating AI models as specialized data products.Danilo's Linkedin Page: linkedin.com/in/danilosato

Daniil Shvets, CEO and co-founder of ASAO DS: Data & AI Consulting Boutique, previously led various companies' Data Science and Product teams. Daniil sat down with Yuliia and Scott to share his opinion on Data Science being a business department with appropriate data skills rather than an IT department. He explained why having 54 ML models in one of the largest retailers in the USA is the wrong approach. Daniil also shared his views on the biggest challenges in perceiving Data Science's role. We also touched on AI and the consultancy business while Scott made all possible relationship analogies. :)Daniil's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniilshvets/

Rui Falhas Santos - is the Manager of Data Analytics at one of the largest banks in the world. He joined us to discuss the AI applications they have implemented. The creativity and the use case are very captivating, as it is applied in one of the most regulated and legacy-bound industries. Rui is a hands-on manager with an extensive background in data. His data team helped build a solution that reads, on average, 300k articles a month to catch any alarming signals about their clients. Additionally, we discussed responsible AI from the decision-making side of model output and how data is collected for model processing.

Andrii Yasinetsky is a serial startup founder, ex-Uber, and ex-Google. Now, he is building a healthcare AI startup in stealth mode; he joins us to talk about the enablers and obstacles in the current AI startup ecosystem. Andrii shares his views on the following challenges for organizations applying LLMs, such as converting bytes into high-quality data, ensuring the safety of LLMs, the implications of legal regulations on innovations, and expanding AI applicability to broader and more complex problems. Despite all the hurdles, Andrii sees AI as a great equalizer that will make many services more accessible and significantly enhance their speed and quality in numerous industries yet to be disrupted. Connect with Andrii: Twitter - twitter.com/yasikLinkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasinetsky/substack - https://yasik.substack.com/

Maya Mikhailov from ⁠Savvi AI⁠ joins us to discuss AI, startups, and the real-world delivery of value to enterprises. The pressing challenge for organizations today is that while the C-suite is both willing and financially prepared to invest in AI strategies, there remains a significant gap between effectively applying AI, extracting tangible value, and overcoming the perception of AI as a miraculous fix-all. Connect with Maya - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayam/