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!

Jason Touleyrou, Data Engineering Manager at Corewell Health joined Yuliia to discuss why most organizations struggle with data governance. He argues that data teams should focus on building trust through flexible systems rather than rigid controls. Challenging traditional data quality approaches, Jason suggests starting with basic freshness checks and evolving governance gradually. Drawing from his experience across healthcare and marketing analytics, he shares practical strategies for implementing governance during migrations and measuring data team value beyond conventional metrics. Jason's linkedin page - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasontouleyrou/

Andrew Jones, principal engineer at GoCardless, is the author of the book "Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts." During this session, we talked a lot about what a data platform is, who data platform engineers are, what it takes to make a data platform reliable, and, most importantly, how Andrew and his team managed to build a reliable platform at GoCardless. Sure enough, we touched a little on data contracts, their implementation, and the possibility of vendors doing the same as Andrew's team did.Andrew's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewrhysjones/