For years, data governance has been about guiding people and their interpretations. We build glossaries, descriptions and documentation to keep analysts and business users aligned. But what happens when your primary “user” isn’t human? As agentic workflows, LLMs, and AI-driven decision systems become mainstream, the way we govern data must evolve. The controls that once relied on human interpretation now need to be machine-readable, unambiguous, and able to support near-real-time reasoning. The stakes are high: a governance model designed for people may look perfectly clear to us but lead an AI straight into hallucinations, bias, or costly automation errors.

This session explores what it really means to make governance “AI-ready.” We’ll look at the shift from human-centric to agent-centric governance, practical strategies for structuring metadata so that agents can reliably understand and act on it, and what new risks emerge when AI is the primary consumer of your data catalog. We'll discuss patterns, emerging practices, and a discuss how to transition to a new governance operating model. Whether you’re a data leader, platform engineer, or AI practitioner, you’ll leave with an appreciation of governance approaches for a world where your first stakeholder might not even be human.

We’re excited to be back at Big Data LDN this year—huge thanks to the organisers for hosting Databricks London once more!

Join us for an evening of insights, networking, and community with the Databricks Team and Advancing Analytics!

🎤 Agenda:

6:00 PM – 6:10 PM | Kickoff & Warm Welcome

Grab a drink, say hi, and get the lowdown on what’s coming up. We’ll set the scene for an evening of learning and laughs.

6:10 PM – 6:50 PM | The Metadata Marathon: How three projects are racing forward – Holly Smith (Staff Developer Advocate, Databricks)

With the enormous amount of discussion about open storage formats between nerds and even not-nerds, it can be hard to keep track of who’s doing what and how this actually makes any impact on day to day data projects.

Holly will take a closer look at the three big projects in this space; Delta, Hudi and Iceberg. They’re all trying to solve for similar data problems and have tackled the various challenges in different ways. Her talk will start with the very basics of how we got here, what the history is before diving deep into the underlying tech, their roadmaps, and their impacts on the data landscape as a whole.

6:50 PM – 7:10 PM | What’s New in Databricks & Databricks AI – Simon Whiteley & Gavi Regunath

Hot off the press! Simon and Gavi will walk you through the latest and greatest from Databricks, including shiny new AI features and platform updates you’ll want to try ASAP.

7:10 PM onwards | Q&A Panel + Networking

Your chance to ask the experts anything—then stick around for drinks, snacks, and some good old-fashioned data geekery.

Analytical Data Product success is traditionally measured with classic reliability metrics. If we were ambitious, we might track user engagement by dashboard views or self-serve activity; they are blunt, woolly indicators at best. The real goal was always to enable better decisions, but we often struggle to measure whether our data products actually help. Conversational BI changes this equation. Now we can see the exact questions users are asking, what follow-ups they need, and where the data model delights or frustrates them. This creates a richer feedback loop than ever before, but it also puts our data model front and centre, exposed directly to business users in a way that makes design quality impossible to hide.

This session will recap the foundations of good data product design, then dive into what conversational BI means for analytics teams. How do we design models that give the best foundation? How can we capture and interpret this new stream of usage feedback? What does success look like? We'll answer all of these questions and more.