It’s no secret that AI is reliant on ‘rock solid’ data. However given the vast amounts of data that companies now have spread across a distributed SaaS, on-premises and multi-cloud data estate, many companies they are a million miles away from this. We are also well past the point where people can govern data on their own. They need help and a total rethink is now needed to conquer data complexity and create a high quality, compliant data foundation for AI Success.

In this watershed keynote, conference char Mike Ferguson details what needs to be done to govern data in the era of AI, how companies can conquer the complexity they face, by implementing an always on, active and unified approach to data governance to continuously detect, automate and consistently enforce multiple types of policies across a distributed data estate. The session will cover:

• Current problems with data governance today and why old approaches are broken

• Requirements to dramatically improve data governance using AI and AI automation

• The need for an integrated and unified data governance platform

• Why a data catalog, data intelligence, data observability, AI Agents and orchestration all need to be integrated for AI-Assisted active data governance

• Understanding the AI-assisted data governance services and AI-Agents you need

• Establishing health metrics to measure effectiveness of your data governance program

• Creating a Data Governance Action Framework for your enterprise

• Monitoring the health and security of your data using data governance observability

• Enabling continuous reporting and AI-Assisted data governance action automation

• Implementing data governance AI Agents for different data governance disciplines

This talk, presented by Dan Keeley, Principal Data Engineer and Jonathan Conn, Digital Technology Director from England Rugby, delves into the real-world challenges and triumphs of a complex cloud-to-cloud migration.

SAP Business Data Cloud is a fully managed solution that unifies and governs all SAP data while seamlessly integrating with third-party sources. With SAP Business Data Cloud, organisations can accelerate decision-making by empowering business users to make more impactful choices. It also provides a trusted foundation for AI, ensuring that data across applications and operations is reliable, responsible, and relevant—enabling organisations to harness the full potential of generative AI.

Join Sami Hero and Tammie Coles, as they share how Ellie is reinventing data modeling with AI-native tools that empower both technical and non-technical users. With CData Embedded Cloud, Ellie brings live metadata and data models from systems like Snowflake, Databricks, and Oracle Financials into a unified modeling workspace. Their platform translates legacy structures into human-readable insights, letting users interact with a copilot-style assistant to discover, refine, and maintain data models faster—with less reliance on analysts.

You’ll see how Ellie uses generative AI to recommend new entities, reconcile differences between models and live systems, and continuously document evolving data environments. Learn how corporations are using Ellie and CData together to scale high-quality data modeling across teams. reducing rework, accelerating delivery of analytics-ready models, and making enterprise architecture accessible to the business.

The Generative AI revolution is here, but so is the operational headache. For years, teams have matured their MLOps practices for traditional models, but the rapid adoption of LLMs has introduced a parallel, often chaotic, world of LLMOps. This results in fragmented toolchains, duplicated effort, and a state of "Ops Overload" that slows down innovation.

This session directly confronts this challenge. We will demonstrate how a unified platform like Google Cloud's Vertex AI can tame this complexity by providing a single control plane for the entire AI lifecycle.

The world has never been more connected. Today, customers demand near-perfect uptime, responsive networks, and personalized digital experiences from their telecommunications providers. 

The industry has reached an inflection point. Legacy architectures, fragmented customer data, and batch-based analytics are no longer sufficient. Now is the time for Telcos to embrace real-time, when the speed of insights and the ability to remain agile determine competitive advantage.

In this session, leaders from Orange Belgium, Google Cloud, and Striim explore how telcos can rethink their data foundations to become real-time, intelligence-driven enterprises. From centralizing data in BigQuery and Spanner to enabling dynamic customer engagement and scalable operations, Orange Belgium shares how its cloud-first strategy is enabling agility, trust, and innovation.

This isn’t just a story of technology migration—it’s about building a data culture that prioritizes immediacy, empathy, and evolution. Join us for a forward-looking conversation on how telcos can align infrastructure, intelligence, and customer intent.

Joseph Toma is the Cloud and AI Director for Media and Communications. Joseph’s career spans across enterprise, scale-up, and start-up environments, most notably as the CEO of Jugo, an innovative AI SaaS platform. His tenure as Managing Partner at Kyndryl and various leadership roles at IBM, including Hybrid Cloud and Red Hat Sales Director, took him to three continents and has equipped him with a unique perspective that shapes his approach to supporting customers. Joseph is based in London where he lives with his wife, young child, and cavapoo.

Discover how to build a powerful AI Lakehouse and unified data fabric natively on Google Cloud. Leverage BigQuery's serverless scale and robust analytics capabilities as the core, seamlessly integrating open data formats with Apache Iceberg and efficient processing using managed Spark environments like Dataproc. Explore the essential components of this modern data environment, including data architecture best practices, robust integration strategies, high data quality assurance, and efficient metadata management with Google Cloud Data Catalog. Learn how Google Cloud's comprehensive ecosystem accelerates advanced analytics, preparing your data for sophisticated machine learning initiatives and enabling direct connection to services like Vertex AI. 

Get ready for a customer story that’s as bold as it is eye-opening. In this session, Eutelsat and DataOps.live pull back the curtain on what it really takes to deliver business-changing outcomes with a specific focus on the Use Cases addressed by Apache at the core. And these Use Cases are BIG – think about big, big numbers, and you still aren’t even close!

You’ll hear the inside story of how Eutelsat found itself with two “competing” cloud data platforms. What could have been an expensive headache turned out to be an advantage: Iceberg made it not only possible but cheaper and simpler to use both together, unlocking agility and cost savings that no single platform alone could provide.

The impact is already tangible. Telemetry pipelines are live and delivering massive value. Next up: interoperable Data Products seamlessly moving from Snowflake to Cloudera and vice versa, driving cross-platform innovation. And that’s just the start—Eutelsat is also positioning Iceberg as a future-proof standard for data sharing and export.

This is a story of scale, speed, and simplification—the kind of transformation only possible when a visionary team meets the right technology.

The most sought-after products don’t just appear on shelves—they arrive at the perfect moment, in perfect condition, thanks to data that works as fast as the business moves.

From premium meats to peak-season produce, Morrisons, one of the UK’s largest retailers, is building a future where shelves are stocked with exactly what customers want, when they want it.

In this session, Peter Laflin, Chief Data Officer at Morrisons, joins Striim to share how real-time data streaming into Google Cloud enables smarter, faster, and more autonomous retail operations. He’ll unpack how Morrisons is moving beyond predictive models to build AI-native, agentic systems that can sense, decide, and act at scale. Topics include:

Live store operations that respond instantly to real-world signals

AI architectures that move from “data-informed” to “data-delegated” decisions

Practical lessons from embedding real-time thinking across teams and tech stacks

This is a session for retail and data leaders who are ready to move beyond dashboards and start building intelligent systems that deliver both customer delight and operational agility.

Are you ready to build the next generation of data-driven applications? This session demystifies the world of Autonomous Agents, explaining what they are and why they are the future of AI. We’ll dive into Google Cloud's comprehensive platform for creating and deploying these agents, from our multimodal data handling to the seamless integration of Gemini models. You will learn the principles behind building your own custom data agents and understand why Google Cloud provides the definitive platform for this innovation. Join us to gain the knowledge and tools needed to architect and deploy intelligent, self-sufficient data solutions.

DuckDB is well-loved by SQL-ophiles to handle their small data workloads. How do you make it scale? What happens when you feed it Big Data? What is this DuckLake thing I've been hearing about? This talk will help answer these questions from real-world experience running a DuckDB service in the cloud.

Ophthalmology generates vast amounts of imaging and clinical data. Yet fragmentation of this data slows both care and research. In this session, Matt Barnfield, Lead Data Engineer at Softwire, will share how we tackled these challenges in two partnerships: Moorfields Eye Hospital (UK) and Retina Consultants of America (US).

We’ll compare the parallel difficulties we encountered and the shared patterns we used to overcome them, focusing on the new, powerful tools available for trusted researchers – from clinical trial recruitments to retrospective studies.

We’ll dive into how we built cloud data platforms that ingest tens of millions of images from disparate silos and harmonise them with health records, transforming dataset curation from a manual process that took months into an automated pipeline that takes minutes. Through these case studies, we’ll show how modern data architecture can facilitate cutting-edge research and ultimately improve lives.

Learn how Salesforce's Data Cloud enables you to deliver great, omnichannel experiences while knowing your customer data is safe and secure.

The growth of connected data has made graph databases essential, yet organisations often face a dilemma: choosing between an operational graph for real-time queries or an analytical engine for large-scale processing. This division leads to data silos and complex ETL pipelines, hindering the seamless integration of real-time insights with deep analytics and the ability to ground AI models in factual, enterprise-specific knowledge. Google Cloud aims to solve this with a unified "Graph Fabric," introducing Spanner Graph, which extends Spanner with native support for the ISO standard Graph Query Language (GQL). This session will cover how Google Cloud has developed a Unified Graph Solution with BigQuery and Spanner graphs to serve a full spectrum of graph needs from operational to analytical.

Ready to move beyond passive data cataloging and unlock true AI-driven value? Join us for an in-depth session on data.world, now fully integrated with ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric. We’ll show how you can unify, govern, and activate your enterprise data—across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments—to fuel agentic AI and intelligent automation. See a live demo of data.world’s knowledge graph in action: discover how to connect and contextualize data from any source, automate governance and compliance, and deliver trusted, explainable insights at scale. We’ll walk through real-world use cases, from rapid data discovery to automated policy enforcement and lineage tracking, and show how organizations are accelerating time-to-value and reducing risk. Whether you’re a data leader, architect, or practitioner, you’ll leave with practical strategies and a clear vision for making your data estate truly AI-ready. 

SAP Business Data Cloud is a fully managed solution that unifies and governs all SAP data while seamlessly integrating with third-party sources. With SAP Business Data Cloud, organisations can accelerate decision-making by empowering business users to make more impactful choices. It also provides a trusted foundation for AI, ensuring that data across applications and operations is reliable, responsible, and relevant—enabling organisations to harness the full potential of generative AI.

Discover how Dun & Bradstreet and other global enterprises use Data Observability to ensure Quality & Efficiency, and enforce compliance across on-prem and cloud environments. Learn proven strategies to operationalize governance, accelerate cloud migrations, and deliver trusted data for AI and analytics at scale. Join us to learn how Data Observability and Agentic Data Management empowers leaders, engineers, and business teams to drive efficiency and savings at petabyte scale.

Discover how Google Cloud's AI-native platform is transforming data science, moving beyond traditional methods to empower you with an intuitive experience, an open ecosystem, and the ability to build intelligent, data-native AI agents. This shift eliminates integration headaches and scales your impact, enabling you to innovate faster and drive real-world outcomes. Explore how these advancements unify your workflows and unlock unprecedented possibilities for real-time, agent-driven insights.