Business initiatives succeed when data-driven decisions consistently guide business outcomes. ZenOptics invites Mark Emery, Group Data & Analytics Manager - GAP Group and Toby Pearson, UK Managing Partner - Projective Group to share their knowledge and experiences. Attendees will gain valuable insights on how to rein in analytics chaos, improve user experience, organize analytics for easy access and discovery, foster success of the overall information strategy using an analytics catalog, and the importance of analytics governance to drive trust, achieve cost transparency, and risk reduction.

Responsible AI decisions are not black and white, they require trade-offs. Learn to make trade-offs and debate the alternatives to make AI governance and responsible AI decisions. Discuss controversial ideas in AI with your peers. Express your opinion and listen to what others are saying. Learn to ask the right questions and get the right answers to ensure responsible, trustworthy and ethical AI.

Asking your colleagues how analytics can help them often results in blank stares, defensiveness, or wildly incoherent suggestions involving AI. This session will show you how to work with your colleagues to pinpoint how you can help, identify the most helpful capabilities to build, and explain how to measure your impact.

This session will delve into the critical role that emotional intelligence (EQ) plays in the successful implementation of data governance frameworks. It will explore how EQ can enhance collaboration, communication and compliance among stakeholders, ultimately leading to more effective data governance.

Tech and service providers are rapidly providing new AI capabilities and features to customers and hoping for leadership. Unfortunately, customers don't really know what to do with these features and are balking at the cost. This session explores a value journey, from features to transformation using a "value accelerator" model designed to align product strategies with customer outcomes.

There are many ways to show the value of the D&A program. This roundtable session is meant for participants to bring creative examples of how they were able to show the value of their program so D&A leaders can learn from each other's experiences.

Gartner's Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) Bake-Off showcases the capabilities of three vendors side-by-side on stage using live scripted demonstrations. Join this roundtable to discuss the ABI Bake-Off with your peers. How did key features compare in action? What were the main strengths and weaknesses of the platforms? Did the vendors change your mind about their products?

To come up with new ideas and move beyond incremental improvement, we must start imagining at the third horizon and work our way back to the now. Join this session to know what Gartner's most provocative predictions are and what we can learn from them as D&A leaders.

What is the role of CDAO? How can you assess if a particular job is a good fit for your aspirations? What common challenges do CDAOs face? What skills and traits are required to become a great CDAO? Whether a technologist aspiring to the role of CDAO, or a new CDAO not achieving the desired levels of traction, this session answers these questions and outlines three steps critical to laying a solid foundation for success.

Although retrieval augmented generation is a very popular architectural pattern for delivering Q&A over complex internal information, it is also extremely hard to build a high quality, high accuracy RAG system. Come to this session to learn the 7 gotchas of RAG systems and best practices to improve their performance.

Data management resources face increasing challenges due to growing demand, including the need for AI-ready data. It is essential for data management leaders to make sure that data management is not misdirected and aligns with the business value. Proper alignment will maximize the value of data management initiative and support business growth.

A major shift is happening in the data space and it’s not just AI. Handling the explosive growth of data while managing costs - all without compromising performance is pushing leaders to reevaluate Data ROI. In this session, we explore how Exponential-e, a leading cloud, networking and services provider, adopted strategies to minimize TCO for data integration and to create additional value with data. Learn how they deliver intelligent systems that are better connected with automated data pipelines and how to put this data to use using managed AI agents.

Among organizations that have adopted generative AI, only 33% report implementing it into functional processes. To seize productivity gains from AI, enterprises need to get the most from their data, ensure governance, and make it easier to use. For many, that means better integration with the workforce tools already in use. Learn how companies are developing AI agents that act with greater autonomy and how they are scaling them across diverse environments to deliver impact. Discover how to manage your AI assistants and agents in a unified, adaptable experience that safeguards investments.

In the era of AI, harnessing data analytics is essential for innovation. Organizations are transforming their data strategies to harness the full potential of AI.  

Learn how organizations create powerful AI experiences by unifying their data and transforming their data strategies resulting in significant operational efficiencies.

AI is data hungry. The lack of data is the most frequently identified barrier to AI adoption. We’re not lacking in data, per se. We’re lacking data that is AI-ready. And traditional data governance practices often hinder AI project progress.

Learn how a European AI innovation leader more than halved the wait time for AI-ready data, saving hundreds of pounds per year by implementing both a data enablement culture and a data policy enforcement technology solution.

Looker’s AI-first analytics experience, with a conversational interface, enables all users in your organization to leverage trusted data and make better decisions. Discover how you can lay the foundations to deliver best-in-class conversational AI experiences. Join us, along with a cohort of your peers, to participate in discussions around foundational strategies for conversational AI and share existing use cases and experiences.

We are presently in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, where advances in deep learning technologies are rewriting the rules of entire industries – including how we forecast the weather and predict changes in our climate. In this session we will learn how the Met Office is successfully navigating the opportunities and challenges (both technological and cultural) of embedding AI across the organisation, and discuss how the complementary use of AI alongside traditional physics-based weather and climate models will further help people make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.

In an era where speed-to-insight defines competitive advantage, Dunelm is embracing a new paradigm: agentic analytics. This session explores how the UK’s leading homewares retailer is transforming decision-making by empowering business users with real-time, self-serve access to data—without relying solely on data teams. Learn how Dunelm is leveraging AI-powered analytics to surface insights proactively, drive operational efficiency, and reduce the time from question to answer. Whether you're modernising your data stack or looking to scale data literacy across the business, Dunelm’s journey offers a practical look at putting agentic analytics into action.

See through the hype to better understand the practical applications, risks, and aspirations of AI in the data governance industry. Find out how to position your data governance program as a leader for your organizations' AI initiatives.

AI explainability is crucial for fostering trust and creating responsible AI by providing transparency into decision-making processes, enabling accountability and mitigating biases. Join this session to know about some practices that D&A technical professionals must adopt to enhance AI explainability and trust, and ensure the responsible and accountable use of AI.

CDAOs need to rapidly gain enterprise trust and establish themselves as critical business enablers. They must create a strong, differentiated and successful brand for the D&A function, in order to gain stakeholder buy-in and engagement.

D&A leaders must develop DataOps as an essential practice to redefine their data management operations. This involves establishing business value before pursuing significant data engineering initiatives, and preventing duplicated efforts undertaken by different teams in managing the common metadata, security and observability of information assets within the data platforms.

Lakehouse has become a cornerstone in managing large and heterogeneous data by providing capabilities that simplify organizational data architecture, unify data assets, and help streamline, harmonize, and enhance data processes, operations and governance. Lakehouse provides high value to the organization, reduces technical debt, and prepares the organization for new frontiers like AI.

Data integration tools help organizations access, process, move and transform data. They support use cases like data engineering, modern data architecture, less-technical/business user support, and operational data integration. In this session, we'll present the latest Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, discussing vendors and technologies to help you choose the best tool for your needs.

Most metadata in 2024 will remain passive in approaches with stats, reports, schema and business-developed glossary terms. Most organizations must grow their maturity in metadata management. We start with traditional metadata techniques — passive. With AI undergoing confidence issues and the demand to reduce risk, grow AI confidence, and provide data assurance, active metadata becomes key.