Organizations continue to struggle to prove the value of agentic analytics initiatives, often due to a disconnect in AI's ability to connect and interpret operational metrics. To unlock the full value of AI, you need a robust metrics framework. A metrics framework provides a structured approach to measure success by aligning high-level strategy with daily operations, enabling both human and agentic data-driven decision-making. By distilling strategy into clear, simple, actionable KPIs, these frameworks enhance transparency and yield insights for strategic recommendations and measurable business value.

Many organizations are wondering how GenAI will impact their D&A governance and management tools, and by extension, their D&A governance operations. This research provides an overview of how key D&A markets are incorporating GenAI capabilities and how these will change the nature of D&A governance.

Decisions AI leaders make regarding AI investments and the patterns by which employees embrace these technologies will shape the future of work. We will explore what we call ripple effects: the downstream consequences of AI adoption that influence workforce needs, the number of employees required, the nature of their roles and how work is organized. Get ahead of blind spots so AI investments deliver.

Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) platforms are increasingly integrating AI agents to transform how data is analyzed and insights are delivered. Data and analytics leaders need to proactively understand these shifts to maximize AI's business impact and ensure organizational readiness. Join this session to learn more.

RAG has emerged as a powerful approach for building advanced AI systems that combine the strengths of large language models with external knowledge sources. However, RAG solutions struggle with reliability and require a lot of experimentation. This session will address key questions to help determine the best design pattern and optimization for RAG implementations.

Snowflake and Databricks have become significant vendors to many enterprises, with increasing product offerings and a broad array of use cases. This session provides strategies and tactics to negotiate the best contractual deal and pose critical questions. D&A leaders will learn how their organizations can best estimate future usage needs, mitigate risk when negotiating with the vendor, discover how to best attain leverage, what is and is not leverage in Salesforce's view, etc.

This session covers practical steps, common mistakes to avoid, and key factors for launching data and maintaining a data catalog. Discover how to assess your organization’s metadata requirements, define clear goals, and apply best practices for a smooth implementation and ongoing success.

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.

AI agents are permeating applications and systems across organizations. Their flexibility is valuable in unpredictable environments where real-time monitoring and control aren’t practical. However, their adaptive strength comes with nondeterministic weaknesses. Increased autonomy and complexities in multiagent systems, compounded by GenAI models, dangerously raise uncertainty, prompting the question: are multiagent systems worth it?

Unlocking the full value of AI requires more than just technology. It demands a fundamental shift in how organizations are structured and how teams collaborate. This session equips D&A leaders and CDAOs with proven strategies to navigate the complexities.

In this roundtable, D&A leaders will discuss how they are balancing the centralization and decentralization of data management, empowering LOBs to achieve self-sufficiency while leveraging the benefits of a centralized data management function. They will also address how to maintain control over local initiatives and prevent the spread of risky patterns that are misaligned with governance policies.

Implement your target AI governance operating model by mapping governance pillars to key AI components and differentiating AI capabilities. This model should connect with other governance bodies and extend existing governance models to AI-specific considerations of trust, transparency and diversity.

The buzz: “Dashboards are dead.” Yet, they remain the backbone of enterprise analytics for operational oversight. GenAI is revolutionizing the space, promising to streamline migration and inject intelligence, but only 8% of new reports use it today. Explore the “death of dashboards” narrative, along with the opportunities and pitfalls of migrating to next-gen analytics.

Discover the essential steps for developing a successful AI strategy. This session will provide guidance on aligning AI initiatives with business goals to drive innovation and gain a competitive advantage.

As the CDAO role continues to evolve in the AI era, organizations face critical decisions about the direction and impact of their data leadership. This session explores the future of the CDAO through three distinct archetypes: Expert, Collaborator and Pioneer. Attendees will learn how to assess and choose the archetype that best aligns with their organization’s AI ambition and strategic goals. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to define their CDAO journey and position themselves and their organizations for success in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

D&A leaders struggle to prioritize and justify data management spend, especially amid cloud-driven cost unpredictability. Value stream analysis links data production to direct and indirect business outcomes, driving quantifiable benefits. This session will link core research on cost management and FinOps with a means of using active metadata to measure value resulting in holistic cost optimization.

Palantir is often seen in the market as a high-cost, high-value provider. It offers products and services to develop real-time decision making application for a organization. It forward deploys its engineers in solving customer's use-cases by taking an ontology-driven data integration approach. D&A leaders seeking to understand Palantir’s delivery model would benefit from attending this session.

Overlooked risks and unintended consequences of GenAI can disrupt operations, ethics, security and value realization. CDAOs should understand the second- and third-order effects of GenAI adoption and proactively address hidden challenges to safeguard their organizations’ competitiveness and resilience.

Prioritizing data and AI literacy programs directly impacts the core measures of a firm’s financial performance. Investing in data and AI literacy is the fastest way for D&A leaders to achieve payback in their D&A maturity journey, especially in early stages of maturity.

AI is impacting everything, though often more slowly than expected. Its adoption is shaped by company politics, which leaders cannot avoid. This session offers practical insights and candid answers on navigating AI’s realities in a political environment.

In this session, you’ll explore a reference architecture that serves as a blueprint for future-proofing your data and analytics environment. Through practical, step-by-step guidance, you’ll learn how to align your technology stack with business objectives — whether you're modernizing an existing architecture or building one from the ground up.

State of D&A 2026 (modified version of CDAO Circle session)

Trust in data, strong risk management, robust trust models, and agentic AI are reshaping how enterprises handle data, analytics, compliance, and business value. This session explores the impact of trust on data governance and agentic AI.

Almost every GenAI use case requires organizations to extract, qualify and govern significant volumes of unstructured data. Data management leaders must deliver workflows that orchestrate entity extraction, vector data embeddings and semantic data enrichment with structured data pipelines to deliver GenAI-ready data. Join this session to learn more.

Agentic analytics can deliver transformative improvements in the effectiveness and adoption of analytics for organizations that are ready to adopt it successfully. This workshop will help you assess your current readiness, identify strengths and pinpoint areas for improvement to ensure you are fully equipped to adopt agentic analytics.