Cindi Howson is the Chief Data and AI Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot where she acts as a thought leader and strategic advisor to ThoughtSpot customers. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20-plus years’ experience and a flair for bridging business needs with technology.Cindi was previously a Gartner Vice President in data and analytics, lead author of the Analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, data and analytics maturity model, as well as research in data and AI for good, NLP/BI Search, and augmented analytics. She introduced the BI bake-offs and innovation panels at Gartner events globally and is a popular keynote speaker. She’s frequently quoted in MIT, Harvard Business Review, Information Week and is rated a top 12 influencer in big data and analytics by Analytics Insight, Onalytca, Solutions Review, and Humans of Data.In 2021, Cindi was named data leader of the year by Women in Data and as a finalist for motivator of the year by Women Leaders in Data and AI. She serves on the board for Drexel University’s LeBow Business Analytics program and is a volunteer for Girls Plus Data, Women in Data, and the Mark Cuban Foundation, AI bootcamps.Prior to Gartner, she was the founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth product reviews based on exclusive hands-on testing, a contributor to Information Week, and the author of several books including Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data and SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference. She served as The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) faculty member for more than a decade. Prior to founding BI Scorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for Dow Chemical. She has an MBA from Rice University and a BA from the University of Maryland.