CDAO UK 2026
Presentations
General Session & Track A
Great governance doesn’t get in the way — it guides without being seen. This session explores how to embed compliance and ethics directly into systems, without slowing teams down.
- Designing governance frameworks that work for business, not static rulebooks
- AI risk management and embedding Responsible AI principles seamlessly
- Where data fits: foundations vs opportunities
- Our tops tips on making governance visible where it matters and invisible where it shouldn’t
Emma York
Chief Data Officer
LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE GROUP
Sanja Hukovic
Group Director, Head of Model and AI Risk
LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE GROUP
As AI adoption accelerates, organisations face increasing pressure to move beyond experimentation and deliver outcomes they can trust. For AI to produce consistent and reliable results, initiatives must be grounded in effective data governance. Organisations that succeed go beyond technology alone, fostering a strong data culture that priorities quality, accountability, and shared understanding across the business.
Join this session to explore:
- Finding the right culture balance with data
- Maximizing AI's impact with a successful data governance framework
- Implementing quality controls to ensure the efficacy of your AI program
Emma McGrattan
Chief Technology Officer
ACTIAN
Enterprise AI often fails due to “context starvation,” where models lack deep domain understanding. AstraZeneca addresses this with an Operations Knowledge Fabric: a semantic-first, graph-native architecture embedding living ontologies into data products. This shift enables faster AI deployment, better regulatory-aware decisions, and scalable, domain-expert AI agents, cutting development time from months to days.
Maria Sorokina
Knowledge Graph and Semantic Lead
ASTRAZENECA
Jesus Barrasa
Field CTO - AI
NEO4J
- What “data as a product” really means (in practical terms, not buzzwords)
- How ownership and accountability need to be set up to make it work
- How to apply product thinking to data roadmaps and delivery
- Common execution pitfalls organisations hit
- What helps turn data strategy into real business outcomes
Vladimir Bendikow
Chief Data Officer
FIRSTBANK UK LIMITED
Most data strategies fail by building a foundation before proving anyone wants the data for a use case. Faced with declining lead quality and slow time-to-value, Nissan shifted its strategy: building foundations as the byproduct of successful delivery.
By focusing on just 4 datasets: Web, Lead, Sales, and CRM, Nissan moved from siloed execution to strategic journey discovery within sales and marketing. This session explores how a use-case-led approach de-risks CX transformation, turns data into a sales driver, and provides the momentum needed to scale what works across multiple markets globally.
Jivesh Juneja
Head of Data Products
NISSAN
- From Technology to Transformation: How the Chief Data Architect role is evolving to shape organisational strategy and outcomes.
- Building High-Performance Teams: Turning data engineers and architects into change agents who can deliver at scale.
- Data Foundations for AI: How to design resilient, secure, and adaptable data architecture to power responsible AI.
- Governance and Agility: Balancing control and innovation in a public-sector context.
- Empowering the Organisation: Driving data literacy and cross-functional collaboration across departments.
Masood Alam
Chief Data Architect
THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT
This session focuses on the practical work of making governance land across diverse environments. Using real life examples, it examines how interpretation drives outcomes, why alignment is often assumed rather than tested, and how leaders can translate standards into clear expectations, stronger accountability, and more consistent execution, without compromising principles or slowing delivery.
- Why do robust governance frameworks still lead to inconsistent decisions across teams, regions, and suppliers? Have we really checked whether our governance and compliance instructions are being followed, by our internal teams and by our external suppliers and outsourced resources?
- What sits between policy and behaviour, where the same rule is filtered through different professional norms, cultural assumptions, and learned ideas of what is “acceptable”?
- How do leaders hold standards when strategic stakeholders push for speed and bold risk, while operational teams can reduce compliance to a formality?
- Are we designing governance for sign-off, or for genuine understanding?
Dr. Justine Dattani
Chief of Strategy and Chief Technology Officer
RM1
This session will give leaders practical, people‑centred ways to build stronger data capabilities which deliver real business value.
- How to understand your organisation’s true data capabilities and grow them by focusing on people.
- What an effective, people-focused data strategy should include.
- Practical tips for enabling teams to deliver the strategy in real life.
Remi Martins-Tonks
Head of Data Analytics
MONEY & PENSIONS
Data trust isn’t a given, it’s engineered. This session explores how leading organisations are reshaping their data foundations to deliver transparency, accountability, and measurable business confidence at scale.
Key takeaways:
- Modernising data ecosystems to build trust and resilience
- Turning governance into a business enabler, not a blocker
- Creating full data lineage and auditability from source to insight
- Embedding shared accountability across business, data, and compliance
- Measuring trust: linking data quality, transparency, and confident decision-making
Akhil Lalwani
Chief Data Officer
ALLIANZ UK
When everything can be automated, the real skill is knowing when not to. This session challenges leaders to make smarter, sharper calls on automation.
- How to identify the business areas where automation delivers real, measurable value
- Recognising the processes that should stay human-led — and spotting early warning signs
- Balancing speed and oversight in decisions that affect customers, risk, and reputation
- Moving from “AI-first” hype to selective, high-impact deployment across the organisation
Adrian Matei
Product Manager
JAJA FINANCE
Track B
Everyone is looking for AI ROI. But with so many organisations invested — yet so few seeing a return — what needs to change?
For decades, companies have dutifully marched back and forth, loosening the reins when much-needed advancement becomes stifled, then pulling back to feel safe by "restoring order.” In 2026, however, the winning model when it comes to data doesn't rely on choosing the "right" side of this perpetual pendulum. It’s about deriving power through orchestration across both sides.
Join Kyle Jourdan, Head of AI Practice at Qlik, and Utsav Datta, Head of Data & AI Technology Partners EMEA at AWS, as they explore the trends reshaping AI adoption in 2026, and the strategic shifts leaders must make to move from experimentation to enterprise impact.
Utsav Datta
Head of Data & AI Technology Partnerships, EMEA
AWS
Kyle Jourdan
Head of AI Practice
QLIK
The future of AI is autonomous. Amit Nandi will show how leading enterprises can evolve beyond MLOps to unlock new business value with LLMs and AI agents. Learn how to modernize your AI infrastructure to enable real-time, human-in-the-loop intelligence while ensuring governance and scale.
- What executives need to know about the shift from MLOps to AgentOps
- How to align AI systems with business objectives and compliance requirements
- Strategies to future-proof your tech stack and stay ahead of emerging AI trends
Amit Nandi
Vice President Solutions & Data Architect
BARCLAYS INVESTMENT BANK