AI Builders

Chairpersons welcome and opening remarks

Why data platforms, analytics engines, and AI systems are no longer separate – and what this means for enterprise architecture decisions.

Every centralisation programme looks beautiful on paper. One platform. One governed store. One diagram that fits on a slide.

It was a reasonable bet, and consolidation solved real problems. But the diagram describes a company that doesn’t exist. Acquisitions sit half-integrated, subsidiaries run their own stacks, and sovereignty rules and cloud costs are pushing workloads back on premise. So the migration runs for years and is overtaken by the next platform decision before it lands.
Now AI has raised the stakes. To reason across your business it needs all your data and all your context with it. So a migration that never finished just got bigger.

But what if data and context could be queried and governed where they already live, across cloud and on premise, without migrating first? This session explores how you can leverage your existing architecture to start driving AI value without waiting for the migration to finish, and where we are taking it next for context.

Every executive in the room has been told some version of the same story: AI is moving fast and the organizations that hesitate will be left behind. It is a compelling story, but it is also incomplete. In this keynote, Marinela Profi — global strategy lead for agentic AI, a TED speaker and Human & AI Trust Expert — challenges the assumption that speed is the defining competitive variable in the agentic era, and makes the case for what actually separates the organizations that will win from those that will spend the next three years cleaning up after themselves. This is a talk about the four traps most AI strategies don’t see coming — because each one looks exactly like the right move. The ones that determine whether agentic AI becomes a durable advantage or an expensive lesson.

With an ever-growing ecosystem of data and AI technologies, selecting the right platform strategy is essential to avoid unnecessary complexity and technical debt. This panel explores how organisations can balance flexibility, scalability and cost when deciding whether to build, buy or combine solutions. Learn how to prevent vendor sprawl, avoid over-engineering and align platform investments with business maturity, ensuring teams remain productive while creating a foundation that can evolve with future data and AI ambitions.