This year’s fast paced and exciting agenda is filling quickly as we finalize the new DataIQ 100 for 2026.
At this year’s 100 Summit, you will have the opportunity to:
The event starts at 1:00pm with registration and lunch. Take this opportunity to connect with senior data and AI leaders, setting the stage for a day of insightful discussions and networking.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Room: Symphony Ballroom
The DataIQ 100 recognizes the leaders shaping the future of data and AI, and in 2026, their focus is clear. This keynote distils the defining priorities emerging from the latest cohort: shifting from experimentation to enterprise-scale execution, embedding responsible AI and governance as foundations, and proving measurable business value at the highest levels of the organization.
Drawing on direct insights from senior data and AI leaders, the session explores how operating models are evolving, why trust and accountability now sit at the center of AI strategy, and what it takes to move from promising use cases to sustained impact. Attendees will leave with a practical, forward-looking view of what data and AI leaders must prioritize in the year ahead, and what will increasingly define success in the C-suite.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
In this fireside chat with the president of Blend and one of their clients, Franklin Templeton, gain insights into what true agentic orchestration looks like and the real business value realised from it. Unpack the evolution from pilots to successful autonomous AI operating in a real enterprise, and the frameworks that exist to make it happen.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Agentic AI promises autonomous, outcome-driven intelligence… but only if organisations can trust what they build. This keynote explores how a strong data foundation, combined with the right cultural shifts, enables AI systems to scale responsibly. It reframes AI transformation as a leadership challenge, where trust, governance, and empowered teams become the true accelerators of impact.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
How do you modernize master data management without taking on a long, complex implementation? Monotype connected multiple CRMs and enterprise systems through Syncari’s Agentic MDM platform, using autonomous data cleansing and synchronization to create a more trusted data foundation. By starting with a focused use case and proving value early, they accelerated AI-ready insights, improved data quality, and lowered costs.
As AI investment accelerates, expectations from the C-suite are changing. This keynote focuses on how data and AI leaders are reframing their work around measurable business outcomes, including revenue, efficiency, growth, and customer impact. The session explores how leaders are aligning AI initiatives to strategic goals, communicating value in executive language, and building credibility through results rather than activity.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Each Knowledge Exchange roundtable will focus on an expertly curated scenario designed to address a challenge facing data leaders. Choose two tables based on the scenarios which most resonate with you. There will be two rotations, and each discussion will last 30 minutes. Come prepared to share your experiences and challenges as we collaborate to build actionable solutions for the future of data leadership.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
How are CDOs handling the balance of innovation alongside rapid changes in a fragmented regulatory environment?
AI Literacy & Adoption as a change process: Why strategy alone isn’t enough
How can you prove the value and measure Agentic AI as you scale?
AI needs to understand your business, not just your data — how can the CDO make that happen?
What does a trusted data context foundation really look like in an AI-driven enterprise, and how do CDOs prove it?
Upskilling everyone: Building data and AI capability at scale
How do Chief Data Officers move from pilots to profit?
Speed without trust is a liability and trust without speed is a bottleneck – how do we safely scale without sacrificing everything we’ve ever known about managing data?
From Dashboard Overload to Decision Intelligence: How AI Is Finally Delivering Clarity for Data Leaders
Can we use AI in data foundations to enhance outcomes?
This is your chance to network with peers, exchange ideas, and continue building connections in a relaxed, collaborative environment.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
How are CDOs handling the balance of innovation alongside rapid changes in a fragmented regulatory environment?
AI Literacy & Adoption as a change process: Why strategy alone isn’t enough
How can you prove the value and measure Agentic AI as you scale?
AI needs to understand your business, not just your data — how can the CDO make that happen?
What does a trusted data context foundation really look like in an AI-driven enterprise, and how do CDOs prove it?
Upskilling everyone: Building data and AI capability at scale
How do Chief Data Officers move from pilots to profit?
Speed without trust is a liability and trust without speed is a bottleneck – how do we safely scale without sacrificing everything we’ve ever known about managing data?
From Dashboard Overload to Decision Intelligence: How AI Is Finally Delivering Clarity for Data Leaders
Can we use AI in data foundations to enhance outcomes?
Room: JW Marriott Rooftop
Be part of the exclusive group of attendees networking with the 2026 DataIQ 100. Enjoy a selection of drinks as we celebrate the achievements of the most influential people in data and AI.
Room: JW Marriott Rooftop
Room: JW Marriott Rooftop
An exclusive first-look at the 2026 list and the new power players across data and AI, including the Top Ten Reveal!
Ready to see Day 1 of DataIQ Summit disappear into a puff of smoke?
Blend360 is hosting an exclusive after party beneath the legendary House of Cards—hidden below the iconic Johnny Cash Museum—where cocktails are crafted, secrets are kept, and magic is very real in Music City.
Just six blocks from the JW Marriott (a quick stroll)… and suddenly, you’re somewhere else entirely.
What’s in the deck:
🃏 Spellbinding handcrafted cocktails & premium mocktails
🍽️ Full food service for lingering, laughing, and late-night bites
🎩 Live magic performances every 30 minutes
✨ Hidden surprises and sleight-of-hand moments around every corner
When: Wednesday, April 29 | 7:30–10:00 PM CDT
Where: House of Cards, Lower Level
119 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN
All are welcome. Come for the magic, stay for the conversations.
The event starts at 8:00am with registration and breakfast. Take this opportunity to connect with senior data and AI leaders, setting the stage for a day of insightful discussions and networking.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Day 2 focuses on how organisations can make operational decision intelligence a reality. It demands new leadership models, operating structures, governance frameworks, and organisational capabilities that allow intelligence to scale responsibly across the enterprise.
Discussions will explore how data and AI leaders are evolving into architects of enterprise transformation, how CDOs align with C-suite expectations, and how organisations design operating models that translate AI potential into operational impact. Sessions will also examine the role of workforce capabilities, data fluency, governance, and product thinking in enabling intelligence to move from isolated initiatives to enterprise-wide systems.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
What does it take to turn AI ambition into enterprise-wide impact? In this keynote, Yuri Aguiar shares a CTO perspective on how CDOs can enable innovation beyond technology by shaping culture, empowering talent, and building the frameworks that turn ideas into execution.
Through compelling storytelling and practical insight, this session will show how data leaders can move beyond experimentation to deliver sustainable and scalable innovation across the business.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
The most successful CDO’s understand how to communicate across the C-Suite, but this becomes tricky without understanding truly the motivations of colleagues across the board. In this session, unlock insights into the way members across the C-Suite think, and understand what they need from the CDO.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Many organizations are investing heavily in AI, yet struggle to move beyond isolated pilots. The root cause is rarely the models—it’s fragmented, low‑trust data that slows progress and limits scale.
In this keynote, we explore how organizations can evolve from disconnected data pipelines to trusted, reusable data products that are governed, high‑quality, and AI‑ready. Attendees will learn practical approaches to reducing complexity, increasing data trust, and accelerating delivery across teams. We’ll also show how AI itself can be used to dramatically shorten the cycle—from months to minutes—to reuse, upgrade, create, and share data products across the enterprise, turning AI ambition into measurable outcomes.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Data platforms only create value when they are designed with clear demand, accountability, and outcomes in mind. In this session, we explore how modern CDOs can apply product thinking to data platforms; shifting from infrastructure delivery to value creation. Through a product lens, this session reframes platform strategy around business impact, adoption and sustained demand, offering practical principles for CDOs navigating scale, complexity, and executive expectations.
This is your chance to network with peers, exchange ideas, and continue building connections in a relaxed, collaborative environment.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Your organization has invested in data infrastructure. You’ve deployed AI tools. You’ve built the strategy. So why aren’t you seeing the value you expected? The answer is rarely the technology.
Every day, decisions get made without data confidence. Opportunities go unspotted. AI investments stall. The gap between your data & AI strategy and your business’ results isn’t a tools problem, it’s a people problem. And it’s costing you more than you think.
In this interactive workshop, Data Literacy Academy invites senior leaders to confront a simple but uncomfortable question: what is a Data & AI fluent workforce actually worth to your business? Join us to explore the revenue you’re not capturing, the costs hiding in plain sight, and the risks accumulating quietly, and leave with practical steps for making Data & AI fluency a strategic capability, not a skills checkbox.
Room: Harpeth 1 & 2
What if you could stress-test your next product before a single person sees it? This showcase explores how synthetic data and AI can reshape the entire product development cycle, how enterprise businesses can rethink the way products are designed, validated, and brought to market, and what an AI-native approach to customer understanding looks like.
This is your chance to network with peers, exchange ideas, and continue building connections in a relaxed, collaborative environment.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
AI models are converging. Within two years, every organization will have access to the same frontier capabilities at roughly the same cost. The differentiator will not be the model, it will be the business meaning the model can access.
Most enterprises haven’t encoded that meaning anywhere a machine can use it. Rules, definitions, and domain expertise sit in documents, in people’s heads, and in tribal knowledge that AI cannot reach. The result: initiatives that spend millions and still fail to reason about the business they were built to serve.
This session introduces a new approach; automated data management built on knowledge architecture, where governance intent, enterprise design, and data semantics become machine-readable, continuously enforced, and fully auditable. The outcome is AI that operates with verifiable business context, at machine speed, with every decision traceable.
We’ll close with the question that determines whether this is possible in your organization: do you have the C-suite partnerships in place to make business intent executable?
Room: Harpeth 1 & 2
Every data and AI leader in this room has delivered something real: a model that works, a report that’s accurate, an insight that’s genuinely valuable. Yet, tracing the subsequent events, the decision made, its speed, and the confidence behind it—reveals a different story.The enterprise data function has mastered the art of insight delivery. What it hasn’t solved is decision velocity: the speed and confidence with which an organization acts on what its data already knows.
This session introduces the Decision Intelligence layer, the structural gap between where your data function ends and where organizational decisions begin. Why insight-to-action latency is now a competitive liability, and what the most advanced data functions are building to close it. You’ll leave with a framework, and a self-diagnosis, you can apply the moment you return to your organization.
This is your chance to network with peers, exchange ideas, and continue building connections in a relaxed, collaborative environment.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Room: Harpeth 1 & 2
Not every organisation has a polished AI success story, and that shouldn’t be a barrier to progress. This session explores what data leaders can do now to prepare for AI adoption while still on the journey. Topics include strengthening data foundations, improving operating models, and aligning stakeholders around practical next steps that enable future AI use cases without over-engineering or slowing momentum.
This is your chance to network with peers, exchange ideas, and continue building connections in a relaxed, collaborative environment.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Chief Data Officers are under pressure to turn AI investment into measurable business impact, while navigating fragmented data, governance challenges, and rising expectations around automation.
This panel will explore what is actually working today, including how organizations are building AI capability that delivers value, and where agentic approaches are starting to make a real difference. Expect practical insights on scaling AI, driving adoption, and aligning data strategy to business transformation.
Room: Harpeth 1 & 2
Data leaders in highly regulated industries face a constant tension between innovation and compliance, often slowing progress and limiting the impact of new technologies.
This panel will explore how organizations are navigating regulatory complexity while still driving innovation. Discussion will focus on practical approaches to balancing risk and agility, enabling responsible AI, and embedding governance in a way that supports, rather than blocks, progress.
Modern data leaders are no longer custodians of information. They are architects of enterprise change. As organizations scale AI and digital capabilities, success depends on strong data foundations, aligned platforms, and clear strategic ownership.
In this keynote, Bharathi explores how combining data, digital transformation, and AI strategy under one leadership vision reduces fragmentation, accelerates delivery, and ensures responsible innovation. She shares lessons from leading this convergence in practice and what it takes to design an intelligent, future-ready enterprise.
Room: Symphony Ballroom
Ari Kaplan (aka Mr Moneyball), Global Head of Global Evangelism, Databricks
In this keynote, Ari Kaplan explores how “vibe coding” is transforming the way businesses build and deploy data-driven applications, shrinking development cycles from months to mere hours. Through a live demonstration of a sports analytics app built in record time, he reveals how organizations can unlock similar speed and impact using their own proprietary data. The session walks through real-world use cases across finance, marketing, pricing, player strategy, research, and attendance forecasting, all powered by rapid, iterative development. Ari also addresses the critical balance between innovation and control, highlighting best practices for data governance, security, and keeping humans in the loop to ensure trustworthy, high-impact outcomes.
