What data infrastructure is most critical for AI platform advantage?

Anahita Tafvizi

Chief Data & AI Officer · Snowflake

Unified Governance

Anahita Tafvizi says the real challenge is building the data foundation right, asking whether customers have built unified governance and unified metric definitions so AI gives trusted answers, because without it AI can just scale your chaos.

Carly Taylor

VP, Engineering (Concepts Lab) · Crunchyroll

Clean Data, Stakeholder Insight

Carly Taylor says the fundamentals that will always hold are keeping your data clean and understanding your stakeholders and their needs, which she calls the ground truth of your data estate.

The answer starts at 5:37.

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Jim Scharf

Chief Technology Officer · Mongodb

Real‑Time Data Access

Jim Scharf says access to real-time data is what matters, because you don't want to query a data warehouse updated a week ago and people expect current information.

The answer starts at 15:33.

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Conny Ploth

AI Transformation Vice President, Global Data & AI · Santander

Good Data Foundations

Conny Ploth says smaller organizations should go back to basics and get good data foundations in order before putting AI on top, because she often sees poorly managed data and processes that need fixing first.

The answer starts at 7:02.

Vivek Vaidya

Co-Founder/CTO · Kana

High-Quality Data

Vivek Vaidya says high-quality data is what matters for AI: if the data is crappy, no matter what AI you put on top of it won't work, or won't work as well.

Sam Pierson

Chief Technology Officer · Qlik

Reliable Data Foundation

Sam Pierson points first to having a data foundation that is quantifiably reliable and high quality, saying that plus added context is what raises the quality and accuracy of LLM answers.

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Tristan Baker

Senior Director, Head of Data Architecture · Salesforce

Graph Infrastructure

Tristan Baker answers graph infrastructure, saying the graph is an infrastructure component and the glue that stitches what a user asks to the data and context needed to answer.

Muralidhar Vemulapalli

Chief Enterprise Architect/ Acting CTO · Arkansas Blue Cross And Blue Shield

Enterprise Semantic Layer

Muralidhar Vemulapalli says the most important thing is the enterprise semantic layer, because machines, unlike developers, do not know what a column name like ABCD means.