October 14, 2026

Free Virtual Conference

We are putting the finishing touches on the 2026 agenda. Find a sneak peak below.

2:00 pm
2:05 pm
2:00 pm - 2:05 pm
DATA festival online – Program

Opening

Dr. Carsten Bange, CEO & Founder | DATA festival & BARC

DATA festival online – Program
02:05 pm
02:40 pm
12:30 pm - 01:00 pm
DATA festival online – Program
Beyond Agent ROI

Alexander Seeliger, Analyst Data & Analytics | BARC

AI agents do more than generate answers. They call tools, access context, and take action. MCP makes those capabilities easier to connect and reuse. But technical reach changes the economics of AI: every additional action creates potential value while also adding operating cost, control effort, and consequences that someone must own.
 
Most ROI calculations stop too early. They count time saved or tasks automated, while supervision, approvals, exception handling, recovery, and the cost of maintaining human readiness sit elsewhere in the organization. An agent can make one process look efficient by moving work and risk beyond the boundary of the calculation.
 
This keynote asks what it means to measure the return of AI that acts. The relevant unit is not the model or an individual agent run. It is the full system of agent decisions, tool calls, human intervention, and business outcomes. MCP may lower the cost of giving agents capabilities. It does not lower the cost of controlling their consequences.
 
The result is a more demanding question than whether an agent works: Does it create value after we account for everything required to trust, supervise, and recover it?
DATA festival online – Program
2:40 pm
3:10 pm
2:40 pm - 3:10 pm
DATA festival online – Program

User Success Story of ProCredit

Anneke Xanke, Head of Reporting & Data Management | ProCredit

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sponsored by

DATA festival online – Program
3:10 pm
3:40 pm
3:10 pm - 3:40 pm
DATA festival online – Program

AI-Readiness: When Your Data’s Next User Isn’t Human

Shree Neve, VP of Operations, North America | ClicData

Business Intelligence was designed around a simple assumption:
humans are theprimary consumers of data. Analysts write queries, dashboards present metrics,and users interpret the results.

AI agents change that model.
As organizations move from dashboards and copilots toward agentic analytics, AIsystems are becoming direct consumers of enterprise data. The challenge is nolonger just how to connect an LLM to a database, but how to give AI the right
context, semantics, permissions, and analytical boundaries to work reliably.
This session will explore how Model Context Protocol (MCP) can act as a structured layer between AI agents and enterprise analytics platforms, enablingagents to discover available data, access governed analytical capabilities,interpret business context, and perform increasingly complex analytical tasks.

The focus will be on the transition from traditional BI to agentic analytics:
BI → Natural Language Analytics → AI Agents → Governed Analytical Actions
Using real customer problems and practical use cases, the session will examine scenarios such as:

  • Investigating why a KPI changed, rather than simply reporting the number
  • Reasoning across multiple systems such as CRM, ERP, marketing, support,and operational data
  • Allowing agents to work with semantic models rather than raw database schemas
  • Propagating user identity, permissions, and security controls through AI-driven interactions
  • Determining what should actually be exposed through MCP: datasets, metrics, semantic models, tools, or actions
  • Moving from “answer this question” toward “investigate this problem” and eventually “take an approved action”

ClicData will be used as a practical reference architecture, including dataconnectors, DataFlows, semantic modelling, AI-assisted exploration, AIDashboard Builder, and MCP.

The session will not focus on MCP as a protocol specification or on AI hype. Instead, it will examine the architectural decisions and real-world challenges that emerge when existing BI environments need to support AI agents.

The central question is:
If AI becomes the next major consumer of your enterprise data, is your BIarchitecture ready for it?

DATA festival online – Program
3:40 pm
4:10 pm
3:40 pm - 4:10 pm

Customer Success Story

4:10 pm
4:40 pm
4:10 pm - 4:40 pm
DATA festival online – Program

From Hours to Seconds: Industrial AI for Defect Prediction in Aerospace Manufacturing

Dr. Aleena Baby, Data Scientist and AI expert | Access e.V.

What do you do when the simulation that guides your most expensive engineering decisions takes three days to run?
 
In aerospace investment casting, porosity above the acceptance threshold sends a turbine blade worth tens of thousands of euros to scrap. Predicting where that porosity will form means solving heat transfer and fluid flow across the entire casting geometry, which takes hours to days per run on HPC infrastructure. The practical consequence is that design iteration runs at the speed of the solver. Engineers evaluate a handful of process configurations instead of the hundreds a real optimisation would need, and every redesign loop costs days.
 
At ACCESS e.V., we stopped treating our simulation archive as output and started treating it as training data. PorosAI is the result: an ML surrogate that predicts porosity directly from casting conditions in seconds rather than hours. Optimisation that used to run overnight now runs interactively, cutting design iteration time and shortening product development. It is now in pilot use with foundry engineers at our Techcenter.
 
In this session, I will walk through the build end to end, with real numbers: how we turned a heterogeneous archive of solidification runs into a supervised training set, and how competing ensemble approaches benchmarked against each other. Purely data-driven features hit a performance ceiling that more feature engineering could not move, until a single physics-guided descriptor, derived from a classical foundry rule from the 1940s, broke it.
 
You will leave with:
  • A method for turning simulation archives into training data, the most underused asset in most engineering organisations
  • A clear view of where domain knowledge belongs in an ML pipeline, and why physics-guided feature engineering can be the difference between algorithms rather than a marginal gain
  • Practical patterns for tiered models that degrade gracefully when users arrive with incomplete inputs, and for building ML tools that domain experts actually adopt
No prior knowledge of casting or metallurgy required. The pattern applies wherever expensive simulations create bottlenecks and years of historical runs sit unused.
DATA festival online – Program

*Preliminary schedule, subject to change.

Any questions? Contact us!

Contact

If you have any questions about the event, please contact the Event & Community Manager Christina Schuhmann.

Phone

+49 931 880 65 10

DATA festival online – Program
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