DATA festival online 2025
Program Details
21st of October 2025, 10:00 am – 10:30 am
Keynote: Autonomous by Design: Rethinking Workflows with Agentic AI
Agentic AI marks a shift from algorithmic assistance to autonomous co-creation. This annual keynote of the DATA festival Founders explores how multi-agent systems with memory, intent, and adaptive planning can take on real business responsibilities, synthesizing data, coordinating tasks, and driving outcomes across functions. They’ll dive into emerging patterns of AI participation in workflows, human-AI interfaces, and the path toward productive machine agency.
21st of October 2025, 10:30 am – 11:00 am
From Concept to Factory Floor: Designing Robust AI Architectures for Industrial Applications
Dr. Nikita Golovko, Software Architect Industrial AI (IoT/Edge) | Siemens
Dr. Nikita Golovko is a seasoned Solution Architect with over 16 years of experience designing scalable, secure, and cost-effective software architectures for industrial and mission-critical systems. With a solid academic foundation and research background in machine learning, he excels at bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technologies and real-world shop floor applications. Nikita is recognized for translating complex business requirements into robust technical architectures and aligning cross-functional teams toward shared goals.
Passionate about innovation, sustainability, and the long-term impact of engineering decisions, he focuses on leveraging AI, IoT, and edge computing to drive continuous improvement in industrial environments. He is also deeply engaged in the topic of technical debt and is currently writing a book exploring how engineering culture and decision-making frameworks can be used to effectively manage and reduce technical debt over time.
21st of October 2025, 11:00 am – 11:30 am
Generative AI @ Scale for Enterprises
At Merck, we have successfully rolled out and scaled GenAI to 25K+ employees, including business consumers and citizen developers. Our strategy, approach, technological insights, and key learnings will be presented. Audiences can benefit from how a similar approach can be applied to adopt and scale (Gen)AI for enterprises of similar nature and scale.
Dr. Harsha Gurulingappa, Global Head of AI & Machine Learning Practice | Merck Group
With a career spanning over 15 years, I am a seasoned professional with extensive experience in research and industry related to applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the constituents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Healthcare and Life Science domains. As the current Head of AI & Machine Learning Practice at Merck, my responsibilities encompass leading the strategy, implementation, and evolution of technological capabilities, empowering business functions to drive impact by harnessing technologies and best practices around AI/ML/NLP. My experience and groundedness in this field positions me to drive transformative innovation and spearhead data-driven decision-making initiatives.
21st of October 2025, 11:30 am – 12:00 pm
From Legacy to Sovereignty: Driving the Future of Insurance through Platform Engineering
Join me on a 4-year journey inside the world’s largest insurance company, where we tackled the challenges of legacy systems, vendor lock-in and the imperative for rapid innovation. Discover how strategic platform engineering, adaptive DevOps topologies, and bold technology choices enabled us to achieve true innovation sovereignty, driving significant business impact. This is a story of transformation, resilience, and the power of building your own future.
Sergiu Petean, Director of Cloud Engineering & Operations former Head of Generative AI | Allianz Direct
Sponsored by
October 21st, 3.00 – 3.30 pm
FFT Produktionssyteme: Accelerate Your Data-Driven Manufacturing with Snowflake
FFT, a global leader in innovative manufacturing systems, has developed a solution to the persistent challenge of bridging IT and OT data. In just six months, FFT launched the FFT DataBridge, which resides on shopfloor edge devices and seamlessly integrates production data into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. This solution unlocks critical shopfloor analytics, AI-based forecasting, and predictive maintenance. By leveraging the power of Snowflake, FFT is helping manufacturing companies transform their operations and is continuing their journey by building a suite of IT/OT-centric applications for the Snowflake Marketplace.
Dominic Fink, Senior Manager Digital Factory | FFT Produktionssysteme
October 21st, 4.00 – 4:30 pm
Data Integration to AI Transformation: The CX Blueprint
Poor customer experience puts $3.8 trillion in global sales at risk, with 53% of customers leaving brands after just one negative experience. Despite recognizing the critical importance of customer experience, most businesses struggle with fragmented data systems, reactive service approaches, and generic customer interactions that fail to meet modern expectations. This presentation introduces a comprehensive three-pillar framework that transforms customer experience through strategic data integration, advanced analytics, and AI implementation. By creating unified Customer data views and leveraging predictive analytics, organizations can move from reactive problem-solving to proactive, hyper-personalized customer engagement at scale, while simultaneously driving broader business innovation and sustainable competitive advantages.
Mohan Krishna Mannava, Business Intelligence & Data Analytics Leader | Texas Health
October 21st, 4.30 – 5.00 pm
GenAI to Automate personalized outreach in Direct selling
Direct selling is a business model built on personal trust and human interaction. While sales enablement strategies are designed to support independent sellers, they often fall short in delivering scalable, personalized communication—an area where manual effort becomes a bottleneck. This presentation explores the transformative potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly large language models (LLMs) such as Claude by Anthropic, deployed through Amazon Bedrock, in addressing this challenge. It demonstrates how LLMs can automate the creation of personalized outreach emails, social messages, product recommendations enhancing both efficiency and customer engagement without compromising authenticity.
Sai Simhadri, Senior Data Architect | Pampered Chef
21st of October 2025, 5.00 – 05.30 pm
Modernization of Data Warehousing Platforms and MDM with AI
Enterprises today face unprecedented challenges in managing and leveraging vast volumes of data spread across legacy systems, cloud platforms, and distributed sources. Traditional Data Warehousing (DWH) and Master Data Management (MDM) architectures, while foundational, are often rigid and struggle to meet the demands of real-time analytics, advanced governance, and AI-driven decision-making. This session will explore how AI and modern architectural patterns are reshaping the landscape of DWH and MDM
Vinod Surasani, Senior Software Engineer | Royal Bank of Canada
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