Agenda

Agenda

Thursday, September 17, 2026

All times are listed in Central Standard Time.

AI & Data Summit Chicago

One Day Event

8:30AM

Registration and Networking Breakfast

Informal networking and welcome, setting the tone for a strategic day.

10:00AM

IDC Welcome Remarks

Kevin Prouty

Kevin Prouty

Group Vice President & General Manager, Tech Buyer Business, IDC

Keynote
10:10AM

IDC Keynote: Agentic AI at Scale: Accelerating Innovation While Managing Risk

Agentic AI is unlocking new levels of enterprise innovation by enabling autonomous decision-making and adaptive workflows at scale. Balancing this potential with robust risk management is essential for ensuring trust, compliance, and sustainable value as organizations operationalize agentic systems across critical functions.

Matthew Eastwood | IDC

Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Telecom, Security, Developers, Channels and Enabling Technology

Read Bio
Matthew Eastwood
10:45AM

Keynote: The State of Enterprise Ai: From Boom to Business Value

Enterprise AI is moving from experimentation to production. Melissa Crichton, VP of AI Specialty Sales at Dell Technologies, explores the forces shaping this shift: inference-led growth, rising enterprise AI spend, tokenomics, and sovereign AI. The takeaway: scale AI with economic discipline and control—on your terms, across a distributed, sovereignty-aware future.

Melissa Crichton

Melissa Crichton

VP, AI Solutions, Dell Technologies

11:15AM

Keynote: Your AI Is Only as Trusted as Your Data

Most enterprise AI initiatives stall. Not because the models are wrong, but because the data underneath them is fragmented, ungoverned, and inconsistent. In this session, we share how global organizations like Pfizer are scaling AI across 27 markets and 15,000 users by investing first in a governed, unified data foundation. You’ll leave with a practical framework for building the AI-ready data infrastructure that turns pilots into enterprise-wide transformation.

Vasant Paranjpe

Vasant Paranjpe

Vice President of Sales Engineering, North America, Strategy

11:30AM

Networking Break

11:40AM

Panel Discussion: Data as a Strategic Asset

Data is emerging as a core driver of enterprise strategy, fueling innovation, operational excellence, and competitive differentiation. Organizations that treat data as a strategic asset are positioned to unlock new value, enable intelligent decision-making, and build resilient, future-ready business models.

Stephen Elliot

Stephen Elliot

Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC

Flo Castro-Wright

Flo Castro-Wright

Chief Data Officer, State of Illinois, Department of Innovation and Technology

Rob Tiffany

Rob Tiffany

Research Director, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, IDC

12:10PM

Interactive Roundtable: Rethinking Endpoint Strategy for AI

Hosted by HP

12:10PM

Interactive Roundtable: AI Scale, Control, Value

Hosted by Dell Technologies + AMD

12:10PM

Interactive Roundtable: Governance for the Agent Ecosystem

Hosted by Boomi

12:10PM

Interactive Roundtable: Rebuilding Code Review for the AI Era

Hosted by CodeRabbit

12:10PM

Interactive Roundtable: Why Agentic AI Projects are Stalling: The Data Problems We Still Haven’t Solved

Hosted by Rocket Software

12:10PM

Interactive Roundtable: Agentic AI: Is Your Data Ready to Scale?

Hosted by Strategy

12:50PM

Keynote: Rethinking Endpoint Strategy for AI

For two decades, the endpoint was treated as a cost line — a device to procure, secure, image, manage, and refresh. That era is over. The endpoint is now where intelligence is gathered, where employee experience is measured, and where competitive advantage is won or lost.
This keynote challenges leaders to stop managing endpoints and start architecting them for AI. We’ll reframe the endpoint from a device to be maintained into a source of insight and a measure of employee experience that drives real business outcomes — and confront why the traditional split between hardware and software budgets has quietly become a barrier to AI adoption.
Kathryn Cordingley

Kathryn Cordingley

Industry Consultant, HP

1:05PM

Networking Lunch & Solutions Showcase

Time off to think, network and share insights.

2:00PM

Panel Discussion: Trustworthy AI – Ethics, Bias & Transparency in Practice

Building trustworthy AI requires embedding ethics, bias mitigation, and transparency into every stage of the AI lifecycle. Organizations that operationalize these principles not only strengthen compliance and stakeholder trust but also position themselves for responsible innovation and long-term success.

Sarah Lee

Sarah Lee

Senior Research Director, Manufacturing – AI, Platforms, and Technologies, IDC

Archana Lamoureux

Archana Lamoureux

Vice President, Head of Corporate Digital Solutions, Northwestern Mutual

Kader Sakkaria

Kader Sakkaria

Global CDO, Marsh

2:30PM

Fireside Chat: Enabling Trust with Agents

As organizations move from experimenting with agentic AI to deploying it at scale, trust becomes the limiting factor. This session explores what it takes to deploy AI agents at scale without sacrificing control: governed data, transparent decision-making, and guardrails built for autonomy. Boomi shares insights on unlocking the highest-value use cases and safely enabling agents to take on more workloads with trusted autonomy.

Stephen Fishman

Stephen Fishman

Lead – Office of AI Advisory, Boomi

Matthew Eastwood

Matthew Eastwood

Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Telecom, Security, Developers, Channels and Enabling Technology, IDC

2:45PM

Fireside Chat: What Agentic AI Is Revealing About the Future of Enterprise Data

Earlier in the day, roundtable participants will explore the practical challenges slowing AI adoption, including fragmented data, disconnected knowledge, governance concerns, and trust. In this discussion, IDC’s Marlanna Harrington and Rocket Software’s Ray Sullivan examine what those challenges reveal about the future of enterprise data architecture and the capabilities organizations will need as AI moves closer to decisions and actions.

As AI adoption matures, trust, context, governance, lineage, and accessibility are becoming increasingly important. Join us for a discussion on what leading organizations are doing differently, where enterprise data strategies are evolving, and what leaders should prioritize now to support AI at scale.

Marlanna Harrington

Marlanna Harrington

Senior Research Analyst, Data Platforms, IDC

Ray Sullivan

Ray Sullivan

Vice President, Product Management, Rocket Software

3:00PM

Fireside Chat: Agentic AI Readiness: Trust at the Speed of Code

AI agents now open pull requests alongside engineers, but review and governance haven’t scaled with them. As more of the codebase is written by machines, who validates it, who’s accountable, and how does trust stay intact at speed? This candid peer discussion covers agentic AI readiness: the controls, guardrails, and team models leaders use so autonomous coding speeds delivery without adding risk, drawing on attendees’ own questions and what’s working (or not) in their organizations.

Sahil Mohan Bansal

Sahil Mohan Bansal

Senior Product Manager, CodeRabbit

Stephen Elliot

Stephen Elliot

Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC

3:15PM

Lightning Insights: SAP Business AI Platform: Powering Applications, Data, and AI to Move Your Business Forward

SAP Business AI Platform brings together applications, data, and AI to help organizations connect business processes, extend and build applications, and embed AI across the enterprise. As the technology foundation for SAP Business Suite, the platform helps unlock the full potential of your applications, data, and AI. Learn how SAP Business AI Platform can accelerate business agility, drive innovation, and help future-proof your business for what’s next.

Doug Freud

Doug Freud

Vice President AI & ML, SAP

3:20PM

Lightning Insights: Closing the NetOps Skills Gap with AI Assistants

Lightning Insights: Enterprise networks are constrained by a widening skills gap. Senior administrators hold deep institutional knowledge, while junior staff face complex environments with limited context. As networks grow more dynamic, this imbalance slows response and increases risk. AI assistants change the operating model by translating telemetry, correlating signals, and guiding remediation through natural language. The result is faster resolution, more consistent execution, and better use of scarce expert time.

Mark Mikhail

Mark Mikhail

Principal Product Marketing Manager, Bluecat Networks

3:25PM

Lightning Insights: When AI fails: Who Owns AI reliability?

Enterprise AI adoption is no longer limited by deployment, but by what happens when agents make mistakes: inaccurate planning, failed tool use, knowledge gaps and loss of trust. This Lightning Insight shows recent techniques to turn errors, escalations and expert interventions into governed memory, operational reliability and continuous performance improvement.

Giorgio Barnabò

Giorgio Barnabò

CEO and Co-Founder, Syllotips

3:30PM

Networking Break

3:50PM

Lightning Insights: What No One Tells You About Taking AI Live

The hard part of AI is not building an impressive demo; it is turning that demo into a trusted, scalable business solution. Drawing on real implementation experience, OGI shares what it takes to move from pilot to production: AI-ready data, governance by design, observability, clear ownership, and controlled costs. Learn the critical decisions and practical lessons that help teams reduce risk, accelerate implementation, and deliver business value at scale.

Ramon Tramontini

Ramon Tramontini

President of International Operations, OGI

3:55PM

Lightning Insights: From Answers to Action: The Next Frontier of Enterprise AI

AI is moving beyond assistance. In this five-minute session, Glean explores how enterprises can turn generative and agentic AI into trusted action—connecting people, knowledge, and workflows with the context and permissions required to operate safely at scale. We’ll unpack practical guardrails, risk and cost trade-offs, hybrid model strategies, and the path from experimentation to measurable business value.

Elaine Gitles

Elaine Gitles

Account Executive, Glean

4:00PM

Interactive Roundtable: Scaling AI in the Enterprise

Hosted by Glean

4:00PM

Interactive Roundtable: AI Is Ready. Are Your Data and Governance?

Hosted by OGI

4:00PM

Interactive Roundtable: Who Teaches AI Agents After They Go Live?

Hosted by Syllotips

4:00PM

Interactive Roundtable: AI-Skilled IT Teams

Hosted by BlueCat

4:45PM

Panel: Ask IDC Analysts Anything

AI and data will fundamentally redefine competitive dynamics, business models, and workforce expectations. Leaders must anticipate disruptive technological shifts, invest in adaptive strategies, and cultivate organizational resilience to harness the full potential of an AI-driven future.

Kevin Prouty

Kevin Prouty

Group Vice President & General Manager, Tech Buyer Business, IDC

Matthew Eastwood

Matthew Eastwood

Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Telecom, Security, Developers, Channels and Enabling Technology, IDC

Marlanna Harrington

Marlanna Harrington

Senior Research Analyst, Data Platforms, IDC

Sarah Lee

Sarah Lee

Senior Research Director, Manufacturing – AI, Platforms, and Technologies, IDC

Stephen Elliot

Stephen Elliot

Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC

Meredith Whalen

Meredith Whalen

Chief Research & Data Intelligence Officer, IDC

Rob Tiffany

Rob Tiffany

Research Director, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, IDC

5:15PM

IDC’s Wrap-Up

Kevin Prouty

Kevin Prouty

Group Vice President & General Manager, Tech Buyer Business, IDC

5:25PM

Networking Reception

Enjoy more food and drinks with our partners and new contacts

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