Agenda
Thursday, September 17, 2026
All times are listed in Central Standard Time.
AI & Data Summit Chicago
One Day Event
Registration and Networking Breakfast
Informal networking and welcome, setting the tone for a strategic day.
IDC Welcome Remarks
Kevin Prouty
Group Vice President & General Manager, Tech Buyer Business, IDC
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
Matthew Eastwood
Matthew Eastwood is Senior Vice President of IDC’s enterprise infrastructure, cloud, telecom, security, developers, channels and enabling technology research groups. Mr. Eastwood and his team research people, process and technology trends affecting the enterprise technology marketplace worldwide. Mr. Eastwood first joined IDC in 2000 as part of the server team and his responsibilities have evolved and expanded during his tenure. In his current role, he leads a team of more than 100 analysts providing insights and analysis to IT suppliers, buyers, investors, and distributors through more than 75 syndicated research programs. Mr. Eastwood also leads IDC’s BuyerView primary research programs which are focused on defining emerging trends in cloud, developers, service providers, edge, AI and security.
Mr. Eastwood joined IDC in 2000. He provides in-depth market analysis, research, and consulting on all aspects of the enterprise infrastructure marketplace to IT professionals, investors, resellers and technology suppliers. During his tenure at IDC, Mr. Eastwood has led IDC primary research focused on emerging trends in enterprise systems and data centers. This primary research allows IDC to make continuous assessments regarding how customers are deploying and using enterprise infrastructure power digital transformation. Recent topics covered in Mr. Eastwood’s research include: Software Defined Infrastructure, Integrated infrastructure, Convergence, Disaggregated Infrastructure, Virtualization & Automation, Cloud Computing, High Availability, Platform Migration and Datacenter Workloads. Mr. Eastwood also serves as IDC’s lead analyst covering Dell and VMware.
Prior to joining IDC, Mr. Eastwood worked for twelve years as a senior project manager and environmental consultant at CDM Smith in Boston. Mr. Eastwood was responsible for managing the planning and design of large environmental infrastructure projects including wastewater collection and treatment facilities. In addition, Mr. Eastwood served as Operations Manager of the firm’s New England practice.
Mr. Eastwood received a bachelor’s degree in Civil/Environmental Engineering from Northeastern University in Boston and earned his MS in Engineering Project Management from WPI in Worcester, MA. He is a Registered Professional Engineer (PE) in Massachusetts.
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:45 pm
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.
One Day Event 2:30 pm
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.
One Day Event 10:10 am
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.
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
VP, AI Solutions, Dell Technologies
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
Vice President of Sales Engineering, North America, Strategy
Networking Break
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
Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC
Flo Castro-Wright
Chief Data Officer, State of Illinois, Department of Innovation and Technology
Rob Tiffany
Research Director, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, IDC
Interactive Roundtable: Rethinking Endpoint Strategy for AI
Hosted by HP
Interactive Roundtable: AI Scale, Control, Value
Hosted by Dell Technologies + AMD
Interactive Roundtable: Governance for the Agent Ecosystem
Hosted by Boomi
Interactive Roundtable: Rebuilding Code Review for the AI Era
Hosted by CodeRabbit
Interactive Roundtable: Why Agentic AI Projects are Stalling: The Data Problems We Still Haven’t Solved
Hosted by Rocket Software
Interactive Roundtable: Agentic AI: Is Your Data Ready to Scale?
Hosted by Strategy
Keynote: Rethinking Endpoint Strategy for AI
Kathryn Cordingley
Industry Consultant, HP
Networking Lunch & Solutions Showcase
Time off to think, network and share insights.
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
Senior Research Director, Manufacturing – AI, Platforms, and Technologies, IDC
Archana Lamoureux
Vice President, Head of Corporate Digital Solutions, Northwestern Mutual
Kader Sakkaria
Global CDO, Marsh
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
Lead – Office of AI Advisory, Boomi
Matthew Eastwood
Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Telecom, Security, Developers, Channels and Enabling Technology, IDC
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
Senior Research Analyst, Data Platforms, IDC
Ray Sullivan
Vice President, Product Management, Rocket Software
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
Senior Product Manager, CodeRabbit
Stephen Elliot
Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC
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
Vice President AI & ML, SAP
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
Principal Product Marketing Manager, Bluecat Networks
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
CEO and Co-Founder, Syllotips
Networking Break
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
President of International Operations, OGI
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
Account Executive, Glean
Interactive Roundtable: Scaling AI in the Enterprise
Hosted by Glean
Interactive Roundtable: AI Is Ready. Are Your Data and Governance?
Hosted by OGI
Interactive Roundtable: Who Teaches AI Agents After They Go Live?
Hosted by Syllotips
Interactive Roundtable: AI-Skilled IT Teams
Hosted by BlueCat
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
Group Vice President & General Manager, Tech Buyer Business, IDC
Matthew Eastwood
Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Telecom, Security, Developers, Channels and Enabling Technology, IDC
Marlanna Harrington
Senior Research Analyst, Data Platforms, IDC
Sarah Lee
Senior Research Director, Manufacturing – AI, Platforms, and Technologies, IDC
Stephen Elliot
Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC
Meredith Whalen
Chief Research & Data Intelligence Officer, IDC
Rob Tiffany
Research Director, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, IDC
IDC’s Wrap-Up
Kevin Prouty
Group Vice President & General Manager, Tech Buyer Business, IDC
Networking Reception
Enjoy more food and drinks with our partners and new contacts
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