Recap: Women Data Leaders’ Global Summit 2023
About the Conference
CDO Magazine and EDM Council’s Women Data Professionals Forum co-hosted the third annual Women Data Leaders’ Global Summit on November 8-9, 2023. This year’s topic on New Era of AI: Transforming Data into ROI seeks to highlight the key business use cases and benefits of the latest AI technologies. However, as a forum of data professionals, it is quite apparent that over the two half-day sessions of the Summit, that data quality and governance maturity would be the strong indicators of creating ROI.
Main Takeaways
The Global Summit kicked off with a keynote from Adita Karkera (Chief Data Officer at Deloitte Government) who spoke on the crucial role that women play in shaping the data space and the importance of Chief Data Officers in building trust, transparency, and ethics. Certainly, it is more important than ever that a diversity of voices and background be heard in building out AI algorithms, policies, and regulations.
While it’s always been about the data as the tangible governable asset, the reality is the true successful indicator is about the people. Salema Rice moderated two panels discussing the essential skills and competencies required to leverage AI effectively for innovation. Problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills are equally important as technical skills. Personalized learning is how we can also future proof ourselves from the evolving technologies.
While many panel sessions followed the traditional moderator questions and answer, there was one group of women that decided to make the conversation more unique by posing as different C-suite executives in a boardroom setting and intentionally rebutting each other’s point of view in the session entitled AI Strategy as the Best Tool. The session was led by Julia Bardmesser (Founder of Data4Real) who served as the CEO of a fictitious company discussing how to leverage AI. The other panelists served as Chief Product Officer, Chief Data Officer, and Chief Information Officer to provide different perspectives.
Last but not least, the Summit ended with a panel discussion on Harnessing the Power of Big Data in AI with Barbara Cohn (Data Strategy Advisor to Xentity Corp) and Peggy Tsai (Chief Data Officer at BigID). The true powers of AI cannot be harnessed without the compute power and cloud technologies. However, there are benefits to data management to prepare the data for AI algorithms and large language models including data discovery for unstructured data and auto-labeling of sensitive and critical data in documents and texts. In addition, the panelists spoke on the overarching theme of improving data culture and up-skilling data literacy to support AI innovation.
With almost 2,000 registered global attendees at this virtual Summit, it is increasingly important for data professionals to continue to advocate for data governance in AI. Technologies will evolve, but the governance of the data and the human skills will be the deciding factor in calculating the ROI of AI.
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