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CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
DAMA Day 2026 brings together a diverse lineup of data and technology leaders from across the Pacific Northwest and beyond for an amazing conference lineup
KEYNOTE - FROM ARTIFICIAL TO VERIFIED INTELLIGENCE |
AI has become the default answer to enterprise intelligence—but many organizations are discovering a harder truth: faster predictions do not guarantee better decisions. As AI systems scale, so do uncertainty, opacity, and cost—often without delivering meaningful ROI. This talk introduces a different path: Verified Intelligence—a model where intelligence is grounded in real expertise, traceable to its source, and governed by clear accountability. Rather than replacing human judgment, it scales it through digital twins that capture how leaders think and decide in complex environments. |
KEYNOTE - 2026 GLOBAL LEO SATELLIGHT ECOSYSTEM & MULTI-ORBIT SPACE RACE |
Karl J. Weaver is a bilingual Mandarin Chinese speaker, focusing on the Global and Asian markets of mobile and wireless industry. He is a go-to-market business development veteran with decades of experience pitching and scaling cutting-edge smartcard and semiconductor technologies into de facto standards on smartphones and IoT devices. His company Newport Technologies evangelizes cutting-edge mobile technology and thought-leadership Karl's background includes spending five years at Gemalto China as OEM/ODM Mobile Device Business Development Manager, where he delivered over 45 major wireless technology presentations across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and closed design-in deals with smartphone giants including Huawei, ZTE, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, and Motorola. Earlier roles at Motorola/Freescale Semiconductor and Intrinsyc deepened his expertise across Bluetooth, ZigBee, NFC, and embedded security technologies. A former Adjunct Professor of Globalization at Seattle University, Karl has been recognized in Barron's Who's Who of the Asian Pacific Rim and was appointed by Washington State Secretary of State Ralph Munro as a World Trade Organization liaison officer to the Hong Kong Government Delegation. He holds a professional certification in Wireless Communications from the University of Washington and a three-year Mandarin language scholarship certification from NTNU in Taiwan |
SESSION ABSTRACTS |
SESSION 1 - The Composable CDP: From Fragmented Customer Data to AI-Ready Decisions |
The CDP market is approaching $5 billion — yet many packaged platforms end up creating the very problem they set out to solve: a new data silo with a new price tag. Per-profile pricing grows with your data volume rather than your business outcomes. Migration can be difficult once you're locked in. And the promise of a "unified customer view" often means unified only within one vendor's ecosystem. At the same time, composable and warehouse-native CDP approaches are growing at six times the industry average, as more IT leaders recognize that much of the infrastructure they need is already in place. This session explores the case for building over buying. In the first half, Ranjith Krishnamoorthy breaks the CDP into four composable layers and shares real-world architectures designed for media companies managing hundreds of millions of customer profiles — covering identity resolution, graph-based household clustering, ML-powered audience intelligence, and natural language activation, all on infrastructure the organization already owns. In the second half, Shamnad Shaffi demonstrates how agentic AI can accelerate the build and maintenance process, compressing timelines from weeks to minutes using a cockpit architecture. No vendor pitch — just architecture, trade-offs, and a practical framework you can take back and apply. |
SESSION 2 - Operationalizing LLMs: From Prototype to Production |
At Instacart, large language models (LLMs) play a crucial role in enhancing the grocery shopping experience and streamlining support for both customers and shoppers. Two key use cases showcase the transformative potential of AI: |
SESSION 3 - From Data Quality to Decision Quality: Foundations in A |
AI pipelines do not end with predictions or even recommendations—they end with human decisions and now agent decisions. For too long metadata has been treated as documentation instead of active intelligence and Data Quality has been treated as fit for purpose instead of fit for multi-purpose AI application. This session reframes data quality as a decision-centric discipline and introduces the concept of Multi-modal Decision-Ready Foundations—a modern approach where data quality rules, metadata, lineage, and context are explicitly designed to support AI-driven decision workflows. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding about:
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PANEL ABSTRACTS
PANEL - The Human Behind Your AI: Who is Accountable When it Goes Wrong |
AI is no longer just analyzing data—it is shaping decisions that affect jobs, healthcare, financial access, education, and public services. As adoption accelerates, a hard reality is emerging:
When AI influences a decision that causes harm, someone—not something—will be held accountable.
That question is moving from theory to enforcement. Proposed legislation in Washington State (including HB 2157), along with California’s AI Transparency Act and the EU AI Act, is raising expectations for transparency, human oversight, and accountability—especially where AI processes personal data and influences high-risk outcomes.
Yet many organizations remain unprepared—not because they lack principles, but because they have not defined who owns AI-driven decisions at scale.
This panel will examine where accountability breaks down and how to operationalize it, including decision ownership, privacy, human oversight, explainability, and translating policy into enforceable controls.
PANEL - The Hardware Revolution: Quantum, AR/VR and the Future of AI |
Quantum computing and immersive technologies aren't just adding new tools to the stack. They're forcing a fundamental shift in how we design hardware, govern data, and operate AI at scale. This panel brings together leaders from industry, research, and engineering to cut through the hype and tackle the hard questions: How do you co-design classical and quantum systems without blowing your roadmap? What do high-volume, immersive technologies demand from your architecture? How do you stay secure when post-quantum threats, AI and multimodal attack surfaces are evolving faster than your compliance frameworks? Panelists will dig into what to prioritize now versus later, from heterogeneous compute strategies and quantum-safe cryptography to MLOps pipelines built for synthetic and immersive data. Expect candid takes on talent gaps, toolchain immaturity, and the real cost of moving from prototype to production. |