Category: Blog & News

Leadership, People & AI at Scale – Industry Day Takes the Spotlight

Week 13 brings a major step forward for the Data Innovation Summit XI Edition, with the program expanding across leadership, transformation, and large-scale AI execution. This week’s updates highlight a powerful mix of political leadership, enterprise-scale AI, cultural transformation, and the foundations needed to make data products truly interoperable.

To start with, we are especially proud to announce our Industry Day Keynote, Fredrik Reinfeldt, former Swedish Prime Minister, who will open Industry Day with a keynote that sets a broader context for leadership, geopolitics, economy, and societal transformation. With more than 25 years in Swedish and international politics, Mr Reinfeldt brings a rare perspective shaped by leading a four-party alliance through two national election victories, serving as President of the Swedish Football Association, and holding senior advisory and chair roles across business, finance, transparency initiatives, and public-space development. 

We are also happy to introduce the closing speaker of the first day, a Closing Keynote by Angelo Rivano, Director of Specialty Presales for Europe North at Dell Technologies, bringing a practitioner’s view on navigating organizational and technological complexity, from the datacenter to the edge, and accelerating innovation across sectors.

Beyond the keynote stage, this week also introduces a strong lineup of new speakers bringing hands-on experience from finance, public sector, travel, and global investment organizations.

From Novo Holdings, Thore Dankert, Executive Director and Head of Digital, shares why digital transformation succeeds or fails far beyond technology. His session focuses on the often-overlooked reality: culture, motivation, governance, and behavior change are what turn digital ambition into real outcomes, or stall it entirely. From the financial sector, Mattias Fras, Group Head of AI Adoption at Nordea, presents how one of the Nordics’ largest banks is approaching AI at scale. Rather than focusing on individual models, the session dives into operating models, organizational rewiring, and what it truly takes to embed AI across a large enterprise. We are also excited to welcome Geir Myrind, Chief Information Architect at the Norwegian Tax Administration, who brings a foundational perspective on data products. His session highlights why strong metadata and operational data models, designed upstream, close to where data is created, are essential for building interoperable, reusable, and trustworthy data products downstream.

Rounding out the Modern Data Platform and Architecture Stage, Anastasiia Stefanska from TUI shares an honest journey toward building an agentic data ecosystem that supports human analysts. The session explores how agentic capabilities, semantic discovery, and human-augmented analytics can work together in real-world environments, including lessons learned along the way.

Finally, we are pleased to welcome new partners strengthening the XI Edition ecosystem:
New Stage Partners: Cloudera (M1), IBM (M2), Acceldata (M3) and also Acceldata as a new partner added to the list. 

With leadership-level perspectives, people-first transformation lessons, and concrete approaches to AI and data at scale, Week 13 marks a significant milestone in shaping one of our strongest event editions yet.

More updates coming soon… and as always… 

See you in Stockholm

The Data Innovation Summit Team

Welcome Back – Starting the New Year with Strong Product & Player Insights

Welcome back after the holidays! We are kicking off the new year strong, and week ten at the Data Innovation Summit XI Edition sets the tone with sharp product-focused analytics, real-world machine learning, and data-driven decision-making rooted in operational reality. As the program continues to take shape, this week highlights how data science delivers value when tightly integrated with product strategy and everyday decisions.

We are excited to welcome new speakers from CCP Games in the new Industry Day Stages, bringing deep product and data science expertise from one of the world’s most complex live gaming environments.

Snorri Árnason, Executive Producer of EVE Online, together with Kajetan Sygula, Senior Data Scientist at CCP Games, present From Noisy Events to Meaningful Player Patterns. The session explores how machine learning is used to understand early player behavior and predict long-term engagement by focusing on the first minutes and hours of the player journey. Built on detailed, real-time event tracking, the talk shows how early player segmentation helps avoid misleading averages and enables reliable churn and lifetime value models. Beyond the models themselves, the session highlights the real challenge: embedding predictions into daily product, player experience, and marketing decisions while keeping data science and product teams aligned as the game evolves.

We are pleased to welcome Dun & Bradstreet as a new partner joining the XI Edition ecosystem. 

As we move into the new year, the XI Edition continues to build momentum with concrete use cases, strong product thinking, and lessons drawn directly from teams working with data and AI at scale. More announcements are coming soon.

See you in Stockholm!
The Data Innovation Summit Team

Big Tech Insights, Strong Industry Voices and Even More Real World AI

Week nine at the Data Innovation Summit XI Edition keeps the momentum high. The program continues to grow with deep technical stories, strong industry cases, and practical lessons from organizations working with data and AI at true scale. This week brings a clear focus on data understanding, data quality, and intelligent automation in real operational environments.

New Speakers 

We are excited to welcome new speakers from Meta, HEINEKEN International and Skatteetaten, each bringing hands-on experience from complex data ecosystems. From Meta, Vasileios Lakafosis shares how data is understood and governed at massive scale, highlighting a long term journey built around privacy by design, early data schematization, and a shared privacy language used across products. The session offers rare insight into how large organizations can embed privacy and data understanding directly into product development. 

From HEINEKEN International, Ralph Foorthuis dives into what it really takes to deliver high quality data products. Drawing from both industry practice and academic research, the session explores how to specify data quality, detect anomalies, and design architectures that support reliable data across different data types, all illustrated with clear examples. 

On the Industry Day, Filippo Remonato from Skatteetaten presents a compelling public sector use case, showing how tax claims move from manual review to intelligent automation. The session demonstrates how AI can speed up processes, improve accuracy, and create real impact in government operations when applied thoughtfully.

New Partners

We are happy to welcome a strong group of new partners joining the XI Edition ecosystem. A special welcome to our Powered By Partner, Databricks, who has been with us throughout the years and continues to strengthen the practical and technical backbone of the event. We also warmly welcome Scalefree, Futurice, EPAM, PCG, WhereScape, Cloudian, Dremio, Alteryx, and Kovant.

With every week, the XI Edition becomes richer, more practical, and more connected to real world challenges. From global tech leaders to industry and public sector practitioners, the stories shared show how data and AI are truly built, governed, and scaled today. More announcements are coming soon.

See you in Stockholm!
The Data Innovation Summit Team

More Voices, Real Use Cases, and Enterprise AI in Action at DIS X1

Week eight at the Data Innovation Summit XI Edition marks another strong leap forward. The program continues to expand with powerful new sessions, senior industry voices, and hands on use cases spanning healthcare, earth observation, media analytics, and large scale enterprise AI. What stands out is the growing focus on real experiences showing how AI is actually being built, governed, and scaled inside organizations today.

New Speakers and Sessions
We are excited to welcome a new group of speakers bringing deeply applied perspectives. From Sahlgrenska University Hospital and RISE, Magnus Kjellberg and Rickard Brännvall share how healthcare organizations navigate innovation while protecting data privacy, meeting regulatory demands, and building trust in highly sensitive environments. Carlos Paz von Friesen from the County Administrative Board of Västerbotten, together with Charlotte Runberg, again from RISE explore how satellite imagery and deep learning enable early detection in marine monitoring, illustrating how earth observation can move from pilot projects to real operational impact.

Continuing a long standing tradition at the event, Google returns to the speaker lineup this year with Shantam Mogali, who presents a practical walkthrough on using multimodal AI and local LLMs to measure brand exposure across video. The session demystifies complex vision analytics and shows how these approaches can be made faster, simpler, and more accessible. From Telia Company, Åke Edlund and Tarek Abouzeid offer an honest look at scaling generative and agentic AI, focusing on architectural decisions, real trade offs, and what it truly takes to turn experiments into sustainable enterprise capabilities. We are also pleased to begin announcing our Executive Roundtable moderators and welcome Gabor Harsanyi from Ericsson as the moderator of the Chief AI Officer Executive Round Table, bringing strong expertise in data strategy, ethics, and value driven AI leadership.

New Partners on board

A warm welcome to TimeXtender, Brightly, MinIO, Data Galaxy, and SS&C Blue Prism, all contributing to a strong ecosystem around data, analytics, and AI innovation.

The X1 Edition continues to build momentum with more content, more real world stories, and more voices from industry leaders who are shaping the future of AI and data. Stay tuned, there is much more to come. 

See you in Stockholm!
The Data Innovation Summit Team

What’s New at the Data Innovation Summit XI – More Content, More Voices, More Impact

This week brings a wave of exciting updates for the XI Edition of the Data Innovation Summit. We are adding fresh sessions, new perspectives, and powerful partners. The program is growing fast, and the content is getting richer every day. Here’s a simple roundup of everything new.

Special Keynote Announcement: Andy Cotgreave

We are excited to reveal updated keynote content from Andy Cotgreave, Data Entrepreneur and author of The Big Book of Dashboards and Dashboards That Deliver. His keynote, Why Human Insight Is More Important Than Ever in the Age of AI, will explore the tension between fast-moving AI tools and the irreplaceable value of human judgment. Andy will show why chart selection, context, and interpretation still matter, and he will introduce a practical framework to help teams evaluate AI-driven analytics tools. This session brings a fresh and timely reminder that even in an AI-first world, human insight remains at the center of meaningful decision-making.

New Speakers and Sessions
This week, we welcome a strong group of new speakers bringing forward-looking ideas across automotive, telecom, retail, media, BI, and large-scale machine learning.

Soumy Jacob from BMW Group joins the Industry Day to discuss the future of connected automotive ecosystems and the challenges of integrating vehicles with digital platforms. Shubhangi Goyal from Admiral Group will guide the audience through modern data modelling approaches for real-time BI and ML in the Databases and Data Quality Stage. The Analytics and Decision Intelligence Stage welcomes Annie von Heijne from ICA Sverige, who will share how a 100-year-old organization is evolving into a data-centric company through culture, capability building, and practical change.

On the ML and Agents’ Stage, Truecaller’s Thore Bücking and Liniker Seixas present how their multi-ML architecture enables personalization at scale across multiple verticals. Åge Ingierd from Telenor joins the Data Platform and Architecture Stage to showcase how the company is building an AI-ready foundation supported by shared platforms and a value stream-based organization.

We also welcome Öykü Yilmaz and Albin Blum from Aller Media Denmark, who will share how four Nordic media companies unified through data. Two new moderators join our lineup as well: Karima Makrof for the Data Strategy & Governance Stage and Albin Blum for the Data Engineering & DataOps Stage, both well-respected experts and familiar names to the long-time followers of the Data Innovation Summit. 

In addition, Jakob Mainz, the Director of AI Governance at Novo Nordisk joins the Data Octagon Panel on trusted AI operating models. More panelists will be revealed in the coming weeks.

New Partners
We are pleased to welcome two new partners this week: Clickhouse and Reltio. Reltio also joins as the Category Sponsor for the Data Management Award. Their partnership further strengthens this year’s focus on scalable, governed, and modern data foundations.

The XI Edition is shaping up to be one of our most extensive and diverse programs to date. With more content being added every week, we are excited for what’s ahead. Stay tuned, much more is coming next week.

See you in Stockholm!
The Data Innovation Summit Team