In-Person

Atlanta CDAO Community

Executive Summit

November 17, 2026 | Atlanta Marriott Northwest at Galleria

November 17, 2026
Atlanta Marriott Northwest at Galleria

Collaborate with your peers

Get together with Atlanta's top CDAOs to tackle shared business challenges and critical priorities facing your role today. Participate in this one-day, local program with peer-driven topics and interactive discussions with your true C-level peers.

Join your peers to discuss the most critical issues impacting CDAOs today:

Strengthen AI Governance to Scale Trusted and Responsible Innovation

Foster a Data-Driven Culture to Accelerate Business Transformation

Maximize Business Value and Monetization Through Data and AI

Atlanta CDAO Governing Body

The Governing Body Co-Chairs shape the summit agenda, ensuring that all content is driven By CDAOs, For CDAOs™.

Governing Body Co-Chairs

James Bolles

Southern Company
Director, Technology Enterprise Foundations

Snorwlor “Sno” Bropleh

Habitat For Humanity International
Senior Director, Global Integrated Planning, Office, Strategy Management

Marcy Cunningham

IHG
Head of Information Governance

Vijay Gandapodi

Campbell's
VP of Data & Analytics & AI

Karthikeyan Ramasamy

Guardian
Chief Analytics Officer

Kenneth Viciana

TSYS
VP, Global Data & Analytics Products

What to Expect

Interactive Sessions

Hear from CDAO practitioners and thought leaders on how they're solving critical challenges impacting your role today in Keynote sessions, and join smaller, interactive discussions with your peers in Breakout and Boardroom sessions.

Community Networking

Make new connections and catch up with old friends in casual conversations during dedicated time for networking designed to better acquaint you with your Atlanta CDAO community.

Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Connect with like-minded peers in a private, one-on-one setting through Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

Agenda

November 17, 2026

8:00am - 8:30am  Registration & Breakfast

8:30am - 9:15am  Gartner Keynote

The Next Frontier of Decision Intelligence

Gareth Herschel headshot

Gareth Herschel

VP Analyst

Gartner

Organizations do not create value through data, analytics, or AI alone, but through the decisions those capabilities enable. As expectations for measurable business impact continue to rise, D&A leaders must move beyond delivering insights and take a more active role in shaping, supporting, and improving decision making across the enterprise. This keynote explores how decision intelligence frameworks help connect data and analytics investments to business outcomes, enabling organizations to communicate value more effectively, prioritize opportunities, and drive better decisions at scale.

Join Gartner Analyst Gareth Herschel as he shares insights on how to:

  • Use decision intelligence as a bridge between D&A capabilities and measurable business value
  • Evaluate different types of decisions and understand their implications for D&A strategy, investments, and operating models
  • Communicate the impact of data and analytics in terms business leaders understand and act upon
  • Begin rethinking data and analytics through the lens of decision making to unlock greater organizational value

9:15am - 9:40am  Networking Break

9:40am - 10:25am  Executive Boardroom

Redefining Data Workflows ― Unlocking Automation, Trust, and Agility

Ramon Chen headshot

Ramon Chen

Chief Product Officer

Acceldata

Kenneth Viciana headshot

Kenneth Viciana

VP, Global Data & Analytics Products

TSYS

As analytics and AI adoption accelerates, CDAOs are shifting from reactive data quality to proactive, end-to-end visibility across the data lifecycle. By embedding governance and automation, organizations can scale reliable, decision-ready data products that deliver measurable business value.

Join this session to:

  • Build trusted, enterprise-scale data workflows
  • Enable proactive visibility for scalable data products
  • Automate data reliability for analytics and AI success

9:40am - 10:25am  Executive Boardroom

Open Data Infrastructure — Next-Gen Data Architecture

Chris Lawless headshot

Chris Lawless

Field CTO

Fivetran + dbt Labs

Open Data Infrastructure is essential for organizations in the AI era, helping leaders scale analytics and AI while maintaining control. CDAOs must balance innovation, flexibility and cost as data platforms expand.

Join this session to learn about:

  • Designing interoperable architectures to avoid lock-in
  • Applying openness to semantics, metadata and governance
  • Enabling AI and operations with flexibility and cost transparency

10:25am - 11:10am  Networking Break

10:35am - 11:00am  Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Connect with like-minded peers in a one-on-one setting through Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

11:10am - 11:55am  Breakout Session

A Practical Framework for AI-Ready Enterprise Data

Guy Vorster headshot

Guy Vorster

Field CTO

Reltio

AI has plenty of intelligence. What it lacks is enterprise context. To act with precision, AI must understand how a business operates.

Join this session to discover:

  • Transforming fragmented data with a real-time System of Context
  • Scaling AI with greater accuracy, accountability and business impact
  • Aligning data strategy with enterprise AI initiatives

11:10am - 11:55am  Executive Boardroom

Driving Value in the Agentic Era — CDAO Framework

Vijay Gandapodi headshot

Vijay Gandapodi

VP of Data & Analytics & AI

Campbell's

As data leaders navigate the agentic era, the focus shifts from reactive analytics to orchestrating proactive, high-ROI agentic workflows that bridge infrastructure and business value. This framework invites discussion on integrating operational intelligence, proactive security, and board-level governance to accelerate enterprise AI transformation. 

Come together with your peers to explore how to:

  • Automate high-impact, low-risk workflows to realize agentic value
  • Integrate security and trust with centralized, transparent oversight
  • Align agentic initiatives with strategy via structured governance and monitoring

11:55am - 12:30pm  Lunch Service

12:30pm - 1:05pm  Keynote

Rethinking Data Security for the Age of Agents

Thomas Mazzaferro headshot

Thomas Mazzaferro

Chief Data Officer

Cyera

Agents are becoming the biggest opportunity in the enterprise, and the biggest adversary. They read your data and act under borrowed identities, at a speed no human review process was built to match. The old question in protecting data was how to keep bad actors out. The new one is more complex: how do you create and manage the biggest risk in your own enterprise, the agents you deployed on purpose?
Join this keynote to hear about:

  • Establishing a framework where data, identity, and agent security operate as one system
  • Shifting from asking whether you can trust your agents to determining what access they can be trusted with
  • Balancing innovation and risk by creating visibility needed to understand agent activity

1:05pm - 1:30pm  Break

1:30pm - 2:15pm  Breakout Session

Raising the Floor, Raising the Bar

Ahmad Haider headshot

Ahmad Haider

VP, Chief AI and Data Officer

Natera

Most technology transformations begin with a platform rollout. AI is different. Employees are already experimenting with AI across the business, making traditional top-down adoption strategies difficult to sustain. As organizations pursue ambitious value targets, leaders must balance broad AI enablement with focused investments, governance, and change management that support business outcomes.

Join this session to learn how to:

  • Enable responsible AI adoption across the enterprise
  • Balance broad AI access with targeted strategic investments
  • Build governance models that accelerate, rather than restrict, value

1:30pm - 2:15pm  Executive Boardroom

Activating Enterprise Data and AI — Overcoming the Personalization Paradox

Adam Greco headshot

Adam Greco

Product Evangelist

Hightouch

CDAOs invest heavily in modern data and AI infrastructure, yet organizations still struggle to translate these assets into real-time, personalized customer experiences. This boardroom explores why this "personalization paradox" persists and how leaders can bridge the gap between back-end data warehouses and front-end execution. We will discuss how a composable architecture allows data leaders to maintain strict security and governance over enterprise data, while securely empowering business teams with the self-serve tools required to accelerate AI-driven outcomes.

Join this boardroom to discuss:

  • Activating core data and AI investments to drive real-time customer personalization
  • Maintaining robust infrastructure governance while enabling self-serve access
  • Eliminating engineering bottlenecks by treating warehouse data as a product

2:15pm - 3:00pm  Networking Break

2:25pm - 2:50pm  Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Peer-to-Peer Meetings

Connect with like-minded peers in a one-on-one setting through Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

3:00pm - 3:45pm  Breakout Session

Hot Topics — What's Your Take?

Mark Jackson headshot

Mark Jackson

Chief Data Officer

Piedmont Healthcare

As AI continues to reshape the role of the CDAO, many of the toughest leadership decisions no longer have clear answers. Questions around ownership, governance, organizational influence, and value realization are driving spirited debate across the data and analytics community. This interactive discussion creates space for peers to compare approaches, challenge assumptions, and explore emerging practices shaping the future of the role.

Join this interactive session to explore:

  • Diverse perspectives on today's most debated CDAO challenges
  • Emerging strategies for balancing innovation, governance, and impact
  • Practical lessons learned from peers across industries

3:00pm - 3:45pm  Gartner Boardroom

Making Agentic AI Pay Off

Mike Stefanick headshot

Mike Stefanick

Executive Partner, D&A

Gartner

As Agentic AI moves from experimentation to execution, leaders are under pressure to demonstrate measurable business impact while managing tokenization costs and evolving operating economics. The conversation is shifting from AI capabilities to value creation, cost transparency and platform strategy.

Join this boardroom to discuss:

  • Identifying value levers across revenue, operation cost, productivity, and modernization
  • Ensuring Agentic AI initiatives drive measurable business outcomes
  • Evaluating platform choices, architecture and vendor options.

3:45pm - 4:00pm  Networking Break

4:00pm - 4:35pm  Keynote

Scaling AI Beyond the Boardroom

Sushma Punuru headshot

Sushma Punuru

Global CDO

Global Payments

Avinash Tripathi headshot

Avinash Tripathi

VP, Analytics, Data Science & AI

University of Phoenix

Scaling AI successfully goes beyond packaging executive ROI stories for the board; it requires a tailored, bottom-up approach that normalizes AI in daily operations. In this closing fireside chat, industry leaders will share real-world insights from their journeys to deploy AI, measure its true business impact, and look ahead at what is next. By exploring the next three to five years of AI development, this forward-looking discussion will help executives prepare their organizations—and themselves—for the next era of digital leadership.

Join this keynote to learn how to:

  • Package compelling AI deployment and ROI stories for the board
  • Measure the cross-business impact of AI initiatives using data
  • Normalize AI in daily workflows to upskill your talent pool
  • Prepare your organization and yourself for the next era of AI leadership

4:35pm - 4:45pm  Closing Comments and Prize Drawing

November 17, 2026

We look forward to seeing you at an upcoming in-person gathering

Gartner cares about the health and safety of our community. If you are feeling unwell, please refrain from attending the conference. At this time, Gartner does not have any health-related requirements in place for attendance. Should this change, we will follow up with updated guidance.

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Global Thought Leader

CDAO Thought Leader

Key Sponsors

Program Sponsors

Community Program Manager

For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.

Tony Stach

Community Program Manager

3604335583

tony.stach@gartner.com