
Chicago CDAO Community
Executive Summit
October 16, 2025 | Convene at 233 South Wacker Drive (Willis Tower)
October 16, 2025
Convene at 233 South Wacker Drive (Willis Tower)
Collaborate with your peers
Get together with Chicago'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:
Scaling AI and Establishing Value
Developing a Data-Driven Culture From the Top
Ensuring Trust and Reliability in Data for AI Initiatives
Chicago 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

Kristina Chambers
TTX
Chief Data & Analytics Officer

Madhav Madaboosi
bp
Head of Digital Transformation, Future Midstream & Strategy

Prasannal Nithyanandam
Volkswagen Financial Services
Head of Data and Advanced Analytics

Sid Raina
Medline
VP & Global Head of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics

Vijay Rajandram
Northern Trust
Chief Data Officer
What to Expect
Agenda
8:00am - 8:30am Registration & Breakfast
8:30am - 9:15am Keynote
One Team, One Vision — Data & Analytics for Impact

Michelle Gansle
CDAO
McDonald's

Wei Manfredi
VP, Global Architecture, Data & Generative AI
McDonald's
Fostering a strong data culture is essential for building trust, enabling cross-functional collaboration and achieving organizational alignment in any large enterprise. By focusing on practical AI applications—such as automation and operational efficiency—organizations can move beyond hype to deliver real business value, grounded in high-quality, integrated data. Collaborative leadership approaches and a “one team” culture help balance innovation with strategic priorities for maximum enterprise impact.
Join this session as Michelle Gansle, CDAO, McDonald's & Wei Manfredi, VP, Global Architecture, Data & Generative AI, McDonald's share ways to:
- Establish unified governance and standards to strengthen trust and collaboration
- Implement practical AI use cases to drive measurable business value
- Foster a “one team” culture to align innovation with strategic objectives
9:15am - 9:40am Networking Break
9:40am - 10:25am Executive Boardroom
Future-Proofing Your Data Foundation for AI and Digital Agility
Hosted by Reltio

Mike Frasca
VP of Product Management
Reltio
As AI adoption accelerates and digital expectations rise, CDAOs face mounting pressure to deliver timely, trusted, and interoperable data. Yet legacy systems, fragmented sources and governance gaps remain major hurdles.
In this roundtable data leaders will explore:
- Modernizing data foundation for a trusted semantic layer
- Balancing latency, performance and trust
- Supporting scalable innovation and transformation
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
Governance in Action — Metadata, Data Fabric and Leveraging Generative AI
Hosted by Orion Governance

Ramesh Shurma
CEO
Orion Governance
As CDAOs continue to grow in their journeys, it is necessary to ensure your data fabric has a solid foundation on the information as well as the barriers in place accessing it. Governance plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining these barriers, ensuring data integrity and compliance. When we add GenAI into the conversation, how can we leverage this tool to our advantage, ensuring those barriers aren’t compromised? Effective governance strategies are essential to balance innovation with security and ethical considerations. This complex conversation has many considerations, so let's explore them together.
Join this session to learn more about:
- Overviewing the complexities of Metadata Management
- Challenging aspects of data fabric as GenAI implementation continues
- Improving the process of governance models
11:10am - 11:55am Executive Boardroom
Accelerating AI Value — Transforming Data Debt into Strategic Assets
Hosted by Google Cloud
Today, maximizing the strategic impact of AI hinges on how effectively we leverage our data, converting existing data challenges into powerful enablers for AI-driven outcomes. We'll explore collective experiences and share actionable insights on building a data foundation that truly fuels enterprise AI initiatives.
Join your peers to discuss and share perspectives on:
- From data debt to AI dividend
- Architecting for intelligence
- Bridging the AI-data gap
11:55am - 12:30pm Lunch Service
Apply to Participate
Apply to participate in the Chicago CDAO Community Executive Summit.
Gartner facilitates exclusive, C-level communities by personally qualifying and understanding the priorities, challenges and interests of each member.
Our selective approach maintains the high quality of the network and ensures top-level discussions with peers from the world’s leading organizations.
Each application will be reviewed, and once your participation is confirmed, you will have access to year-round community programs.
Location
Venue & Accommodation
Convene at 233 South Wacker Drive (Willis Tower)Community Program Manager
For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.