Dallas CDAO Community
Executive Summit
June 17, 2026 | Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel
June 17, 2026
Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel
Collaborate with your peers
Get together with Dallas'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 for Business Impact
Maximizing Business & Monetization Value
Building Trust Through Governance
Dallas 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

Aamer Charania
Best Buy
Head of Applied Machine Learning

Jayadev Gopinath
DraftKings
SVP, Data Engineering & Data Science

Sonia Khosla
Globe Life
SVP & CDAO

Sanjeev Kumar
NextGen Healthcare
VP & CDAO

Mark Nance
American Fidelity Assurance Company
Chief Data Officer

Latheef Syed
Verizon
VP, Data Products & Governance, Data, Analytics and AI
What to Expect
Agenda
8:00am - 8:30am Registration & Breakfast
8:30am - 9:15am Keynote
Modernizing for Data-Partnered Innovation
Mary Edmond
SVP CDAO
Children's Health
When the call for innovation comes from the boardroom, leaders must first lay the groundwork for meaningful transformation. Mary Edmond, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Children’s Health, shares her journey of moving from fragmented analytics to a unified, strategic vision; addressing foundational gaps, building a modern architecture and fostering a culture where data and business move forward together. Discover how intentional partnership and foundational investments can accelerate innovation and create lasting value.
Join this keynote to explore:
- Lessons from assessing and benchmarking D&A maturity in a complex organization
- Building the case for foundational investments in cloud, governance, and data warehousing
- Shaping a culture of partnership and data-driven decision making across the enterprise
9:15am - 9:40am Networking Break
9:40am - 10:25am Breakout Session
Data Competence as an Organizational Capability — Modern Data Architecture
Hosted by SAP
Colin Dover
SAP Solution Advisory, Data & AI
SAP
Modernizing data architecture is essential for building organizational data competence and unlocking business value. CDAOs must champion cultural change, invest in scalable architectures, and enable AI-driven analytics to embed intelligence across the enterprise.
Join this session to learn:
- Advancing modernization of data architecture to support business priorities
- Fostering a data-driven culture for sustained organizational competence
- Enabling AI-supported analytics and embedded intelligence at scale
9:40am - 10:25am Executive Boardroom
The Human Side of AI
As AI continues to transform the world of work, data and analytics leaders play a critical role in preparing and guiding their organizations through rapid change. This session will explore how collaboration between data, analytics, and HR leaders can help organizations develop critical skills, support the workforce through transitions, and achieve business objectives.
Join this session to discuss:
- Anticipating and responding to AI’s impact on roles
- Using skills data to drive workforce decisions
- Building a culture that embraces learning and change
9:40am - 10:25am Executive Boardroom
Open Data Infrastructure — Next-Gen Data Architecture
Hosted by Fivetran
Darren Pedroza
Head of Enterprise Architecture & Data
Teradyne
David Millman
Lead Partner Sales Engineer, System Integrators and GSIs
Fivetran
Amlan Maitra
SVP, Head of Enterprise Data
PepsiCo
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 boardroom to discuss:
- Designing interoperable architectures to avoid lock-in
- Applying openness to semantics, metadata and governance
- Enabling AI and operations with flexibility and cost transparency
9:40am - 10:25am Executive Boardroom
Redefining Data Workflows - Unlocking Automation, Trust, and Agility
Hosted by Acceldata
Ramon Chen
Chief Product Officer
Acceldata
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
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
Closing the Context Gap for Trusted AI Decisions
Hosted by IBM
Jo Ramos
Distinguished Engineer, Director, Expert Labs, AI Transformation Technical Leader
IBM
AI agents are accelerating decision-making across the enterprise — but many leaders find that even with mature data foundations, organizations still struggle to deploy and scale agents with confidence. The emerging challenge isn’t preparing data alone, but ensuring agents can interpret it with the right context and clarity to make trusted decisions.
Join this session to discuss:
- The “decision trust gap” limiting AI agent performance
- How context, meaning, and governance shape reliable agent actions
- A practical model for assessing agent readiness for auditable outcomes
11:10am - 11:55am Executive Boardroom
Change Management — Upskilling Teams for a New Era
David Newman
Executive Partner, D&A
Gartner
AI is transforming data and analytics roles, creating both excitement and uncertainty across organizations. As agentic AI and automation reshape workflows, leaders must focus on upskilling talent, building AI literacy, and fostering the critical skills needed to thrive in a converged data and AI landscape.
Join this boardroom to discuss:
- Navigating the transition from manual reporting to AI-driven workflows
- Identifying and developing essential skills for the future
- Motivating, certifying, and retaining talent as roles evolve
11:10am - 11:55am Executive Boardroom
Data Management for the Agentic Era
Hosted by Google Cloud
As organizations shift to agentic AI, success hinges on engineering data environments that deliver precise context for autonomous, role-based agents. Leaders face challenges in redefining workflows and proving ROI as machine intelligence drives decisions beyond traditional dashboards, demanding new metrics and governance.
Join this boardroom to explore:
- Building context-rich data for agentic AI
- Designing role-based agents for enterprise workflows
- Quantifying ROI and risk in agent-driven operations
11:10am - 11:55am Executive Boardroom
Scaling Agentic AI with Trusted Context
Hosted by Reltio
Sriraj Rajaram
Director, Product Management
Reltio
Agentic AI is transforming business, but CDAOs can only scale AI agents as quickly as they can provide trusted, real-time context. Context intelligence is essential, combining data and business meaning for confident scaling.
Join this roundtable to discuss:
- What are the core data platform capabilities required to serve as a system of context
- How should you structure your AI strategy to balance innovation speed with accountability and measurable outcomes
- Which key metrics should you track to assess data readiness for AI
11:55am - 12:30pm Lunch Service
Apply to Participate
Apply to participate in the Dallas 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
Renaissance Dallas Richardson HotelA block of rooms has been reserved at the Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel at a reduced conference rate. Reservations should be made online or by calling 800-264-0359 . Please mention Dallas Executive Summit to ensure the appropriate room rate.
Deadline to book using the discounted room rate of $184 USD (plus tax) is May 25, 2026.
Community Program Manager
For inquiries related to this community, please reach out to your dedicated contact.
