Boston: CDAO and CAIO Gather for AI Governance

A double event in Boston will detail how to govern AI in the age of agents, consolidate databases, prioritize use cases, and align CDAO and CAIO. The program brings together leaders from major organizations and offers VIP access reserved for end users.

CDAO and CAIO Must Decide Together on Key Decisions

The program highlights the convergence of data and AI leadership, with decisions increasingly shared between CDAO and CAIO. A session titled “Two Titles, One Mission: What CDAOs and CAIOs Are Finally Discovering About Each Other” will feature Adem Albayrak (Alzheon), Sanjay Sidhwani (Valley Bank), and Jillian Landi (Needham Bank) to detail what makes the relationship effective in practice, followed by a continuation on the second day with “The New Power Couple: How the CDAO and CAIO Must Work Together or Watch Everything Collapse.” Beyond organizational charts, the challenge is to identify decisions that require the joint presence of both roles.

The program also addresses organizational and economic challenges: sustaining data teams despite leadership changes, advocating for long-term investment, nurturing future leaders, building trust with employees, clients, and regulators, measuring ROI beyond projections, balancing central governance and domain autonomy, promoting self-service analytics, and deciding what to automate or merely augment. These topics, presented as non-theoretical, reflect ongoing projects in healthcare, finance, industry, retail, the public sector, and insurance.

Agentic AI Reshuffles Oversight and Controls

The rise of tools capable of acting rather than just recommending necessitates a different kind of governance. A session titled “The Agentic Leap: From AI That Advises to AI That Acts” will bring together leaders from The Hartford, Walmart Global Tech, and MassMutual to discuss autonomous AI, observability, intervention modalities, and levels of control to apply, including when an AI agent should be scrutinized like a human for a major decision. Another session, “The Human in the Loop Is Not a Strategy,” will question the relevance of minimal human oversight in the face of systems making thousands of decisions at machine speed.

Governance is presented as an operational design that promotes speed without losing control. Colleen Tartow (Capital One) and Chandrakanth Thadkapally (Walmart) will debate the approach to take in light of an expanding regulatory framework in the session “Regulation Is Coming Whether You’re Ready or Not.” Other segments will address trust deficits, responsible AI, normative complexity, and frameworks enabling “responsible speed” without becoming a bottleneck.

Quality, Architecture, and Integration: Prerequisites Recentered

Despite the enthusiasm for generative AI and agents, the data foundation remains crucial. The session “Dirty Data, Broken Promises” will gather representatives from Johnson & Johnson, Dakota, Omnicom Media, and Sensata to discuss quality, engineering, ownership, and infrastructure investments, dimensions presented as conditioning the utility—or danger—of AI systems. Manajit Barman, Chief Data Officer of the US Air Force, will also share architectural choices that could impact the next five years.

With the acceleration of AI adoption, integration is elevated to a strategic capability. The session “From Data Movement to Data Momentum” will address the continuous feeding of fresh, clean, and contextualized data to AI systems.

Moving from Pilots to Results: Prioritizing, Framing Costs, Knowing When to Stop

Many companies have attempted AI use cases; few transform these trials into measurable, repeatable gains. Two sessions, “From Strategy to Business Reality” and “AI: What Are the Next Steps? From Hype Cycle to Harsh Reality,” will discuss the conditions for scaling, prioritizing trade-offs, budget discipline, and the ability to cease certain projects. Ash Dhupar, Chief AI & Data Officer of Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, will detail what distinguishes deployments that are effectively put into production from initiatives that remain in pilot stage. The challenge, increasingly central for data leadership, is to convert AI ambition into operational reality.

Boston, October 26–27, 2026: An End User Event

The dual event CDAO Fall + CAIO Fall is scheduled for October 26 and 27, 2026, at the Renaissance Boston Seaport District. Organized at the same venue, the event targets decision-makers as well as professionals in data, analytics, and artificial intelligence, and includes participation from Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, US Air Force, NYC Health + Hospitals, Johnson & Johnson, Capital One, Comcast, Mass General Brigham Healthcare, Prudential Financial, Travelers, Walmart, Citi, New York Life, The Cigna Group, TE Connectivity, MetLife, among others. Eligible end users can apply for a free VIP pass; this offer is not available to solution providers, vendors, consultants, or service providers. The program emphasizes the desire to make these topics the center of discussions.