Voices that powered FWRD 2025: Customer session highlights

At Ataccama FWRD 2025, attendees arrived seeking clarity, better frameworks, and practical guidance to help them navigate a rapidly evolving data landscape, one where accelerating AI capabilities and the need to build data trust have redefined how data teams operate. Throughout the event, executive keynotes and product sessions offered attendees recommendations for how to react to these new market pressures. Leaders from Ataccama shared a vision for where the industry is heading, and how Ataccama can enable and support organizations at various stages of data maturity.

One of the most energizing layers of the event agenda came from our customers. Through a series of candid, client-led sessions, data leaders from around the world expanded on the themes introduced on the main stage and brought them into focus with real-world proof points, tried and tested strategies, and practical approaches to today’s data and AI challenges.

If you’re looking to elevate your data practice in 2025 and beyond, read on for fresh inspiration.

Focusing AI to deliver business value

Enterprise data leaders are entering a pivotal moment. The volume, speed, and variety of data continue to grow, just as they have for decades. What’s different now is visibility. Data teams have entered the spotlight, and as Ataccama CEO Mike McKee puts it, data leaders have become the “cool kids.” But with that status and recognition comes new pressures: sky-high expectations from the business for real‑time insights, trustworthy AI, and robust compliance.

In his session at FWRD 2025, Andrew Foster, Chief Data Officer at M&T Bank, explained how important it is to go beyond experimentation and direct AI toward real business outcomes such as efficiency, risk reduction, growth, and customer value. Together with Parth Patwari, Principal, Banking & Capital Markets Data & Technology at Deloitte, the two leaders explored how trusted data is the foundation for every successful AI initiative. They covered how embedding quality and governance into daily operations helps teams modernize faster and innovate responsibly, and touched on what it takes to align AI programs to business value and operationalize data trust.

Regulatory pressures: Risk or opportunity?

In The data journey behind regulatory reporting, Jason Wright, Senior Manager of Data Governance at T-Mobile, highlighted another defining theme of FWRD 2025: regulatory pressure is not just a risk, but an opportunity to differentiate and become more competitive as a business. 

Attendees were given an inside look at T-Mobile’s modernization journey following a 2021 data breach. Rather than stop at finding the issue and diagnosing where and why it occurred, the telco partnered with Ataccama to enter into a “new mode” of protecting their trove of data assets. This involved 30 petabytes of data across 25 thousand databases and 19 different technologies.

With data governance, protection, quality, and master data management under his purview, Jason shared how his team helped the business pivot from foundational yet defensive regulatory reporting to a more strategic, business-outcome-focused data management practice.

Looking ahead, Jason emphasized the growing role of unstructured data:

“Unstructured data is something we are really focusing on now. We started with data minimization and reducing our attack footprint, but cataloging and understanding how to organize our unstructured data for value and for reuse is critical. We’re getting that into a more automated perspective, but having it connected back to the structured side is also critical, and something we are really trying to focus on as we go into our next year.”

AI that moves teams from data to wisdom

In Bridging data and business: Turning insight into action at Truist, Elisa Cottingham, SVP and Director of Consumer Data Insights and Governance, said her team uses the term “business data executive,” a bridge-building role for modern data leaders that connects data with front-line processes. 

“How do we get data, turn it into wisdom – not just information, but wisdom, and infuse it into our activities for our clients, teammates, and that helps drive revenue and efficiency?” she asked.

Elisa’s answer is a modern interpretation of the classic “people, processes, technology” refrain:

“All of that has to be enabled right now by a great set of teammates that really understand our data, how data works, how it flows through our systems, and how we can enhance that data or enrich it with the appropriate analytics, the appropriate AI tools, and glean what’s most valuable out of it.”

The inside track

From theory to execution, speakers at FWRD 2025 delivered actionable playbooks for scaling data impact, AI readiness, regulatory responsiveness, and data trust. To close the event, three Ataccama customers joined a panel to share their lessons from the front lines of data transformation.

Speakers:

• Kevin Muller, Head of Business Change and Operational Scalability at Coller Capital
• Susan Spence, Senior Data Product Analyst at SSEN Transmission 
• Kesh Reddy, Principal Data & Technology Advisor at BCBSNC
• Moderator: Lee Edney, Global Head of Business Value Consulting at Ataccama 

Lee opened the panel by reminding panelists that while no two organizations take the same approach to managing their data, “We’re all on the same mountain and headed towards the same destination.” He invited the panelists to discuss how they built their programs, secured early wins, scaled across the business, and what they might approach differently with the benefit of hindsight.

When asked how he knew his organization was ready to expand beyond early use cases, Kevin Muller of Coller Capital walked the audience through the evolving complexity of their data landscape and the importance of continuously adjusting the “master plan.” While drivers change, he stressed, the right tools provide the discipline needed to scale in a dynamic environment. To knowing smiles from the other panelists, he said, “The journey continues. We’re still climbing the mountain.”

More on demand

Ataccama FWRD 2025 was packed with virtual content to help data leaders and practitioners navigate AI-driven complexity. We explored the decline of costly, best-of-breed patchwork stacks and the rise of unified agentic platforms. We waded into the evolving partnership between data teams and business teams, and how their metrics are converging. And we took a deep dive into Ataccama ONE Agentic, the newest generation of our unified platform that automates how organizations manage, govern, and trust their data.