Ataccama FWRD 2025 brought together more than 1,800 data leaders and practitioners for a half day of customer stories, knowledge sharing, product announcements, and deep dive demos. One message anchored the entire event: trusted data is now the foundation for everything organizations want to do, from analytics and automation to agentic AI,  regulatory compliance, and more.

What does this shift mean for data practitioners, the people working closest to the data in any organization? Below we highlight three practitioner-focused sessions from the event that break down what data trust really means for hands-on data teams, and what we recommend these users consider going into 2026.

Session highlights from FWRD 2025

Data done right: Best practices for real business impact

This attendee-favorite session from FWRD 2025 reframed enterprise data management as a long-term effort rather than a single deployment, where success depends on building momentum over time. Our own Mo Dodge, Best Practice Lead at Ataccama, argues that while technology certainly plays a role, progress also grows out of clearer processes, repeatable actions, and consistent alignment with the business.

During the session, Mo also unveiled the new Ataccama Best Practice Library: a resource designed to help teams accelerate implementation using proven templates and guidance. For practitioners, this means less trial-and-error and more time applying methods that have been demonstrated to work by other practitioners in the field.

If your team is planning your 2026 roadmap, listen in to the session to see how other data leaders define and benchmark success, navigate common pitfalls, and drive maturity across their ecosystems.

Reinventing reference data: AI-powered consistency for the enterprise

Reference data often operates quietly in the background while mistakes in codes or categories ripple across reports, workflows, and AI models. On top of that, many organizations still try to manage their reference data manually, creating unnecessary risk. If that sounds familiar, you’re certainly not alone.

In his session, Petr Zacek, Director of Product Management at Ataccama, showcased a cloud-native, AI-first approach to reference data management. He showed how automating rule suggestions, bulk edits, data transformation, and other actions can dramatically reduce the time practitioners spend fixing issues downstream, and make managing reference data more intuitive for everyone involved.

If you and your team are making do with highly manual reference data management, inconsistent taxonomies, and fragmented systems, watch the session to see a practical approach to managing, validating, and distributing trusted reference data across cloud, pipelines, and legacy systems.

Ataccama ONE Agentic data trust platform: Product deep dive

Increasingly, AI is moving from single-use tools to multi-agent systems that scale and transform how enterprises function. Ataccama ONE is designed for emerging multi-agent systems, all built to evolve as enterprises manage and trust data. 

At a deep dive demo session led by Ataccama Chief Technology Officer Martin Zahumensky, attendees were rewarded with a first look at the new Ataccama ONE AI Agent in action. Together with VP of Product Jessie Smith, they covered practical examples of how the agent strengthens core capabilities such as data quality, lineage, and reference data management.

During the live demo, attendees watched as the agent profiled datasets, applied quality rules, and resolved inconsistencies in real time. What once required days of manual cleanup unfolded in minutes, offering a glimpse of how autonomous systems will soon underpin every AI initiative.

What this means for data teams

Across customer stories, keynotes, and especially the sessions for data practitioners highlighted above, several key themes surfaced and resurfaced at FWRD 2025:

Data trust is essential. Organizations want to adopt AI, but progress stalls when underlying data is unreliable or poorly governed.

Unified platforms are gaining momentum. Companies are starting to recognize the hidden cost of fragmented data stacks and years of best-of-breed tooling investments. A consolidated platform reduces the burden of initial integrations and ongoing maintenance, and creates a clearer path to data maturity.

Practitioners are now strategic partners for the business. Conversations at this year’s event showed how technical teams increasingly shape business outcomes, and how key objectives for business and data teams are converging around increasing speed and agility, augmenting the customer experience, and managing risk.

For data teams, FWRD 2025 showed that organizations are no longer satisfied with data that is merely accessible. They need data that is trusted, understood, and ready to support advanced AI use cases. For practitioners, this shift represents an opportunity to influence strategy while building stronger technical foundations.

Going into 2026, we recommend that data teams:

1. Visit the Ataccama Best Practice Library: Take advantage of this growing collection of practical guides, toolkits, templates, and resources designed to accelerate data maturity, adoption, and real-world business impact.
2. Put automating reference data management on the roadmap: Enable your teams to more intuitively manage, validate, and distribute trusted reference data across cloud, pipelines, and legacy systems.
3. Consider the benefits of a unified data trust platform: With lower total cost and reduced integration risks, faster adoption that enables scalable growth, and consistent governance for every team, a unified platform is the backbone for emerging multi-agent AI systems that will shape the future of enterprise data. 

As we move into 2026, the teams that thrive will be those that make data trust a core part of how their business operates. For more insights from your fellow data leaders and practitioners, all sessions from Ataccama FWRD 2025 are now available on demand.