A rewind on FWRD 2025 

The pace of AI innovation shows no sign of slowing, and neither did the conversation at Ataccama FWRD 2025, where more than 1,800 data leaders and practitioners gathered on November 6, 2025, to explore one question: how do you build trust fast enough to keep up with AI?

Throughout the day, one idea surfaced in every discussion, that being, data-trustworthy has become the precondition for progress. It’s no longer a supporting function but the foundation for everything that follows: analytics, compliance, automation, and the next wave of intelligent systems.

Speakers from Snowflake, Deloitte, Atlan, and Tiger Analytics joined customer leaders from T-Mobile, Truist, M&T Bank, and Thermo Fisher Scientific to show what that looks like in practice. Each story was different, but they all pointed in the same direction: the future of AI belongs to organizations that can trust their data to act autonomously.

We explored these themes and much, much more at FWRD 2025, and here are our top three takeaways:

1. Trusted data is becoming the real foundation of enterprise AI

As generative and domain-specific AI move from pilots to everyday use, organizations are realizing that even the most advanced models are only as reliable as the data behind them. The companies making real progress are engineering trust into their foundations, automating quality checks, documenting lineage, and ensuring every dataset is accurate and explainable before it ever reaches an AI model.

2. The line between data and business is disappearing

Data has become inseparable from performance. Boards now expect the same level of accountability from data teams as they do from any revenue-driving function. Across leading organizations, analytics, governance, and operations are finally converging, aligning around shared metrics for growth, efficiency, and compliance.

3. The age of patchwork stacks is ending

After years of best-of-breed tool sprawl, many enterprises are confronting the hidden cost of complexity. Integration work drains resources, governance fragments, and innovation slows. Unified, agentic platforms are emerging as the antidote, consolidating quality, lineage, and governance into one intelligent system that scales cleanly and efficiently.

Introducing Ataccama ONE Agentic

Midway through the event, attention turned to the main stage for a moment that had been building all morning, the unveiling of Ataccama ONE Agentic, the company’s next-generation data trust platform.

The biggest news of the year, the new agentic platform is designed for a world where data systems, models, and agents now operate side by side, ONE Agentic automates the work of quality and governance at scale. It’s built-in ONE AI Agent learns how data behaves, executes complex tasks autonomously, and explains every step along the way, creating what Ataccama calls a living layer of trust across the enterprise.

“The ONE AI Agent doesn’t just find problems; it acts on them, ensuring data stays accurate, explainable, and ready for use,” said Jay Limburn, Chief Product Officer at Ataccama. “It shifts the focus from managing data to trusting it, because in an AI-driven enterprise, success depends not on how much data you have but on how much you can trust.”

Jay Limburn, Chief Product Officer at Ataccama

That philosophy shaped much of the day’s discussion, and it was easy to see why. 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.

Built around three principles, data quality at scale, a unified platform, and automated intelligence ONE Agentic ties together a unified foundation that ensures data is accurate, consistent, and explainable before it ever reaches an AI model.

From data to wisdom: Customer perspectives in action

In one of the most powerful sessions of the day, Bridging data and business: Turning insight into action at Truist, Elisa Cottingham, SVP and Director of Consumer Data Insights and Governance, captured what this transformation means for business leaders: 

In conversation with Ataccama CEO Mike McKee, Cottingham remarked, “Our role as business data executives is really building a bridge between our data and our 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? 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.”

Elisa Cottingham, SVP and Director of Consumer Data Insights and Governance

This theme echoed throughout the event, from MetLife’s discussion on transforming data into measurable business value to Thermo Fisher Scientific and Ortecha’s focus on trusted customer 360s that drive growth and personalization.

Asking better questions in the age of AI

To close FWRD 2025, Cassie Kozyrkov, former Chief Decision Scientist at Google, delivered a keynote titled When AI answers are cheap, are you asking the right questions? that resonated deeply with every data leader in the room:

When generative AI delivers answers at light speed, the real advantage shifts to the quality of your questions and the clarity of your purpose. Cassie challenged attendees to confront the hidden risk no one is talking about, mistaking more answers for better decisions, and reminded leaders that the next generation of data excellence will be defined not by the speed of technology, but by the discipline of their thinking.