Data leaders from Lennar, Lloyds Banking Group, iA Financial Group, Mondelēz International, Snowflake, Deloitte and ServiceNow will share how they built trust in data to enable AI this year and how they’re preparing for what’s next.

BOSTON, Nov. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ataccama, the data trust company, today announced the speakers and agenda for FWRD 2026, its flagship virtual event for data and AI leaders. Taking place Nov. 5 at 10 a.m. ET, the event is comprised of two parts: a look back at the shifts in data quality, agentic data management and governed context that shaped trusted AI in 2026, and then a look ahead to what 2027 will ask of data and AI teams.

In 2026, organizations moved AI agents into real business workflows, often faster than they could prepare the data behind them. Yet 67% of data leaders say they don't fully trust the data in their own organization, even as they are asked to deliver trusted data foundations for AI-first operations. FWRD 2026 is built for the leaders working through that tension between AI ambition and the trustworthiness of the data that fuels it.

At the center of the event are the data leaders who put AI into production this year. Speakers from Lennar, Lloyds Banking Group and iA Financial Group will share how they built trust in the data behind their AI, empowering business adoption of AI at scale. A panel of leaders from Mondelēz International, Snowflake, Deloitte and ServiceNow will offer their predictions for what 2027 will demand of data teams.

Rewind: How data leaders built trust in 2026

Ataccama CEO Martin Zahumensky will open FWRD with a look at the challenges that broader AI adoption brought this year, from rising regulatory exposure under the EU AI Act to modernization projects that stalled because data was moved to new platforms before it was fixed. Customer speakers will then share how they steered their organizations through those shifts:

  • Isaac Gabay, VP of Data & AI at Lennar, will share Lennar's AI platform journey, including how his team builds trust in the AI agents it runs in production.
  • Jo Riseborough, Group Data Management and Data Culture Director at Lloyds Banking Group, will describe how Lloyds approached data modernization, grounded in her belief that AI's success depends on the data discipline behind it.
  • Chantale Boulanger and Nickolaos Mikedis of iA Financial Group will explain how they built a master data management (MDM) foundation and a 360-degree client view that gave teams one shared picture of each customer, and how this creates a differentiator for their business in the AI era.

Live demos of Ataccama ONE will show how teams apply data quality checks and anomaly detection at the source, before data reaches the warehouse, and how they ground AI agents in quantified quality scores and governed context through Ataccama's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. For teams facing regulatory pressure, demos will also cover a new headless MDM experience built to serve golden records into agentic workflows, along with augmented lineage for SAP environments that supports audit traceability.

Fast FWRD: Predictions shaping 2027

The second half of the event turns to the year ahead. Peter Stojanovic, editor of HotTopics and a regular interviewer of FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 executives, will moderate a panel on predictions for 2027 with:

  • Camilla Björkqvist, Senior Director, Global Data Governance and Transformation, Mondelēz International
  • Chris Child, Vice president, Product management, Snowflake
  • Donovan Spronk, Partner, Ecosystem and Alliance leader, Deloitte
  • Juan Sequeda, Principal Data Strategist and Researcher, ServiceNow
  • Jay Limburn, President, Ataccama

The panel will explore how data management and AI teams will partner with the business on AI use cases, and why trust, context and semantic layers will matter more next year. Panelists will also discuss how AI will change the way data issues are detected and fixed, where AI governance and regulation are headed, and what data leaders should prioritize going into 2027.

Jessie Smith, Ataccama's Chief Product Officer, will then connect those predictions to the 2027 Ataccama product roadmap. Her session will preview how Ataccama is extending data trust from the data AI agents consume to the answers they produce, and how headless capabilities across the platform, including MDM, will help AI tools work with trusted data and shorten time to value.

"Two out of three data leaders don't fully trust the data in their own organization, and AI is raising the stakes," said Martin Zahumensky, CEO of Ataccama. "When agents act on inaccurate or incomplete data, and on each other's output, a single error can quickly impact automation at scale. Most AI investment goes to models and applications, but that stack is unsafe for AI to use until the data underneath it can be trusted. At FWRD, data leaders will hear how their peers built that trust layer this year and what to prioritize as they head into 2027."

Register for FWRD 2026 at ataccama.com/fwrd.

About Ataccama

Ataccama provides the only end-to-end agentic data trust platform that helps organizations accelerate AI, reduce risk, and modernize data at enterprise scale. Ataccama ONE sits between enterprise data and AI orchestration, ensuring trusted data powers every model, agent, and business decision. The platform unifies data quality, observability, catalog, lineage, reference data management, and master data management in a single solution, while the embedded ONE AI Agent acts as a digital data steward that automates repetitive data management work. Recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Augmented Data Quality Solutions, the 2026 Forrester Wave™ for Data Quality Solutions, and the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data and Analytics Governance, Ataccama helps the world’s leading enterprises trust their data so they can accelerate AI. Learn more at www.ataccama.com.

Media contact

JoEllen Koester

joellen.koester@ataccama.com