Data Debrief: Russian Bots, LIVE was hot & Kyle weeps as he's getting old

In Episode 28 of Season 7 of Data Debrief, Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom look back on a packed Driven by Data Live and the lessons from its roundtables. They then turn to what a reported attack on a Russian data centre might mean for data leaders, and debrief their conversation with German Faraoni, Global Director of Shared Services at Reckitt, on why data teams need to be in the right room.

In this episode:

• Why Driven by Data Live was oversubscribed, and why roughly 45% of attendees being new to the events is good for the community.
• How Chatham House round tables help people share candidly, and why authenticity matters more than ever in an AI world.
• An HR agent use case: an anonymous assistant on top of an HR catalogue, with guardrails that signpost support and flag sensitive questions to the HR team.
• Why internal, people-led AI use cases are likely to come before customer-facing ones, and how they build confidence.
• How something as simple as understanding your maternity leave policy can influence employee loyalty, especially if non-competes are challenged in the UK.
• What the reported disruption to a Russian data centre, and the apparent drop in bot and crawler activity, suggests about how much online engagement is real. Both hosts are careful to flag that the reporting is still developing.
• Why geopolitical stability and data sovereignty are likely to be on every event agenda next year.
• How AI is giving data management, governance and quality, as well as cybersecurity, a new lease of life.
• How CISOs balance battening down the hatches against smothering the business, and what data leaders can learn from them.
• Why data leaders need to work closely with PR and understand their customers’ values, since decisions about where data lives could cost customers.
• Why doing business is more complex than ever, and what boards are weighing up on AI.
• A debrief of the interview with [Guest name], including the “if you’re in this room, you’re in the wrong room” idea.
• How a SKU-based use case showed the value of sitting with the executive team and working back to a use case that moves the P&L.
• Why no one will invite you into the room, and how to build the trust and credibility to get there.
• Why data teams working in isolation risk building things that go nowhere.
• How to write a CV for two audiences, those screening for keywords and those looking for outcomes, and why hiring managers say AI-written CVs now look the same.

Community shout: the final event of the year, the quarterly roundtable, takes place on 17th November. Find the details at orbitiongroup.com.