EP 14 – Serial CDO: 30 Years of Data, One Career That Saw It All

In this episode of The AI Data Fabric Show, Prat Moghe speaks with Andrew Clyne, former CDO at Comcast, Visa, Expedia, CenturyLink, and other large enterprises. Andrew traces how his career in data began not in Silicon Valley but in the US Air Force, where he discovered that the command and control systems for different military branches used incompatible data elements. Tail numbers had different digit formats across the Navy and Air Force. His solution was to push for a data dictionary and data standards, a problem that remains unsolved in most enterprises today.

Andrew breaks down what he sees as the defining challenge for CDOs right now: adopting AI at the pace of AI. With board and shareholder pressure to deliver top-line growth while cutting costs and headcount, CDOs face a relentless multi-front battle. His advice centers on three things that will rule the day for the next five years: reading the RPM of the company and adjusting accordingly, leading with empathy under pressure, and keeping teams motivated when budget cuts are constant. Technical expertise, he argues, is now table stakes.

Topics Discussed:

-        Building first military command and control data standards

-        How Visa's pre-IPO consolidation drove data governance

-        Influencing Cloudera's Impala to migrate off SAS

-        CDO role shift from cost center to top-line growth driver

-        Adopting AI at enterprise speed vs. board pressure

-        Reading company RPM to drive transformation without popping the clutch

-        Blockchain and agentic AI agent-to-agent payment authentication

-        K-shaped economy risk from AI and robotics displacement