Data Faces Podcast

Leigh Felton, President of the AI for Job Security Foundation, joins Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Had AI been screening job candidates when she started out, she says it would have rejected her. She was a pregnant, homeless teenager and a college dropout who went on to spend 20 years at Microsoft, where she headed the company's first eth...

"AI can tell you what the market appears to believe, but an experienced analyst can tell you whether you should believe that or not." Gerry Van Zandt has spent close to 30 years in analyst relations at Intel, HP, Oracle, and now Alteryx, and he thinks AI makes analysts more important to technology buyers. Gerry and David Sweenor get into how the inputs behind a big technology purchase have multipl...

Stacie Christensen, Senior Data Leader at H-E-B, joins Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After 22 years in the data industry, she grades our collective data quality somewhere between a D plus and a C minus, and she argues that data initiatives fail long before technology is ever the problem. Stacie explains why AI is a multiplier and a scaler th...

Most of what makes an expert good at the job was never written down. Ken Sanford, who leads go-to-market and commercial strategy at Clarifeye, argues that this tribal knowledge is the part of the AI context layer nobody talks about, because document retrieval is close to solved and the judgment to interpret those documents still lives in people's heads. Ken and David Sweenor go back to their S...

Randy Bean, founder and CEO of the Data & AI Leadership Exchange, joins Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His test for data leaders is blunt. If you're not getting measurable business value from your data and AI investments, or a clear path to it, go back to the office this afternoon and shut them down. Randy has organized the CDOIQ Chie...

Everyone blames AI for the tech job market. An executive recruiter who talks to the hiring decision-makers every day says the story started two years before the AI headlines did. Jim Jinright, Managing Partner at JRJ Search Group in Dallas Fort Worth, joins David Sweenor to explain the perfect storm behind the layoffs: pandemic overhiring, the 2022 interest rate increases, and labor arbitrage, wit...

Veenit Shah, Senior Manager of Data Engineering, and Puneet Singh, Senior Data Engineer, both at Intuit Credit Karma, join Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their team keeps credit scores current for about 140 million members, and an AI remediation agent now compresses root cause investigations that once took 30 to 40 minutes into just a few. Ve...

Every vendor says your data needs to be "AI-ready." Almost none of them define it the same way. Malcolm Hawker, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, former Gartner analyst, and author of The Data Hero Playbook, joins David Sweenor to take the term apart. His definition is short: data is AI-ready when it supports the use case in front of it. That makes readiness a spectrum, not a state, and it...

Amy Lenander, Chief Data Officer at Capital One, and Christina Egea, SVP of Enterprise Data, join Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their data product strategy is producing measurable results, with use cases launching three times faster and standardized data costing 30% less to maintain. Amy and Christina walk through the talk they gave at the s...

Every AI architecture decision made today comes with an expiration date. Models leapfrog each other every few months, patterns change, and the conversation itself will look different in a year. In this episode of the Data Faces Podcast, David Sweenor sits down with Sam Pierson, Chief Technology Officer at Qlik, to talk about building an AI stack you can change your mind about: open formats like Ap...

Amin Venjara, chief data and product officer at ADP, joins Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He explains why a contractor going on about wood, nails, and concrete will never win over a homeowner who just wants to entertain in the backyard, and why data teams make the same mistake when they pitch the business. Amin walks through the framework fro...

"Any software feature can be cloned with a prompt, overnight." A room full of data and AI leaders agreed on it. April Dunford's verdict: absolute BS. On this episode of the Data Faces podcast, David Sweenor talks with April Dunford, the positioning consultant behind Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch who has worked with more than 300 B2B technology companies, about why the death-of-Sa...

Getting data "ready" used to mean ready for a dashboard, where a person could catch a bad number before it did any harm. Once an AI agent acts on the data instead of a person, that safety net is gone. In this episode of the Data Faces Podcast, David Sweenor sits down with Matt Hayes, General Manager of the Data Business Unit at Qlik, to talk about why AI-ready data is a much higher bar t...

For decades, buying a data platform meant buying into a practice, a methodology, a community, a whole way of seeing the work. Now a general-purpose AI model can copy almost any feature from a prompt. So what does a software vendor sell? On this episode of the Data Faces podcast, David Sweenor talks with Donald Farmer, Principal of TreeHive Strategy and a veteran data product leader from Microsoft...

Doug Laney coined the three V's of big data in 2001. On this episode of the Data Faces podcast, he names the next three for the agentic AI era: volition, visibility, and viscosity. David Sweenor and Doug Laney get into the seven levels of agentic autonomy, from a basic chatbot to a business that runs itself, why labor savings are the least imaginative way to value an AI agent, who really owns...

Everyone is racing to do something with agentic AI. Almost nobody is asking whether they should. Andreas Welsch spent close to two decades building enterprise AI at SAP, and he is now one of the most direct voices on what agentic AI demands from business leaders. In this episode of the Data Faces Podcast, David Sweenor and Andreas Welsch talk about the contagion driving AI layoffs, the revenue que...

"Without context, your agents are dumb." That's how Josh Howard, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Executive Audiences at Databricks, closed Episode 40 of the Data Faces Podcast. Frontier models are some of the most advanced technology of our lifetime. They are also dumb in the way that matters for your business, because they were trained on the public internet and have never...

The difference between an AI that "hallucinates" and one that acts intelligently lies in context. In Episode 39 of the Data Faces Podcast, Steve Wooledge (CMO at Collate) joins David Sweenor to discuss why metadata, once a technical "card catalog," is now the foundational layer for the agentic era. Steve traces his journey from chemical engineering to building categories at Alt...

LinkedIn has a "rewrite with AI" button. Meanwhile, Kate Strachnyi is building an entire media company on authentic human voices. Is she right? In Episode 38 of the Data Faces Podcast, Kate Strachnyi (Founder, DATAcated) shares how she pivoted from finance to data visualization, built a 40+ creator influencer agency, and why she's betting on real humans over AI-generated content. Key...

For 25 years, data quality was everyone'sproblem and nobody's priority. Brendan Grady, EVP and GM of Analytics & AIat Qlik, explains why the stakes just changed. In this episode recorded on location at QlikConnect 2026, David Sweenor and Brendan discuss consequence management, whereenterprise agentic adoption really stands ("prior to stage zero"),Qlik's Trust Score for AI...

On the Data Faces Podcast, I usually interview someone with a whole face. For this bonus segment, I made an exception. Scott Taylor's Data Puppets character "A-Eye" joins the show fresh from the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit. The puppet had thoughts about agentic AI, data governance, and vendors who couldn't spell AI two years ago. Key moments:1- A-Eye reports from the Gart...

Data leaders have been pitching "data quality" to executives for decades, and the pitch keeps falling flat. Scott Taylor, the Data Whisperer, explains why — and what to do instead. In Episode 34 of the Data Faces Podcast, Scott Taylor (MetaMeta Consulting) shares his three-word data philosophy — truth before meaning — and the 3V framework (Vocabulary, Voice, Vision) that helps data leade...

Stewart Bond coined the term "data intelligence" in 2016. Now it's a market category. Here's how it happened — and why it matters more than ever for AI. Stewart Bond, Research VP at IDC, joins David Sweenor on the Data Faces Podcast to trace the origins of "data intelligence" from a single research note to a full-blown market category adopted by Collibra, Alation, Infor...

"All the computer programs that have ever needed to be written have already been written." That's what Michael Meyer's guidance counselor told him in the late 1980s. 35 years later, he's still proving that advice wrong. In this episode of the Data Faces Podcast, host David Sweenor sits down with Michael Meyer, Solutions Engineer at Snowflake, to talk about the skill that carr...

📢 Most AI initiatives stall not because of weak models, but because of weak execution. In this episode of the Data Faces Podcast, David Sweenor sits down with Asa Whillock, CEO of Euphonic AI, to unpack what it really takes to operationalize AI inside the enterprise. With experience spanning Adobe, Alteryx, and now a growth-focused AI startup, Asa explains why production AI depends less on model...