Driven by Data: The Podcast

Welcome to another episode of Data Debrief, the companion show to Driven By Data: The Podcast. Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom reflect on the first recording from Driven by Data Live, a panel with Barry Panayi (Chief Data Officer, Howden), Sarah Barr Miller (Chief Data Officer, British Airways), Sid Shah (VP of Data and International, Live Nation Entertainment) and Nina Bryant (Data, A...

In Episode 31 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Barry Panayi, Chief Data Officer at Howden, Sarah Barr Miller, Chief Data Officer at British Airways, Sid Shah, VP Data, International at Live Nation Entertainment, and Nina Bryant, Data, Analytics & AI Partner at Baringa, recorded live at Driven by Data LIVE 2026, where they discuss how data leaders balan...

In this week's Data Debrief, Catherine Dowden-King & Kyle Winterbottom have a special Halloween episode! They discuss the tricks of the market, the horror stories that persist and the zombie challenges that won't seem to stay gone!

In Episode 30 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Catherine Dowden-King is joined by Di Mayze, Chief Data and AI Officer at Marks & Spencer, where they discuss why the CDO role has to prove its value, why clean data foundations still come before AI, and how to build a data culture people want to be part of. As featured in Driven by Data Magazine 2026. As the first person in post at M&a...

Welcome to another episode of Data Debrief, the companion show to Driven by Data: The Podcast, hosted by Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom. This week, Catherine reports back from the Marketing Showcase in Bristol, her first event as a pure attendee in a long time. The talk was all data, analytics and AI. She and Kyle explore why marketing and data share the same struggle to show their im...

In Episode 29 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Lee Fulmer, Head of Data at Canada Life Reinsurance, where they discuss why clean, well-governed data still isn’t AI-ready, and why context, a clear business outcome and curation matter more than any blueprint. Canada Life Reinsurance reported around a billion dollars in profit last year from roughly fifty dea...

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 rig...

In Episode 28 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by German Faraoni, Global Director of Shared Services for Data at Reckitt, where they discuss why data and AI investment still struggles to show measurable value, and why the answer lies in articulating it in business outcomes rather than data terms. German also shares how Reckitt cut the time to get a new SKU on...

In this episode of the Data Debrief, Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom reflect on the week's news and the latest Driven by Data: The Podcast interview, with Tom Sadler of HP. Their central question is whether organisations are measuring AI activity (headcount, spend, job titles, tooling) instead of the productivity and financial outcomes that matter. They begin with the ASOS breach and t...

In Episode 27 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Tom Sadler, Data Science and AI Business Solution Lead at HP, where they discuss why most AI and data strategies stall not because of the technology, but because different teams and divisions inside the same organisation simply don't talk to each other. They also explore why the best AI use cases are often bui...

Catherine and Kyle are deep in event-season chaos this week — the printed Driven by Data magazine has just gone to print, the digital edition is about to launch, and Driven by Data Live is just eight days away. Catherine recaps her (very delayed) trip to Big Data London: reconnecting with the community, a noticeably different vendor landscape stacked with new AI-era players, and "context" as this...

In Episode 26 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is rejoined by Aimee Smith, Chief Data Officer at the UK Government, where they discuss her move from 25 years in policing and law enforcement into government's top data role, and why she believes culture, risk appetite and misaligned investment incentives, not legislation or technology, are what's really blocking data sha...

In this week's Data Debrief, Kyle Winterbottom and Catherine Dowden-King recap the Future of Data, AI & BI Summit with Starburst, share Catherine's top tips for networking at data events, and debrief this week's main episode with Simon Turner, Chief Technology Officer at Foil AI — including the Welsh Water case study that brought his "autonomic business" concept to life. They also discuss: Why...

In Episode 24 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Simon Turner, Chief Technology Officer at FOIL AI, where they discuss the "autonomic business" – organisations run by bounded, goal-driven digital entities that work alongside humans – and why, when every company has access to the same models and tools, competitive advantage has to come from somewhere else: yo...

In this week's Data Debrief, Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom are recording a day early ahead of a busy stretch in London – a custom client event, the Future of Data, AI & BI Summit and Big Data London, with Driven by Data Live on 8th October. The headlines this week belong to Donald Trump, who has dismissed AI safeguards and calls for a "kill switch" as a hoax, which sets up the ep...

In Episode 24 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is rejoined by David Castro-Gavino, Executive Director, Head of Data Deployment at AstraZeneca, and joined by his co-author Boyan Angelov, Principal Strategist at Exxeta, where they discuss their new book, Enabling Data, and why the data industry is still stuck in Groundhog Day. The same three arguments – who owns that num...

In Episode 23 of Season 7 of Data Debrief, Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom unpack Tuesday's conversation with Greg Freeman, CEO and Founder of Data & AI Literacy Academy, and the gap between organisations that have given everyone a Copilot licence and those that are actually using AI to change how the business operates. As Catherine puts it, a Sunday league player and a Premier Lea...

In Episode 23 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is rejoined by Greg Freeman, CEO & Founder at Data & AI Literacy Academy, where they discuss why most organisations have mistaken tool training for AI literacy – and why a data-literate workforce, critical thinking and the willingness to rebuild processes from the ground up matter far more than knowing which button...

In this week's Data Debrief, Kyle Winterbottom and Catherine Dowden-King unpack a ChatGPT-powered "smart learning" teddy bear aimed at three-year-olds, and use it as a way into a bigger question: when we let technology deliver the output, what happens to the learning journey that used to produce it? That thread runs from toddlers and university degrees all the way into the enterprise. They also di...

In Episode 22 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Chris Pearce, Chief Data and AI Officer at Ageas, where they discuss why so few organisations manage to get AI out of proof-of-concept and into live production. Chris makes the case that this is a structural and operating model problem rather than a technical one, and that the businesses which crack it are the...

In this week's Data Debrief, the companion show to Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom and Catherine Dowden-King unpack the week's main episode with Michael Ross and range far beyond it into the collapse in graduate hiring, the succession planning nobody is doing, and what's really happening at both ends of the data job market. From a record 45% drop in advertised graduate roles, to the...

In Episode 21 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Michael Ross, Data Agitator & Non-Executive Director at Domestic & General and Policy Expert. They discuss why so many consumer and retail businesses fail to turn data into commercial value, because they run on averages and siloed metrics that hide where money is actually being won and lost. Drawing on...

In this week's Data Debrief, the companion show to Driven by Data: The Podcast — Davin Crowley-Sweet OBE, CDO at National Highways, steps into Kyle Winterbottom's seat and is joined by Catherine Dowden-King to unpack the week's main episode with Nick Zervoudis and range far beyond it into the human side of data leadership. From burnout and its lesser-known cousin "rustout," to the serendipity we'v...

In Episode 20 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Nick Zervoudis, Founder at Value from Data & AI, where they discuss why so many data and AI teams struggle to demonstrate measurable business value — and why the real failure almost always happens upstream, long before anyone tries to articulate it. Nick makes the case that "we can't prove our value" is us...

Welcome to another episode of the Data Debrief, the companion show to Driven by Data: The Podcast, where hosts Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom unpack Tuesday's episode, share what's been on their minds, and explore the realities of leadership, culture, and capability across the data and AI landscape. This week, Catherine and Kyle reflect on the conversation with Marion Shaw, Senior Dir...