The Essentials of Data Platforms

Bo Vande Sompele is co-founder of Plainsight, where she works with organisations on data, AI and software solutions that fit the way their business actually runs. She has spent her whole career in this field, starting out as a data architect designing and building data platforms and analytics environments across a wide range of industries, and she now spends most of her time on the question of how AI gets from a promising idea to something people genuinely use in their daily work.

That last step is where her attention goes, because it is the part that tends to get skipped. She is convinced that end users belong in the conversation from day one rather than at the demo, and she would rather talk about the reality of running an AI system in production, including governance, maintenance and integration with everything a company already has, than about what the technology might do one day. Which technology ends up being used follows from what a client needs, not from the other way around.

Bo shares what she learns through webinars, workshops, conferences and courses, with a long-standing teaching relationship at Syntra West and regular sessions for SBM. Years of explaining technical things to non-technical audiences taught her that the real value of expertise lies in the communication of it, in making something complex clear enough that people recognise their own situation in it.