Driven by Data: The Podcast

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 built by accident, by employees solving their own problems rather than having a solution handed down from the top; how HP's compact AI workstations are bringing serious compute to the edge; and why data sovereignty and energy consumption are becoming unavoidable parts of every technology decision.They also discuss:Why most organisations buy technology before they understand the problem they're trying to solve.How workflow, governance and people should shape technology decisions, not the other way round.Why organisational silos lead divisions to pursue contradictory AI strategies without realising it.What "people, process, data, governance, technology" means as a decision-making order.Why the best AI solutions are often built by accident by employees solving their own problems.How HP's compact AI workstations bring trillion-parameter-scale compute to the edge.Why starting small and scaling out beats one large, upfront AI investment.How sandboxed, local compute lets teams experiment safely without runaway cloud costs.What the US Cloud Act and data sovereignty mean for where organisations choose to host their data.Why defence and government customers require fully offline, lockdown-capable AI environments.Why token pricing is more expensive in practice than headline prices suggest.How copilots and AI assistants need explicit rules and training to be genuinely useful.Why AI leadership is often fragmented across too many overlapping roles in large organisations.What it takes to give employees the freedom to experiment without losing control of security.Why storytelling and simplification matter when explaining AI to non-technical stakeholders.How rising AI energy and water use is becoming an unavoidable business consideration.Why prompt engineering training could meaningfully reduce unnecessary cloud AI usage.Thanks to our sponsor, Data & AI Literacy Academy.Data & AI Literacy Academy is leading the way in transforming enterprise workforces with data literacy across the organisation, through a combination of change management and education. In today's data-centric world, being data literate is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.If you want successful data product adoption, and to keep driving innovation within your business, you need to start with data & AI literacy first.At Data & AI Literacy Academy, they don't just teach data skills. They empower individuals and teams to think critically, analyse effectively, and make decisions confidently based on data. They're bridging the gap between business and data teams, so they can all work towards aligned outcomes.From those taking their first steps in data & AI literacy to seasoned experts looking to fine-tune their skills, our data experts provide tailored classes for every stage. But it's not just learning tracks that they offer. They embed a deep data culture shift through a transformative change management programme.They take a people-first approach, working closely with your executive team to win the hearts and minds. We know this will drive the company-wide impact that data teams want to achieve.Get in touch and find out how you can unlock the full potential of data in your organisation. Learn more at www.dl-academy.com.Thanks to our sponsor FOIL AIFOIL are an AI consultancy, and one of the most exciting to watch right now.​Fast-growing, genuinely ambitious, and refreshingly down to earth, with a leadership team who have been doing this for years and are well respected for it.​FOIL push data leaders to claim a voice at the top table, to lead the business rather than trail behind it with a handful of AI productivity tools. They push the point that if every competitor has the same tools, productivity is not an advantage. The real prize with AI is bigger and FOIL have the expertise – both strategic and technical – to push the boundaries of what your organisation can achieve, in a practical way. ​FOIL are a lot bolder and braver that the traditional consultancy. That confidence comes from deep practitioner expertise, and it shows in how they engage with their partnerships.​They are claiming the phrase: the autonomic business. A business that senses what is happening, decides within clear guardrails, adapts as things change, and keeps improving on its own. Intelligence built into how the company runs, and they’ve just been recognised at the British Data Awards for their work with Welsh Water on exactly this concept.​Learn more at https://foilai.co.uk/

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 sharing across Whitehall.They also touch on the UK's evolving position on data and AI sovereignty, the real purpose behind the National Data Library, and how Aimee is building a framework to track and prove the value of government data.They also discuss:Why Aimee left a 25-year career in policing to become the UK Government's Chief Data Officer.How she is building influence across government departments without having formal authority over them.Why she restructured the Chief Data Officer Council around a strategic data roadmap and sector-based leads.What makes data sharing across government harder than the equivalent challenge in the private sector.Why culture and risk appetite, not legislation or technology, are the biggest blockers to data sharing.How she plans to fix the incentive problem by changing how Treasury assesses technology and data investment bids.Why she wants government's most valuable data treated as critical national infrastructure.How linking investment to data assets rather than departments could unlock sharing.Why legacy technology is as much a data cataloguing problem as a modernisation one.What she believes better data sharing could unlock for citizens navigating public services.Why she thinks the data sovereignty debate currently overlooks the data itself.How she is working with cross-government commercial teams to embed sovereignty principles into procurement.What the National Data Library actually is, and the shifting priorities behind its original manifesto pledge.How the National Data Library differs from a centralised data lake.Why AI adoption depends on getting the underlying data foundations right first.How she is using AI as a way to keep data on the agenda inside government.Why she is cautious about how AI investment gets communicated to the public.What her three-part framework for tracking data value looks like (commercialisation, valuation, usage).How Treasury's new balance sheet requirement for data valuation came about.What she hopes to point to as evidence of progress in twelve months' time.Thanks to our sponsor, Data & AI Literacy Academy.Data & AI Literacy Academy is leading the way in transforming enterprise workforces with data literacy across the organisation, through a combination of change management and education. In today's data-centric world, being data literate is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.If you want successful data product adoption, and to keep driving innovation within your business, you need to start with data & AI literacy first.At Data & AI Literacy Academy, they don't just teach data skills. They empower individuals and teams to think critically, analyse effectively, and make decisions confidently based on data. They're bridging the gap between business and data teams, so they can all work towards aligned outcomes.From those taking their first steps in data & AI literacy to seasoned experts looking to fine-tune their skills, our data experts provide tailored classes for every stage. But it's not just learning tracks that they offer. They embed a deep data culture shift through a transformative change management programme.They take a people-first approach, working closely with your executive team to win the hearts and minds. We know this will drive the company-wide impact that data teams want to achieve.Get in touch and find out how you can unlock the full potential of data in your organisation. Learn more at www.dl-academy.com.Thanks to our sponsor FOIL AIFOIL are an AI consultancy, and one of the most exciting to watch right now.​Fast-growing, genuinely ambitious, and refreshingly down to earth, with a leadership team who have been doing this for years and are well respected for it.​FOIL push data leaders to claim a voice at the top table, to lead the business rather than trail behind it with a handful of AI productivity tools. They push the point that if every competitor has the same tools, productivity is not an advantage. The real prize with AI is bigger and FOIL have the expertise – both strategic and technical – to push the boundaries of what your organisation can achieve, in a practical way. ​FOIL are a lot bolder and braver that the traditional consultancy. That confidence comes from deep practitioner expertise, and it shows in how they engage with their partnerships.​They are claiming the phrase: the autonomic business. A business that senses what is happening, decides within clear guardrails, adapts as things change, and keeps improving on its own. Intelligence built into how the company runs, and they’ve just been recognised at the British Data Awards for their work with Welsh Water on exactly this concept.​Learn more at https://foilai.co.uk/

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: your codified business knowledge, your data, and the creativity of your people.The conversation covers why the most common mistake is automating processes that shouldn't exist in their current form, a real-world water utility case where an autonomic entity cut alarm triage from 40 minutes to seconds during the drought, and why ownership of this agenda ultimately lands with a properly empowered CDO.They also discuss:Why generative AI was the catalyst for rethinking the traditional consulting model.Why "we want to do more AI" is the wrong request, and what businesses actually need.Why, if everyone says they're behind, someone has to be in the lead.Why the technology is easy, and landing it as systemic change is the hard part.What an autonomic business is, and why the term comes from biology.How an autonomic entity differs from RPA and traditional automation.Why autonomic entities pursue goals rather than execute fixed processes.How Gartner's digital-twin thinking seeded the idea years before ChatGPT.Why the autonomic business depends on knowledge management, not technology.How LLMs and knowledge graphs unlocked the 80% of business information that is unstructured.Why access to the same tools is a leveller, not a competitive advantage.Why reducing cognitive load matters more than raw speed.Why operating model and culture decide whether AI transformation succeeds.Why automating a broken process at scale creates no value.Why most business processes live in people's heads, and how to make them computable.How a water utility used an autonomic entity to cope with alarms rising from 800 to 3,800 a day.What the four human–AI partnership models look like, from "entity proposes, human decides" to "human retains authority".What needs to be true before entities can act fully autonomously.Why the CDO should own the AI agenda, and why that role can no longer sit inside IT.Why generative AI is becoming the Excel of the 90s.Why ROI rarely comes from a single AI project.Why headcount is a dangerous yardstick for ROI, and what successful organisations do instead.Thanks to our sponsor, Data & AI Literacy Academy.Data & AI Literacy Academy is leading the way in transforming enterprise workforces with data literacy across the organisation, through a combination of change management and education. In today's data-centric world, being data literate is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.If you want successful data product adoption, and to keep driving innovation within your business, you need to start with data & AI literacy first.At Data & AI Literacy Academy, they don't just teach data skills. They empower individuals and teams to think critically, analyse effectively, and make decisions confidently based on data. They're bridging the gap between business and data teams, so they can all work towards aligned outcomes.From those taking their first steps in data & AI literacy to seasoned experts looking to fine-tune their skills, our data experts provide tailored classes for every stage. But it's not just learning tracks that they offer. They embed a deep data culture shift through a transformative change management programme.They take a people-first approach, working closely with your executive team to win the hearts and minds. We know this will drive the company-wide impact that data teams want to achieve.Get in touch and find out how you can unlock the full potential of data in your organisation. Learn more at www.dl-academy.com.

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 number, is it right, and why does it take so long – have been repeating for thirty years, and rather than fixing them, the industry keeps renaming the problem.The conversation covers why most complexity in data is self-inflicted, why maturity models are "data theatre" compared to diagnosing friction, and why AI hasn't solved any of this – it has poured fuel on the fire.They also discuss:Why the industry has a short collective memory and keeps rediscovering problems solved twenty years ago.What the three recurring arguments are that every data organisation keeps having.Why renaming the symptom – big data, data mesh, platforms – never fixes the underlying problem.How a simple pizza business becomes a data nightmare the moment it goes digital.Why most complexity in data is self-inflicted, and why that is good news.Why "technology is not the problem, you are" is deliberately provocative.What four questions to ask before going back to the market for a new tool.Why fixing the system, not the tool, is the maxim that matters.Who the "merchants of complexity" are, and why consultants are usually the culprits.Why making things simple is the hardest job in data.What's wrong with using maturity scores as the objective.Why measuring the wrong things promotes the wrong behaviours.How to practically find friction by refusing to accept the first answer.Why friction looks different for an analyst, an engineer and a business leader.Why not every foundational problem needs to be solved, and how to avoid spending forever in the basement.Why data teams that don't understand the business are missing the biggest opportunity.What the cargo cult is, and why copying Spotify's operating model won't make you Spotify.How the enabling model's four pillars – people, governance, technology and enablement – fit together.Why the fragility of senior data leadership is structural rather than personal.Why data doesn't create friction in an organisation, it reveals it – and gets blamed for it.Why a clear mandate matters more than who the CDO reports to.Why the industry needs to stop hiring data leaders on a shopping list of technical skills.How AI has exposed how little progress most companies have actually made on the fundamentals.Thanks to our sponsor, Data & AI Literacy Academy.Data & AI Literacy Academy is leading the way in transforming enterprise workforces with data literacy across the organisation, through a combination of change management and education. In today's data-centric world, being data literate is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.If you want successful data product adoption, and to keep driving innovation within your business, you need to start with data & AI literacy first.At Data & AI Literacy Academy, they don't just teach data skills. They empower individuals and teams to think critically, analyse effectively, and make decisions confidently based on data. They're bridging the gap between business and data teams, so they can all work towards aligned outcomes.From those taking their first steps in data & AI literacy to seasoned experts looking to fine-tune their skills, our data experts provide tailored classes for every stage. But it's not just learning tracks that they offer. They embed a deep data culture shift through a transformative change management programme.They take a people-first approach, working closely with your executive team to win the hearts and minds. We know this will drive the company-wide impact that data teams want to achieve.Get in touch and find out how you can unlock the full potential of data in your organisation. Learn more at www.dl-academy.com/drivenThanks to our sponsor FOIL AIFOIL are an AI consultancy, and one of the most exciting to watch right now.​Fast-growing, genuinely ambitious, and refreshingly down to earth, with a leadership team who have been doing this for years and are well respected for it.​FOIL push data leaders to claim a voice at the top table, to lead the business rather than trail behind it with a handful of AI productivity tools. They push the point that if every competitor has the same tools, productivity is not an advantage. The real prize with AI is bigger and FOIL have the expertise – both strategic and technical – to push the boundaries of what your organisation can achieve, in a practical way. ​FOIL are a lot bolder and braver that the traditional consultancy. That confidence comes from deep practitioner expertise, and it shows in how they engage with their partnerships.​They are claiming the phrase: the autonomic business. A business that senses what is happening, decides within clear guardrails, adapts as things change, and keeps improving on its own. Intelligence built into how the company runs, and they’ve just been recognised at the British Data Awards for their work with Welsh Water on exactly this concept.​Learn more at https://foilai.co.uk/

In Episode 18 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Laura Fiacco, Founder of Adaptive Assets, where they discuss why communication, influence and commercial thinking have become the competitive advantage for modern data professionals, and how learning to communicate like an executive is now just as important as technical expertise.They also discuss:Why influence without authority is the defining skill for modern data leaders.The 4 quadrant brain framework for tailoring communication to different thinking styles.Why successful influence starts by understanding other people's goals before presenting your own ideas.Why relationship building happens outside the meeting room, not inside it.How to communicate technical work in a way executives immediately care about.Why every presentation should start with the business outcome, not the analysis.Why data professionals often answer questions that were never asked.What data leaders can learn from sales discovery.The questions every data professional should ask before proposing a solution.Why understanding failed attempts and hidden assumptions leads to better stakeholder conversations.How to influence when different executives have conflicting priorities.Why peer success stories influence behaviour more effectively than data alone.Why communication, influence and leadership should become measurable career progression criteria.Practical habits that help build influence, trust and credibility every day.Why AI will make communication, influence and judgement more valuable than technical expertise.Why every person needs to understand their specific role in delivering the wider business objective.Why every business strategy is built on assumptions that data should validate or challenge.How to align stakeholders when everyone interprets the same strategy differently.Thanks to our sponsor, Data & AI Literacy Academy.Data & AI Literacy Academy is leading the way in transforming enterprise workforces with data literacy across the organisation, through a combination of change management and education. In today's data-centric world, being data literate is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.If you want successful data product adoption, and to keep driving innovation within your business, you need to start with data & AI literacy first.At Data & AI Literacy Academy, they don't just teach data skills. They empower individuals and teams to think critically, analyse effectively, and make decisions confidently based on data. They're bridging the gap between business and data teams, so they can all work towards aligned outcomes.From those taking their first steps in data & AI literacy to seasoned experts looking to fine-tune their skills, our data experts provide tailored classes for every stage. But it's not just learning tracks that they offer. They embed a deep data culture shift through a transformative change management programme.They take a people-first approach, working closely with your executive team to win the hearts and minds. We know this will drive the company-wide impact that data teams want to achieve.Get in touch and find out how you can unlock the full potential of data in your organisation. Learn more at www.dl-academy.com.

In Episode 17 of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Joanne Riseborough, Group Data Management and Culture Director at Lloyds Banking Group, where they discuss why the AI boom has quietly made data management one of the most strategically important disciplines in the boardroom.They explore why AI is shining a spotlight on data quality, governance and culture, how large enterprises balance modernisation with legacy technology, and why organisations that invest in strong data foundations will be best positioned to realise meaningful value from AI.They also discuss:Why AI has made data management more important than ever.Why data quality has moved back onto the boardroom agenda.How organisations should define what "good enough" actually means.What data quality should actually be measured against.How large enterprises balance modernisation whilst continuing to operate critical legacy platforms.The unique data management challenges created by hybrid cloud and on-premise environments.How data culture influences the success or failure of AI adoption.Why data and AI literacy is becoming a strategic capability rather than a technical nice-to-have.How Lloyds Banking Group is building capability through education, practitioner communities and leadership development.Why executive sponsorship remains one of the strongest predictors of successful AI transformation.How organisations should balance fixing today's problems whilst investing in tomorrow's capabilities.Why continuous monitoring and data observability will become fundamental components of modern data management.How reusable data products can accelerate both governance and AI adoption.Why organisations should think about both data for AI and AI for data.Why responsible AI starts with trusted data, lineage and governance rather than model oversight alone.How central strategy and standards can successfully coexist with federated ownership and delivery.Why organisations should assess their data maturity before accelerating AI ambitions.Why the strongest AI strategies are built on strong data foundations rather than stronger AI models.Thanks to our sponsor, Data & AI Literacy Academy.Data & AI Literacy Academy is leading the way in transforming enterprise workforces with data literacy across the organisation, through a combination of change management and education. In today's data-centric world, being data literate is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.If you want successful data product adoption, and to keep driving innovation within your business, you need to start with data & AI literacy first.At Data & AI Literacy Academy, they don't just teach data skills. They empower individuals and teams to think critically, analyse effectively, and make decisions confidently based on data. They're bridging the gap between business and data teams, so they can all work towards aligned outcomes.From those taking their first steps in data & AI literacy to seasoned experts looking to fine-tune their skills, our data experts provide tailored classes for every stage. But it's not just learning tracks that they offer. They embed a deep data culture shift through a transformative change management programme.They take a people-first approach, working closely with your executive team to win the hearts and minds. We know this will drive the company-wide impact that data teams want to achieve.Get in touch and find out how you can unlock the full potential of data in your organisation. Learn more at www.dl-academy.com.