Hybrid: AI & the Value of Data: Data and AI are two sides of the same coin

Speakers

Lyndon Hedderly

Orit Meidan

Agenda

18:30 - Hybrid event starts

20:00 - Presentation ends with networking and refreshments for those attending at the BCS London office

21:00 - Event close

Synopsis

As AI matures from ML to GenAI to Agentic AI - and these use cases evolve from experimentation into production, the symbiotic relationship between data and the AI models becomes increasingly clear. To deliver real business impact—smarter automation, better customer experiences, and massive cost takeout—AI use cases are only as powerful as the data they’re running on.

Lyndon and Orit will talk about how to make data readily available for AI in business - and how to model the business value of doing so.

About the speakers

Lyndon Hedderly, Senior Director of Value Consulting at Confluent

Lyndon joined Confluent in 2017 and is now leading Confluent’s Value Consulting practice globally. Confluent is a data streaming company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, offering a platform for real-time data. Lyndon helps organizations model how Confluent and the Data Streaming Platform (DSP) can improve company performance, which includes explaining how real-time data and new AI use cases are two sides of the same coin. Prior to joining Confluent, Lyndon built the Business Value practice at Acquia - a digital experience platform company (2014-2017) and was on the founding team of a UK start-up, with an enterprise infrastructure platform and analytics solution (2009-2014). Before that, Lyndon spent 12 years with Accenture’s IT Strategy practice (1996-2008). Lyndon holds an MSc in Neuroscience incl. Neural Networks & AI, from Oxford University. He runs his own blog on all things Digital & Data here: https://lyndon.london

Orit Meidan, Principal and Head of Strategic Customer Advisory, EMEA at Confluent At Confluent

Orit partners with the company’s most strategic enterprise clients across the region to align their data and AI strategies with measurable business outcomes. Orit began her career as a software engineer in quantitative trading, before moving into strategy and commercial leadership roles that bridge technology and business impact. Over the past 15 years, she has held positions at Palantir Technologies, Evolution AI, and Strategy&, helping organisations harness data to drive growth, efficiency, and innovation. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Communications from Tel Aviv University.

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Image credit: photo by Omar:. Lopez-Rincon on Unsplash