IDC AI & Data Xchange

Roundtable with senior data and AI leaders on turning AI investment into measurable revenue and customer experience — not another chatbot demo. The throughline matched the event's "governance to growth" theme: governance isn't the brake on scaling AI, it's the thing that lets you scale it at all. Where the room pushed hardest was on real-time. The differentiator is rarely the frontier model everyone can already access; it's the quality and freshness of the data you feed it, and how close to the customer you can run inference. Distributed edge inference kept coming up as the practical lever — cutting the "thinking lag" of centralised systems so personalisation, fraud scoring and conversion nudges land in the moment rather than after it. And with the centre of gravity shifting from chatbots to autonomous agents, the unglamorous data foundation — quality, lineage, governance — is exactly where the real work now lives. A warm footnote to a sharp three days in Getxo: it happened to be my birthday, and the group surprised me with happy birthday and a few gifts at the gala dinner — not what you expect from a room of senior executives steering hundreds of billions, and a good reminder that they're people first.