HELSINKI DATA WEEK OPENING EVENT [LIVE]
Helsinki Data Week starts here, with this opening event.
Speakers (and schedule)
Main Partners
Snowflake
Agile Data Engine
Partners
Nortal
Sparta Consulting
Price/ticket
Three different prices depending on when you buy
Early bird (from May to Aug 5) - 50 €
Regular (from Aug 6 to Sep 30) - 75 €
Last chance! (from Oct 1 to Oct 27, 12 pm (EET)) - 100 €
Note! The price of admission includes lunch
Note! Limited capacity. When the event is sold out, it’s sold out
Get your tickets below!
PS. You can attend all the other events during the week for free!
Agenda
08:45-09:30
Doors
09:30-09:45
Stage 1
Opening remarks
09:45-10:30
Stage 1
Keynote
John K. Thompson: GenAI – Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond
GenAI has been with us for nearly 3 years. The technology is not showing signs of slowing down; in fact, the entire area is accelerating. Innovations are being developed and delivered at impressive speeds. Enterprises and developers alike are trying to make decisions on how to develop tools, technologies, applications, and solutions.
Data professionals are seeking to understand how to leverage these tools to convert data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. In these past 3 years, we have gone from using approximately 1% of the world’s data to at least 100%. That change alone has been mind-bending.
GenAI and AI in general hold great promise to deliver value and insights, leveraging more than 100% of the world’s existing data. In this session, we will discuss the short yet dynamic world of GenAI and project forward what we can expect to see in the next 3 to 5 years, as well as in the next 10 to 30 years.
10:45-11:30
Stage 1
Hannes Mühleisen: DuckLake - The SQL-Powered Lakehouse Format
Managing changes to tables in data lakes has been very challenging in the past. The formats and systems involved did not exactly cooperate, and as a result, sketchy workarounds were all too common. This is ostensibly solved by the advent of Lakehouse formats that attempt to sanitize changes by specifying formats, processes, and conventions to enable changes to tables.
However, common Lakehouse formats like Iceberg only appear majestic until one starts looking under the surface. There lurks a huge amount of complexity and some questionable engineering decisions. And even after all that, the hard problems like transactional consistency are delegated to an opaque catalog server, e.g., Polaris or Unity Catalog, that in turn delegates this to a bog-standard SQL database like Postgres.
DuckLake re-imagines the Lakehouse design by putting an SQL database in charge of managing metadata. This allows a very elegant design that still scales arbitrarily and greatly reduces complexity, with the actual table data still being on object stores in open format. For the first time, DuckLake allows a “multi-player” experience with DuckDB, where computation can happen anywhere and in parallel, but with centralized transactional safety.
Stage 2
Tiankai Feng: Humanizing Data Strategy
People are emotional, irrational, and unpredictable – and yet they are the most important aspect of any data strategy. Tiankai introduces his framework of the 5 Cs – competence, collaboration, communication, creativity, and conscience – with actionable examples to help you put the human being really at the center of your data efforts, and to turn your team members and employees into active advocates for your data strategy.
11:30-12:45
Lunch
12:45-13:30
Stage 1
Joe Reis: The Great Data Engineering Reset - From Pipelines to Agents
For years, data engineering was a story of predictable pipelines: move data from point A to point B. But AI just hit the reset button on our entire field. Now, we're all staring into the void, wondering what's next. While the fundamentals haven't changed, data remains challenging in the traditional areas of data governance, data management, and data modeling, which still present challenges. Everything else is up for grabs.
This talk will cut through the noise and explore the future of data engineering in an AI-driven world. We'll examine how team structures will evolve, why agentic workflows and real-time systems are becoming non-negotiable, and how our focus must shift from building dashboards and analytics to architecting for automated action. The reset button has been pushed. It's time for us to invent the future of our industry.
Stage 2
Maija Hovila: Crossing the AI Chasm
According to some sources, 95% of generative AI pilots fail, and companies are stuck at the start line, unable to reap benefits from their data and AI investments. It doesn't have to be this way. Come and hear insights on how to cross the AI chasm and ensure your data is working for you.
13:45-14:30
Stage 1
Katariina Kari: From Silos to Shared Practice - Making Data Everyone’s Business
In many organisations, data is treated as a secondary by-product of applications rather than the foundation of the business itself. This application-centric mindset creates silos, duplications, and fragile data ecosystems that fail to serve long-term strategic needs.
In this talk, I will share how organisations can shift towards data-centricity, where data development is a shared practice spanning management, product, and engineering. I’ll show what it looks like when the conceptual model of the business is also machine-readable—and why this matters for aligning data engineering with the organisation’s core concepts.
Drawing on experiences from Zalando, IKEA, and, most recently, building a data-centric organisation at the Finnish strategy start-up In Parallel, I will demonstrate how making data models explicit and machine-readable transforms both daily operations and long-term value creation.
Participants will leave with a clear understanding of what data-centricity looks like in practice and concrete ideas for how to take ownership of the central concepts in their business, ensuring that data is managed not just as a technical asset, but as a shared organisational responsibility.
Stage 2
Vin Vashishta: The Hallucination Game - Preventing AI Hype From Taking Over Your Business
With AI, what sounds like hype is real, and what sounds real is hype. With all that fog, how can businesses monetize AI? How do we get CEOs to stop chasing the latest shiny object before their businesses follow the hype off a cliff?
This talk covers the most common misconceptions about AI, and most will surprise you. Here are the three most controversial slides…
Hype: Hallucinations are bad. Reality: Hallucinations are why LLMs have any value.
Hype: No one’s getting any ROI out of their AI investments. Reality: AI is the fastest technology cycle to start delivering returns that we have ever seen.
Hype: AI can replace people. Reality: AI makes people more important than ever.
Come learn what’s real and what’s vapor from someone who’s building agentic platforms and monetizing AI for Global 2K clients outside of tech’s echo chamber.
14:30-15:00
Coffee
15:00-15:45
Stage 1
Panel
Veronica Durgin, Katariina Kari, Maija Hovila, Säde Haveri, and Eevamaija Virtanen (moderator): AI Trust Issues
AI is becoming part of everyday products and decisions, but reliability remains a challenge. From data quality to design choices, numerous factors influence whether people can rely on these systems.
This panel brings together experts in strategy, infrastructure, semantics, design, and analytics to explore what trust in AI really takes and how to build it.
15:45-16:00
Stage 1
Closing remarks
16:00-17:00
Mingling
(17:00-19:00
@ Kaisla, Vilhonkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
Unofficial low-key afterparty)