Helsinki Data Week: Actian - AI Needs Context. Where Does It Come From?
Join Actian and Solita during Helsinki Data Week for an afternoon exploring how data catalogs and enterprise knowledge are evolving to give AI the context it needs to understand and act.
What We’ll Explore
AI can access more enterprise data than ever, but access alone doesn't provide understanding. For AI to deliver reliable answers and act effectively, it needs the context behind the data: what it means, how it relates, and how it is used across the organization.
Together, Actian and Solita will explore:
How AI is changing data catalogs and the way organizations discover, organize, and use enterprise data.
Why AI needs an enterprise context layer that connects data, metadata, content, and organizational knowledge.
How to start building trusted context for AI by bringing together structured, unstructured, and tacit knowledge.
Join them for two expert perspectives, followed by an opportunity to continue the conversation over drinks and snacks.
Agenda
Session 1: How Data Catalogs are Changing in the Era of AI
Speaker: Ole Olesen-Bagneux, Chief Evangelist at Actian
When Microsoft joined forces with OpenAI to bring conversational search to Bing, Satya Nadella called it “a new day for search”. AI is now bringing a similar shift to data catalogs, which have long served as the search engines for enterprise data.
As AI changes how organizations find and use information, data catalogs need to support new ways to organize and search data: with AI, by AI, without human intervention, and for AI itself. This session explores how AI is changing data discovery, how the data catalog's role is evolving, and what organizations need to consider as AI becomes an increasingly important consumer of enterprise data.
The session draws on Ole Olesen-Bagneux’s forthcoming second edition of The Enterprise Data Catalog, published by O’Reilly.
Session 2: Building the Company Brain: The Enterprise Context Layer for AI-Ready Organizations
Speaker: Juha-Pekka Joutsenlahti is the Data Catalog Practice Lead and Data Advisor at Solita
AI is fundamentally changing how businesses operate. Processes are being redesigned around agents, and new business models are emerging. Rather than programming every step, we increasingly define the goal and let AI determine how to achieve it. This shift succeeds only when AI understands the business context it operates in. Today, that knowledge is scattered across data platforms, documents, systems, and people, leading to inaccurate AI.
The enterprise context layer brings it together into the company brain. If the brain needs memory, the context layer is its long-term memory: governed, durable knowledge of what the organization knows, what its data means, and how its concepts relate. Approaches like LLMWikis act more like short-term memory. They capture fast-moving knowledge quickly, but they need the long-term layer to stay consistent and trustworthy.
This session explores how to get started building it. We look at how structured data, unstructured content, and tacit organizational knowledge come together into trusted meaning, and how intent, meaning, and the model’s context window connect.
Free for participants. Reserve your spot here!