UPCOMING EVENTS
ALL EVENTS ARE IN EASTERN (EST) TIME ZONE.
As enterprises continue to expand their use of advanced analytics, machine learning, real-time reporting, and self-service business intelligence, the reliability of underlying data ecosystems has become increasingly critical. Ensuring the data powering enterprise decisions remains accurate, complete, timely, and trustworthy is becoming increasingly important as organizations scale their data and analytics capabilities.
At the same time, growing data volumes, expanding data architectures, and increasingly interconnected data ecosystems are creating new challenges around observability, lineage, monitoring, operational resilience, and data quality management. Incomplete lineage visibility, schema drift, data quality degradation, broken dependencies, and limited insight into upstream and downstream impacts can significantly affect analytics accuracy, reporting integrity, business confidence, and operational decision-making.
In this highly interactive, member-driven working session, the event moderators will facilitate a structured, open exchange where all attendees are expected to actively contribute to the group conversation - sharing what is working, what is not, and to engage in a candid, group problem-solving dialogue around the most pressing challenges facing many enterprise data environments.
Please Note: This is not a passive event. Throughout the event, all attendees are expected to actively participate in the discussion and contribute real-world challenges and solutions.
Topics of discussion will include, yet will not be limited to:
Karthik Josyula, Head of Data & AI Platforms, Data & Analytics, KOHLER
Shrikant Sonparote, Lead Software Engineer, LOWE’S
Kapil Kumar Sharma, Data Architect, Data & Business Operations - Virtual Demand Center, CISCO
Enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are being deployed rapidly, but many are failing to deliver consistent, reliable outputs when exposed to real-world data environments. What begins as a straightforward retrieval pipeline often becomes unstable as data quality issues, poor chunking strategies, weak embedding alignment, and inefficient indexing approaches compound. As system complexity increases, retrieval precision degrades, latency rises, and outputs become less grounded - creating significant challenges for engineering and architecture teams responsible for production performance.
As these challenges surface, organizations are moving toward more rigorous approaches to designing, tuning, and validating RAG systems - placing greater emphasis on data preprocessing pipelines, retrieval optimization, indexing strategies, and evaluation methodologies. This includes refining how data is chunked and embedded, how vector search is tuned, and how retrieval outputs are validated and monitored, enabling more deterministic, scalable, and high-performing systems in production environments.
Please Note: this is not a passive event. At the end of the speakers’ presentation, all attendees are expected to actively participate in the discussion and contribute real-world challenges and solutions.
Chirag Shah, Global Chief Information Security Officer & Data Protection Officer, MODEL N
Jacqueline Starr, IT Business Analysis Senior Specialist, CNA INSURANCE
Poornakala Sethuraman, Ph.D., Vice President, Data Science & Product Strategy, BANK OF AMERICA
Shailesh Kadam, Artificial Intelligence & Cloud Architect, SAKS GLOBAL
An Unfiltered Conversation with Enterprise Technology Leaders
Presented by Stephen Harris, in association with the IA FORUM.
An “Open Network” PUBLIC virtual event - for IA FORUM members, their guests, and anyone interested in the event topic - to then be shared via the IA FORUM “public” YouTube channel, website, LinkedIn, and other marketing channels - and to live FOREVER via said platforms.
About this Tech Thought Leadership Exchange Event…
As organizations continue accelerating AI adoption, understanding what delivers measurable business value - and what doesn't - has become essential to building successful, scalable, and sustainable AI initiatives.
About the Event Series…
Enterprise AI and technology leaders are navigating one of the most significant technology shifts in modern business history. Yet behind the headlines, product announcements, and market hype are the real-world experiences of the executives, architects, engineers, and transformation leaders responsible for operationalizing these technologies inside complex enterprise environments.
The Tech Thought Leadership Exchange event series, hosted by Stephen Harris, in association with the IA FORUM, was created to provide a candid, in-depth, and conversational look into how enterprise leaders are approaching AI, automation, data, infrastructure modernization, governance, organizational change, and large-scale transformation initiatives in real-world production environments. Each virtual event features an in-depth group conversation between Stephen Harris and 2 - 3 speaker guests.
Throughout each event discussion, the conversation will explore the featured guest’s professional background, technical expertise, leadership perspectives, enterprise challenges, lessons learned, industry observations, and strategic outlook on a given technology industry topic - as Stephen Harris also digs deeper by providing his insights throughout the candid conversation.
Please Note: This event series is open to IA FORUM members, yet also to the public - and will take place live as scheduled IA FORUM events - in turn being video-recorded for ongoing distribution through the IA FORUM’s public YouTube channel, IA FORUM Magazine, LinkedIn, and related promotional platforms. To maintain the integrity and production quality of the recording, attendees will not be permitted to appear on camera or actively participate during the live broadcasts.
Host: Stephen Harris, Former Corporate Vice President, Global Head of Data Science & AI Growth Analytics, MICROSOFT
Robin Patra, Head Data & Analytics Manager, KEELEY COMPANIES
Ram Srinivasan, Managing Director, AI Adoption & Integration & Future of Work Advisory, JLL
Ashok Pal Singh Rathore, Senior Technical Program Manager, FACEBOOK (META)
Presented by Doug Shannon, in association with the IA FORUM.
About this Podcast…
About the Podcast Series…
The Enterprise Tech Exchange podcast series, hosted by Doug Shannon, in association with the IA FORUM, was created to provide a candid, in-depth, and conversational look into how enterprise leaders are approaching AI, automation, data, infrastructure modernization, governance, organizational change, and large-scale transformation initiatives in real-world production environments. Each podcast features an in-depth one-on-one conversation between Doug Shannon - an IA FORUM Advisory Board and community member who’s also a globally recognized top thought leader in the space - and a featured IA FORUM member speaker.
Throughout each podcast discussion, the conversation will explore the featured guest’s professional background, technical expertise, leadership perspectives, enterprise challenges, lessons learned, industry observations, and strategic outlook on a given technology industry topic - as Doug Shannon also digs deeper by providing his insights throughout the candid conversation.
Please Note: This podcast series is open to IA FORUM members, yet also to the public - and will take place live as scheduled IA FORUM events - in turn being video-recorded for ongoing distribution through the IA FORUM’s public YouTube channel, IA FORUM Magazine, LinkedIn, and related promotional platforms. To maintain the integrity and production quality of the recording, attendees will not be permitted to appear on camera or actively participate during the live broadcasts.
Host: Doug Shannon, Global Intelligent Automation & GenAI Thought Leader & Global Intelligent Automation Manager, GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY
Subba Rao Katragadda, Senior Principal Data Engineer, GLOBAL MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY COMPANY
