With retail sales flattening, volumes declining and retail confidence still in negative territory, CDOs are being asked to deliver AI-led growth without much top-line tailwind. This panel unpacks how data leaders secure funding, prioritise ruthlessly, and influence the C-suite in a squeezed retail environment.

Omnichannel growth is won through the architecture underneath it. Retailers are still leaving data trapped in store, ecommerce, marketplace, and media silos are losing margin, misallocating spend, and missing conversions they should own. Leading data leaders are replacing fragmented stacks with revenue-ready data architectures built on shared semantic layers, cross-channel identity, real-time eventing, and domain data products. You’ll hear how one retailer redesigned its data backbone to collapse long-standing business and technology silos—unlocking faster activation, sharper attribution, and measurable margin uplift.

• Understand how a unified data backbone, semantic layers, lineage, identity, and streaming directly translate into higher conversion, smarter spend, and better margin.

• Discover the architectural patterns that turn disconnected store, ecommerce, marketplace, fulfilment, and media signals into monetizable, reusable data products.

• Explore how unified customer, product, and inventory models drive profitable personalisation, real-time decisioning, and channel-agnostic activation.

• Hear about governance and operating mechanisms that force silos to disappear so every team executes from the same playbook, with the same numbers, in real time.

In today’s highly competitive retail environment, the performance of your analytics, automation, and AI capabilities depends on more than just models—it hinges on the trustworthiness, traceability, and clarity of the data beneath them. This session explores how retail data leaders can elevate data quality, lineage visibility, semantic layer adoption, and cataloguing maturity to shift their organisations from reactive firefighting to proactive, AI-ready execution. You’ll learn how to turn foundational data work into a margin-moving advantage.

Static dashboards slow commercial teams in a high-velocity retail environment. Conversational analytics turns every colleague into a data-ready decisionmaker. This session explores how natural language interfaces, real-time insights, and human-guided AI can replace passive reporting with intelligence that moves the margin weekly. Learn what governance and data quality foundations must be in place to make it safe and scalable.

• Examine why dashboards miss the ‘why’ behind commercial shifts.

• Identify data foundations required before NLQ and co-pilots.

• Build decision support copilots for trading and marketing teams.

• Prove ROI quickly with adoption metrics and lightweight implementation.

How do innovative retailers unlock smarter, faster business decisions in a world of disparate data and rapid AI adoption? Explore practical approaches to centralising data, building semantic knowledge bases, and harnessing AI for insight—while overcoming the realities of stakeholder resistance and accelerating business engagement. This session offers actionable lessons and candid experiences for any retail organisation eager to move beyond legacy reporting to future-proof decision-making.

This session is designed as a safe, interactive space where you can openly share and dissect real AI failures anonymously, work together to try to turn these breakdowns around or use them as a warning not to go there.

Simply choose the level of data and AI maturity most relevant to you and join the discussion. Bring Your Backlog- These roundtables turn the collective expertise in the room into your own roadmaps—focusing on the biggest obstacles to delivering data and AI value