We’re excited to announce that the call for speakers is officially open for the 13th annual Data Summit conference, to be held in Boston, May 6-7, 2026, with pre-conference workshops on May 5th.

This year we have redefined the learning experience at Data Summit for every level of the data and AI organization. We plan on four tracks: Modern Data Architectures, Data Engineering, Analytics Delivery & Semantic Layers, and GenAI & Agentic AI. We believe that hands-on insights and implementations are essential to the data-driven organization.

It’s clear that enterprises, regardless of size, are looking at AI technologies that can streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve decision-making. They want scalable, flexible, and cost-effective approaches to data management. GenAI and Agentic AI contribute to organizational goals but the emphasis on data architectures, data engineering, data governance, and data strategy is ongoing.

Whether you're architecting next-generation data platforms, building production ML systems, delivering analytics to business users, or setting enterprise data strategy, Data Summit 2026 is looking for the real-world case studies and technical deep-dives, as our audience is a mixture of technical and business professionals. What's working now and what's next in data and AI? We want to showcase innovation and have presentations that encourage attendees to take home actionable frameworks, proven patterns, and implementation blueprints they can apply immediately.

For the Modern Data Architectures track, we're calling for architects and engineers shaping the future of enterprise data platforms. Share your experiences implementing data fabric architectures, data mesh topologies, lakehouse patterns, and real-time streaming infrastructures. We seek case studies that detail architectural decisions, trade-offs, and lessons learned from production deployments at scale. We’d like data fabric implementations, migrations from legacy architectures, multi-cloud and hybrid strategies, and architectural patterns for BI/AI/ML workloads. We want presentations on emerging technologies like Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and data virtualization platforms, as well as architectural approaches to active metadata, data quality, and observability. Sessions on DataOps for architects, platform team structures, and balancing centralized versus federated approaches are highly valued. Technical depth is expected—include architecture diagrams, platform comparisons, and quantifiable results. Share how you're building composable, product-centric data architectures that accelerate value delivery.

For the Data Engineering track, we want practitioners to share battle-tested approaches to building reliable, scalable data pipelines. Present your solutions with a vendor-neutral context for complex data integration challenges, DataOps implementations, orchestration strategies, data observability, and data quality engineering. We're seeking sessions on modern ETL/ELT patterns, change data capture, data contracts, and testing strategies for data pipelines. Strong proposals will include real-world implementations, and we especially welcome presentations on data engineering for AI/ML workflows, feature engineering pipelines, and handling unstructured data at scale. Sessions on team productivity, development workflows, CI/CD for data pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code are encouraged. We want technical presentations, code walkthroughs, and honest discussions of what went wrong before you got it right.

For the Analytics Delivery & Semantic Layers track, we seek innovative presentations on delivering trusted, relevant analytics to business users through semantic layers, metrics stores, knowledge graphs, and modern BI platforms. Share your approaches to building business-friendly data models, implementing governance-enabled self-service analytics, and creating reusable metrics that ensure organizational alignment. This track bridges technical implementation with business value delivery. Ideal sessions include building and governing semantic models, implementing universal metrics layers, natural language analytics interfaces, and embedded analytics architectures. We're particularly interested in case studies showing how semantic layers reduce analytics chaos, ensure metric consistency, and accelerate time-to-insight. Presentations on analytics catalogs, business glossaries, metric certification processes, and change management for analytics adoption are highly valued.

For the GenAI and Agentic AI track, we're calling for practitioners building and deploying production GenAI, Agentic AI, and ML systems at scale. Present your implementations of MLOps pipelines, LLM applications, small language models with edge deployment, RAG architecture patterns, traditional ML systems, agentic architectures, and multi-agent systems. We want detailed technical sessions on the full engineering lifecycle: model development, deployment, monitoring, evaluation frameworks, benchmarking, and maintenance in production environments, with real metrics and lessons learned.

Strong proposals include case studies on GenAI and Agentic AI applications from prototypes to production, computer vision systems, recommendation engines, and predictive analytics implementations. We especially welcome sessions on practical AI engineering: vector databases, prompt engineering patterns, fine-tuning strategies, guardrails, and cost optimization. Presentations comparing different approaches, tools, and frameworks with objective analysis are highly valued.

We would like a mix of formal presentations and interactive panel participation. Case studies that demonstrate practical uses are particularly welcome. We also invite submissions for teaching half-day workshops. Feel free to suggest something different from a normal conference presentation—we like creativity!

How to Submit a Proposal

Come share your knowledge, your approaches, and your experiences at the Data Summit 2026 conference. IT practitioners and business stakeholders alike can contribute. Submit your proposal to speak now!

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you at Data Summit 2026!

John O’Brien
Conference Chair
John.Obrien@radiantadvisors.com

Marydee Ojala
Conference Program Director
Marydee@xmission.com