Executives are betting on agentic AI to drive growth, yet many enterprises still struggle to move from pilot to production. The difficult part has never been about the models, it is about building trust in underlying data assets, human-AI workflows, and outcome accountability.
At Data Summit 2026, on May 6 - 7 in Boston, with pre-conference workshops on May 5, Cal Al-Dhubaib, principal technologist at Rubrik, will dive into Trust Engineering—the emerging discipline needed to consistently scale AI beyond pilots—during his keynote speech.
John O’Brien, program chair for the event and principal advisor, industry analyst at Radiant Advisors, spoke to Al-Duhbaib on behalf of DBTA to get the rundown on the importance of this keynote address.
Al-Dhubaib is a globally recognized data scientist, entrepreneur, and thought leader in responsible AI. He leads emerging tech thought leadership at Rubrik, focusing on AI, cyber resilience, and enterprise trust as organizations adopt more autonomous systems.
He is a frequent keynote speaker on AI innovation, governance, and literacy, reaching thousands of leaders through conferences and events. His insights have been featured in Forbes, Nasdaq, VentureBeat, and Open Data Science.
What are you working on and what's got you most excited these days? Is that going to be part of your keynote as well?
For the last, I'd say 12-ish months or so, I've been obsessed with this concept of trust engineering. In fact, I have a course launching on LinkedIn this May, so I’m very excited. The timing couldn't be more perfect.
And part of the reason why I'm so excited about trust engineering is we all know that there's inherent risks with these AI systems and the traditional approach is, all right, we need more controls, we need more risk management, we need more security. Through my experience leading AI teams, designing AI systems, I have found that some of the most effective ways to manage AI risk starts with user experience and design and managing expectations.
So, a lot of what I'm going to be talking about in the keynote comes from this discipline that I've been coining as “trust engineering.” I'm really excited to unpack that.
What are you seeing out there in the industry with data teams that are working, trying to stay on the leading edge of AI? And what do you see in the field, in the trenches?
So, most enterprises have gone through this cycle over the past two years of “we've got to do something with AI.” And the reality is most organizations maybe have some form of a copilot or general-purpose AI tool but really struggle to go from POC and pilots to production when it comes to building generative AI systems. And in no small part, it has to do with data readiness. Companies are asking everything from how do we secure this information when we have these autonomous systems interacting with it? How do we deal with access and permissions and controls? How do we defend against new and emerging threats when these models are so open-ended? You have this huge, long tail of edge cases.
What I'm seeing now is our teams are really starting to unpack what does it take to have an actual AI operations practice.
What are you looking forward to about attending Data Summit in person?
So, being hands on is my favorite thing, and I'm excited to join. I've heard all about it from you and the team, but the practitioner perspective.
It's easy to attend conferences and see media where there's a lot of platitudes like AI is going to do everything and companies are growing ridiculous amounts and AI is going to solve everything. But the reality is, I love hearing two things.
One, we realized that building this AI use case was a lot more complicated, and here's what we're doing to make it successful.
And then I also love hearing the stories of these surprisingly valuable ways of using AI to solve problems in new ways, and you only get that from practitioners. I love it. And I have no doubt, I will learn a ton from everyone there.
Register now to attend the 13th annual Data Summit, taking place in Boston on May 6–7, 2026, with pre-conference workshops on May 5.