CTO Network September Breakfast - There is no value in data

Description

There is no value in data You have more data than you have ever had, and less idea than ever what it's for. The lake filled up. The warehouse moved to the cloud and then to the lakehouse. Somewhere in there the bill stopped being a line item and started being a strategy. Then agents arrived and started actually consuming it and instantly exposed how much of it was never usable in the first place. 😱 Stijn Christiaens has been making this argument since 2019, when almost nobody wanted to hear it: there is no value in data, only in your ability to use it. He co-founded Collibra and built it into a company valued north of $5 billion. He is not going to tell you to collect more.. more below! This is a working session, not a product story. 30+ CTOs and founding engineers in a room with someone who has spent eighteen years watching organisations relearn the same lesson with a new logo on it. No slides. Bring your hardest question. Our first edition outside the Netherlands CTO Network goes EU, first stop: Antwerp, hosted at imec; one of Europe's deepest technical research institutes; with Snowflake in the room. Same format, same rule: no pitches, no recruiters, no panel theatre. Just the people who have to make it work. Opening keynote: Stijn Christiaens, co-founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra Stijn launched product, presales, partnerships and research at Collibra, served as CTO, and now runs the company's internal Data Office; meaning he deploys his own product against his own company and lives with the result. His academic roots are in semantics and ontology, which is exactly the layer the industry has spent this year rediscovering: Collibra now positions itself as an enterprise AI control plane, built on the argument that agents are only as good as the governed context you can hand them. Three tables. Three arguments. You'll sit at two. 🧭 Copies are the problem, not storage: every replica is a divergence with a deadline attached. Centralise the meaning and federate the rest, or admit you're doing neither. 📟 One agent is a feature, two is a system: the second agent turns your feature into a distributed system, and there's no trace between the hops. 🗂️ Metadata is on the critical path now: the catalog stopped being somewhere people browse and became something machines query mid-inference. It isn't on your status page. Format Breakfast from 9:00. Keynote and open Q&A. Two rounds of small-table discussion, each one co-moderated. Networking until noon. Home by lunch. Why it matters Most teams are still solving this by adding: another store, another pipeline, another copy. The argument on offer is that the constraint was never supply. it's that nothing in the stack knows what any of it means. If you are currently deciding how much of your retrieval layer to own, where your definitions should live, or what you'd say if someone asked you to trace an agent's decision back to a row, this is the room. RSVP to join. Limited seats. Invitation only. Hosted at imec, in partnership with Snowflake.