What's Holding Your AI Strategy Back?

How do you unlock AI's potential without breaking trust? That's the question every data and analytics leader is wrestling with right now. Many organizations have ambitious AI plans, but no clarity around what data to use to power their models. What can they use? And what should they use? The same challenge affects analytics, research, marketing and other data-driven work. Jan Kestle, President and Founder of Environics Analytics, and Khaled El Emam, Founder and CEO of Woodway Assurance, will have a candid conversation about what it takes to expand access to training data and provide AI models with data responsibly. They'll also discuss how to turn AI ambition into business value. Protecting people and enabling data-driven decision-making are not incompatible. Handled responsibly, data can support both privacy and insight. Together, they'll examine what's possible today and how AI is changing the data landscape, plus how advances in de-identification and privacy-enhancing technologies, along with independent privacy assurance, are widening responsible access to data for AI and other uses. They'll also explore how credible evidence can help organizations build the trust their data ecosystem depends on, and why Canada's privacy-forward approach is an opportunity to lead, not just a box to check. What you’ll learn: • Why access to relevant, high-quality and appropriately protected data is central to moving your AI strategy forward • How advances in de-identification and privacy-enhancing technologies are expanding responsible access to structured and unstructured data, including text • What it takes to expand access to training data and provide AI models with data responsibly • What credible, independent evidence of privacy risk assessment looks like and how it can build confidence and support business value • Why Canada's privacy-forward stance positions it to lead globally, not just comply Who should attend Privacy, data governance, and compliance professionals; data and analytics leaders; and business and product teams looking to responsibly commercialize, share or build AI on the text data they already own. Speaker bios: Jan Kestle has spent more than four decades shaping how organizations use data responsibly, grounded in the principles of privacy-by-design. As founder of Environics Analytics in 2003, she built a company trusted by thousands of Canadian business leaders to use data and analytics to solve complex challenges and make smarter decisions. Before EA, she was president of Compusearch and spent 19 years at the Ontario Statistical Centre, developing a career-long grounding in the rigor of official statistics.Her influence extends into the broader data policy landscape through her former role on the Canadian Statistics Advisory Council and advisory positions at the DeGroote School of Business (McMaster) and the Morrissette Institute (Western). She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Toronto Metropolitan University in recognition of her contributions to Canadian data and analytics. Dr. Khaled El Emam is the CEO and Founder of Woodway Assurance, which specializes in the application of AI to re-identification risk assessment and anonymization. He also has a Canada Research Chair in Medical AI at the University of Ottawa and leads the Ottawa Medical AI Research institute at the Faculty of Medicine. He is a Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health and Director of the Electronic Health Information Laboratory at the CHEO Research Institute. He was recently the Scholar-in-Residence with the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, where his main mandate was to support the IPC’s modernization and expansion of de-identification guidance. An internationally recognized expert in anonymization, re-identification risk assessment and privacy-preserving data sharing who has founded or co-founded several spin-off companies, he has decades of experience conducting and applying rigorous research to practical solutions used globally. This event is brought to you by Woodway Assurance and Environics Analytics. For more information about EviData, visit the Woodway Assurance website. For more inforamtion about Environics Analytics, visit the company's website.