--- title: "Opening Keynote: Context is King" url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/opening-keynote/" description: "Prukalpa Sankar reveals why history keeps repeating from Big Data to BI to AI - featuring insights from Workday, Mastercard, CME Group, DigiKey, Marriott, and VMO2 on closing the AI context gap." keywords: "atlan, data governance, regovern 2025, regovern watch center" --- > Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/ **Opening Keynote: Context is King** is a Re:Govern 2025 session video in the Atlan Re:Govern watch center. Prukalpa Sankar reveals why history keeps repeating from Big Data to BI to AI - featuring insights from Workday, Mastercard, CME Group, DigiKey, Marriott, and VMO2 on closing the AI context gap. Watch it at https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/opening-keynote/ (email required to keep watching). All sessions: https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/ ## Speakers - **Joe DosSantos**, Vice President, Enterprise Data & Analytics, Workday. From EMC and TD Bank to Qlik, Joe has built data foundations at scale. At Workday, he leads AI readiness - creating semantic layers that transform the world's largest and cleanest HR-and-finance dataset into precise, trustworthy, organization-specific AI insights. - **Prukalpa Sankar**, Co-founder, Atlan. Prukalpa Sankar is co-founder of Atlan, where she leads the company's mission of helping humans and AI do their best work, together. Before founding Atlan, Prukalpa worked with the UN, World Bank, and national governments, where she first encountered the critical challenge of context - a problem that would become Atlan's founding obsession. - **Sridher Arumugham**, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, DigiKey. A Global CDO 100 honoree, Sridher has built data organizations across finance, software, and consulting. Now he's pioneering AI resilience across supply chains at DigiKey, the world's largest electronic component manufacturer. - **Kiran Panja**, Managing Director, CME Group. Kiran architects data infrastructure for the world's largest derivatives exchange. From regulated banking at Citi to enterprise cloud at IBM, he's mastered the trade-off between agility and governance - now he's solving it at market scale at CME Group. - **Mauro Flores**, EVP, Data Democratisation, Virgin Media O2. Mauro leads Virgin Media O2's mission to turn one of the UK's largest connectivity providers into an AI-ready, data-driven enterprise. Previously, he led global data strategies at Salesforce and Mulesoft, helping some of the world's largest companies scale governed, self-service analytics. - **Andrew Reiskind**, Chief Data Officer, Mastercard. Andrew spent 16+ years embedding privacy by design at Mastercard. Now he secures 160B+ AI-scanned transactions annually, proving governance accelerates innovation. He's building "Context by Design" for agentic commerce at Mastercard. ## Companies - **DigiKey**: One of the world's largest electronic component distributors, DigiKey serves 180+ countries with 16.5M+ products and 25,000 daily shipments. DigiKey is pioneering AI resilience for supply chains, in a market projected to grow from $3B to $31B by 2029. - **CME Group**: CME Group operates the world's largest derivatives marketplace, processing 30.2M contracts on average every day. A decade-long Google Cloud journey powers AI-ready, governed infrastructure at the speed and scale global markets demand. - **Mastercard**: Mastercard processes billions of transactions globally, with AI now powering 1/3 of its products. 160B+ transactions scanned annually by AI-driven fraud detection. 2,000+ specialists advance data & AI innovation under Data Responsibility Principles. - **Workday**: Workday is the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents - powering 11,000+ organizations including half the Fortune 500. - **Virgin Media O2**: Virgin Media O2 is not only one of the Europe's most recognized telecom brands, but also one of its most ambitious data and AI enterprises - powering national infrastructure, customer experience, and innovation through governed, context-rich data from one of the richest data platforms in Europe with 45M+ connections. ## What's inside For twenty years, data chased promises that never delivered. Now AI risks the same fate: 95% of GenAI projects fail to reach production. Drawing from the State of Data & AI Report 2025, this keynote uncovers the real reason - the AI context gap - and brings together six leading organizations showing how context makes the difference between AI pilots that stall and AI that ships. ### Key takeaways - Workday shows how human-readable governance fails AI: semantic layers must teach machines business language because AI hallucinates when it can't say "I don't know" - Mastercard demonstrates context by design for agentic commerce: moving from tribal knowledge to machine-readable context embedded in transactional data - CME Group proves context must move at market speed: automating enrichment to deliver AI-ready data in seconds across 18 million assets instead of weeks of manual work - DigiKey argues for context readiness before crisis: building shared meaning and ontologies proactively, not scrambling when supply chains break during disruptions - Marriott reveals "build to change" thinking: creating agile context layers that standardize metrics across 9 million assets without slowing thousands of global users - VMO2 demonstrates context for all 16,000 employees: scaling self-service through AI-powered discovery, data marketplaces, and context that makes adoption natural ## More from Re:Govern 2025 - [Modern Data & AI Governance Blueprint](https://atlan.com/blueprint) (resource) - [The Rise of the Enterprise Context Layer](https://atlan.com/know/ai-readiness/context-layer-101/) (resource) - [Context Engineering 101: How to Build a Deep Context Layer for AI Analysts](https://atlan.com/know/context-engineering-for-ai-analyst/) (resource)