Conference 2026 Agenda

This agenda is tentative and subject to change.
Click here to view Saturday’s Event Agenda

Friday, October 16, 2026
Noon - 5:30 pm
Benson & Edith Ford Conference Center
College for Creative Studies, Detroit

Thank you to Hackathon Sponsors

Presenting

Silver+

10:30 - 11:00 AM Ask Me Anything Session

11:00 AM - Noon Registration / Networking

Noon - 12:15 PM Welcome

12:15 - 12:30 PM Break

12:30 - 5:15 PM Hackathon

12:30 - 2:30 PM Workshops / Demos Session I
“Office Hours”

2:30 - 3:00 PM Break

3:00 - 5:00 PM Workshops / Demos Session II
“Office Hours”

5:00 - 5:15 PM Open networking

5:15 - 5:30 PM Closing announcements

6:30 - 8:30 PM VIP Welcome Reception (By invite only)


Ask Me Anything

10:30 - 11:00 AM

Hosted by Jean-Georges Perrin

In-person AMA! Special Detroit edition, live at the 2026 Data in the D Conference.

Questions are welcome — especially ahead of time, ideally via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgperrin

Hackathon
AI at Work: Hack the Everyday

12:15 - 5:15 Pm

What could you build with AI if you had 5 hours, powerful data, and no limits on your imagination? Find out at our upcoming hackathon, AI at Work: Hack the Everyday — an opportunity to get hands-on with how AI is changing data workflows and put AI coding agents to work designing and deploying real data solutions.

Choose from three challenge tracks, designed with data analysts and engineers in mind — but everyone is welcome to participate!

Track 1: AI-Powered Analysis

Use AI to uncover valuable meaning from data and create visual analyses that would be difficult or impossible to complete in five hours without AI.

Track 2: AI-Powered Productivity

Build an AI-based tool, agent, automation, or workflow that accelerates everyday data work — from agentic pipeline reliability to skills for more trusted data analysis.

Track 3: Data Products for People

Create a product for a specific end-user that helps them uncover insights from the data that matters to them — whether that's a conversational interface, an app, or something entirely new.

And you won't be starting from scratch. Every participant will receive a full 30-day Snowflake trial, including access to Snowflake's AI capabilities, plus three custom datasets designed specifically for the challenge tracks. At the end, teams will present their creations to our judges, with prizes up for grabs!

Come ready to experiment, build, break things, and see what's possible when AI meets data.

Workshops & Demos Session I

12:30 - 2:30 PM

Powering AI Workflows: A Hands-On Guide to Modern Data Pipelines

Dive into a two-hour interactive workshop on building modern, end-to-end data pipelines. Through live demos and hands-on labs, you'll learn how to extract complex enterprise data from SAP ERP, orchestrate and transform it, and connect governed data to AI workflows through agentic platforms.

Huddle Up: An AI Analytics Lab with Omni

We’ll open with a quick look at Omni: what it is, why brands like BuzzFeed, Mercury, and Condé Nast run on it, and a few of our favorite demos. Then it’s your turn to get hands-on with the Kaggle Big Data Bowl 2026 dataset in your own Omni environment (bring your laptop). You’ll ask questions of the data in plain English, have AI build a dashboard, use Excel-style calculations, and describe an app idea for Omni to build in front of you. The best apps win Lions-themed swag and bragging rights. Seats for hands-on participation may be limited, so arrive early.

Office Hours for Salesforce Tableau and MotherDuck

Talk with their teams about scenarios specific to your role / your organization, ask more detailed questions, gain a better understanding of their products and services, etc.

Workshops & Demos Session II

3:00 - 5:00 PM

The Tableau Demo will include 3 use case based highlights at 3:00 & 4:00 covering:

  • Tableau Knowledge - Power trustworthy AI agents with unified enterprise knowledge

  • Tableau MCP (The Power of Tableau + Your Agent of Choice) - Deploy on any surface to enable trusted answers anywhere

  • Tableau Studio - An AI-assisted workspace for building dashboards, data analyses, and data applications

Raw Source to Data App in One Conversation: The Agentic Warehouse

Agents simultaneously allow data teams to have larger impact and democratize self-service analytics in a way that prior generations of tooling could not. However, it's not enough to just give Claude a data warehouse connection string. Your agents need an end to end view of your data platform, your business context, and how consumers analyze the data. You want to be able to ingest, transform, and visualize in the same conversation, with the agent you are already using.

This hands on workshop will take the audience from zero to end to end pipelines created by agents. In as little as a single prompt, the MotherDuck platform can ingest data with Python, transform it with Python or SQL, curate business context about that data, and then visualize it in a highly interactive and shareable data app. No prior experience is needed, but there will still be plenty of best practices for even savvy AI users. Everything is still manually controllable if desired as well. While MotherDuck is the example provider, the audience will also learn the art of the possible and be able to better architect their own data platforms.

Office Hours for dbt / Fivetran and Omni

Talk with their teams about scenarios specific to your role / your organization, ask more detailed questions, gain a better understanding of their products and services, etc.