Expert Panel: AI Runs on Data Pipelines: Modernizing Data Movement for the AI-Ready Enterprise
Webinar Speaker: Fern Halper, TDWI VP Research, Senior Research Director for Advanced Analytics
Date: Monday, April 20, 2026
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
Organizations are running into a hard reality with AI: progress stalls without a strong data foundation. TDWI research consistently shows that many enterprises are still unable to operationalize AI against their own data, limiting value to productivity gains from generic, external tools. A key issue is data movement. Manual, brittle pipelines remain one of the top data management challenges, slowing access to trusted, analytics-ready data.
As generative AI scales, and as agentic AI introduces greater speed, autonomy, and complexity, these limitations become more severe. Without modern, automated pipelines, organizations cannot deliver the timely, governed data required to support reliable AI outcomes.
Join TDWI VP of Research Fern Halper and experts from Fivetran as they examine how modernizing data pipelines is becoming essential for AI success. This panel will explore how organizations are rethinking data integration and movement to support scalable, production-ready AI across cloud and lakehouse environments. Topics include:
- The impact of fragmented and manual pipelines on AI deployment and scale
- Strategies for modernizing data integration to support generative and agentic AI
- Approaches to delivering trusted, analytics-ready data across distributed platforms
- The role of automation in improving pipeline reliability, speed, and governance
Guest Speaker
Kelly Kohlleffel
Senior Global Director, Partner Sales Engineering
Fivetran
Kelly leads the Fivetran Global Partner Sales Engineering organization where he works with a broad ecosystem of technology partners and consulting services partners on modern approaches to data products and solutions. He also hosts the Fivetran Data Drip podcast where some of the brightest minds across the data community talk about their data journey, vision, and challenges.
Kelly previously led the Hashmap (acquired by NTT DATA) Go To Market team providing consulting services and solutions for the modern data stack. He also hosted Hashmap on Tap, a weekly podcast focused on data company founders and industry leaders. Kelly enjoys all aspects of the data industry and before Hashmap helped grow Hortonworks across the energy industry and worked closely with enterprise clients as Key Account Director at Oracle.
He’s also passionate about his family, and when he gets the chance to unplug from tech for a while, you can catch him (usually with a family member) on the tennis court, basketball court, or the lake in a kayak.
Date: April 20, 2026
Time: 9:00 am PT
Fern Halper, Ph.D.