DataConf 2026 Agenda

🤝 Visit our sponsors in the networking area!

8:00 - 9:00 Registration

9:00 - 10:15 Welcome & Panel Discussion 📍 Auditorium

Welcome

Mercia & Candice (your hosts)

with Nantes Kirsten, GM for AI at MTN South Africa

🎤 Panel Discussion

AI Has Changed the Game.
How Do We Lead the Craft?

10:15 - 10:40 Tea Break

Auditorium

Co-Lab

10:40 - 11:20 Session 1

Dr Thabang Mathonsi

Healthcare in the Age of Agents: The AI Paradigm Shift and its Impact in a Regulated World

Geoffrey Lydall

Intellectual and Emotional Obesity - Fast food in your brain

11:30 - 12:10 Session 2

Thato Mokoena

Trekking to the Data Promised Land: Building a Data Practice, Not a Data Team

Abia Duvenage

Thorough, Documented & Wrong: The Problems Methodology Can't Fix

12:20 - 13:00 Session 3

Paul Domanski

Vanta Rising: How I Built an AI-Native Operating System for a Global Brand House

Rishal Hurbans

The Algorithms Inside Generative AI

13:00 - 14:00 Lunch

14:00 - 14:40 Session 4

Carike Blignaut-Staden

Token Economics: The Hidden Cost of Every Prompt

Michael Victor

An Introduction to Data Science with the Help of Banana-Throwing Gorillas

14:50 - 15:30 Session 5

Daniel Acton

Building AI-Accelerated Data Teams: Sustainable Velocity Across Data Engineering, Analytics and BI

Mfundo Mbambo

What Does AI Think Africa Looks Like? An Experiment in LLM Bias

15:40 - 16:20 Session 6

Lisema Matsietsi

Take The Gap: The Journey from Data Specialist to Data Leader

James McGillivray

Turning Data into Stories People Remember

16:20 - 17:00 Data Mixer - Social and networking