Striking a Balance Between Innovation and Governance in Data & AI
Thursday 16th July | 5:30pm - 7pm
Join the Eden Smith team, along with Nicola Askham and Kumutha Swampillai, for an evening of discussion on the importance of governance in Data & AI.
Chatham House rules apply.
About the Speakers
Kumutha Swampillai, PhD is an AI and Data Science leader with 17 years' experience across FTSE 100 organisations and high-growth scale-ups.
At LexisNexis Intellectual Property, she led the delivery of Protégé, a conversational agentic AI system built into PatentSight+, from concept to launch in 11 months.
Previously as Director of Data Science at Intent HQ, her team won AI Company of the Year 2024 at the British Data Awards, delivering privacy-safe behavioural AI for major telecoms and media clients. Before that, she spent several years at Accenture building AI strategy and production systems for UK financial institutions, and earlier researched speech recognition at Nuance Communications.
Kumutha is drawn to problems that once seemed out of reach, where AI, applied thoughtfully, opens up something genuinely new. She cares as much about the team and culture as the technology, because one without the other rarely ships. And she's built her career at the crossroads of deep technical expertise and commercial strategy, because that's where the most interesting problems live.
Nicola Askham
The Data Governance Coach
Nicola Askham is one of the UK's leading authorities on data governance, widely recognised as "The Data Governance Coach." With more than 24 years of experience, she helps organisations build practical, sustainable data governance frameworks that improve data quality, support AI initiatives, and enable better business decision-making.
As the founder of Nicola Askham Ltd, Nicola provides consulting, executive coaching and training to organisations across sectors including financial services, insurance, retail, utilities, higher education, defence, media and technology. Her approach focuses on simplifying complex governance challenges into practical, business-focused solutions that gain stakeholder buy-in and deliver measurable value.
Nicola is a respected thought leader within the global data community. She serves as a Director and Committee Member of DAMA UK, sits on the expert panel for DataQualityPro, and is a regular international keynote speaker on topics including data governance, data quality, data literacy and AI readiness. She has also been recognised as one of the DataIQ 100 Most Influential People in Data and has received multiple industry awards for her contribution to data governance education.
About the Talks
Getting Agentic AI Out the Door: A Practitioner's View
Kumutha Swampillai
In May 2026, LexisNexis Intellectual Property launched Protégé, a conversational agentic AI built into PatentSight+ that turns complex patent data into plain-language, decision-ready insights in minutes, reducing analyst effort by up to 90%. Getting there in 11 months was an exercise in moving fast without cutting the corners that matter.
In this talk, Kumutha Swampillai shares what that journey actually looked like from the inside, the realities of building and shipping agentic AI in an enterprise context, and how the principles of responsible AI weren't constraints on innovation but the scaffolding that made it possible.
She'll cover how building the evaluation harness became an unexpected forcing function for alignment across commercial, product, and technical teams; and how human IP experts were embedded throughout development to surface domain nuance, catch misinterpretations, and ensure Protégé reflected the way skilled analysts actually think.
An honest, practitioner's perspective on what responsible AI innovation looks like when the pressure is real and the timeline is short.
