About the Lounge

Leading a decision science capability, while balancing competing demands of the board with your team's needs, can leave you feeling isolated.

The Eden Smith Lounge can be your salvation.

Your cohort of insight leaders face similar challenges as you, with whom you can leverage shared experience and find companionship at the same time.

Join our Guest Speakers on Thursday, 16th July, for another lively evening in the 'lounge'

Your AI strategy has a people-shaped hole in it

Organisations are racing to adopt AI, but most are skipping the foundational work that makes AI trustworthy and effective: the people, processes and data governance behind it.

This session looks at why AI strategy so often overlooks the human and organisational side, and what data governance practitioners need to do differently as AI changes the stakes (though not necessarily the fundamentals) of their work.

Key Takeaways:

• Why AI adoption is exposing data governance gaps that already existed
• What's genuinely new about AI governance versus what's the same old data discipline in new clothes
• Practical first steps for embedding governance into AI initiatives without becoming the department that says no

Getting Agentic AI Out the Door: A Practitioner's View

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.

Nicola Askham

The Data Governance Coach

Known as The Data Governance Coach, Nicola helps organisations understand and manage their data better.

For over two decades, she has helped organisations reduce costs and inefficiencies. Typically, people turn to her because their data is a mess and they need help unravelling it, or because they realise that new initiatives are failing because of poor-quality data.

As well as providing coaching and consulting, she also runs training courses because she feels it is important to give people the skills to make sure that data is used to solve problems and make better-informed decisions.

Nicola initially worked for a leading UK Bank and moved into consultancy in 2009. Since then, she has worked with clients across a wide range of sectors.

Nicola was a Committee Member of DAMA UK for 13 years, and she regularly writes, presents and creates videos, blogs and a podcast on data governance best practice. She has written a book: Effective Data Governance, published in February 2026.

Kumutha Swampillai

Director of Data & AI Science

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.