From AI Pilots to Scalable Value

BARC Perspective: Why AI initiatives often fail to scale, and what organizations need to move from experimentation to value?

Title: Navigating the Future of Data & AI: A BARC Market Perspective

13:30 - 14:30

An independent market perspective from BARC, one of Europe’s leading analyst firms in data, analytics, and AI. Discover the latest market trends, emerging technologies, investment priorities, and strategic developments that are shaping the future of the industry.

Title: Who Owns the Truth About Our Media? Data Governance from the VRT Archive's Perspective - Koen Renders

How do broadcasters ensure accountability, traceability, and trust in an increasingly AI-driven media ecosystem? This session shares lessons learned from VRT’s data governance journey and explores the role of metadata, provenance, and semantic standards in managing media assets at scale.

Title: Vendor Presentation

15:15 - 16:00

Short Description

Coffee, Finger Food & Community Networking

16:00 - 16:30

16:30 - 17:30

Short Description

17:30 - 18:30

Following BARC’s independent market outlook, a panel of Belgian business and technology leaders reflects on the implications for the local market. Which trends are already shaping Belgian organizations, where are the biggest opportunities and challenges, and what should leaders prioritize in the years ahead?

Closing Session: Data Engine Thinking with AI- Roelant Vos

18:30 - 19:30

Discover how metadata-driven design, automation, and AI can accelerate data integration and delivery by transforming data models and business knowledge into automated, scalable data solutions.

Food, Drinks & Peer-to-Peer Conversations

19:30 - 22:00

An exclusive opportunity for peer-to-peer discussions and knowledge sharing, complemented by outstanding food and drinks prepared by renowned chef Jeroen De Pauw.

Speakers

Koen Renders, VRT

Koen Renders (°1973) has spent 26 years at VRT, where his work has naturally evolved alongside the changing landscape of media archives, metadata, and technology. He started out as a music archivist, developing deep expertise in audio collections and the descriptive practices that make them usable. From there, he moved into the role of product owner for the broadcaster’s successive search tools and the DAM/AAM systems for music content management, bridging the worlds of archivists, developers, and end users. 

Following the merger of the company’s archive departments, he now works as Data Manager at the Archives, part of a team responsible for data governance, metadata quality, and the archive’s evolving role in an AI-driven media landscape — with a remit spanning all media types, from news and radio to streaming fiction and multimedia publishing. 

Most recently, he contributed to MOSAIC, a European Commission–funded project (November 2024 – May 2026) developing a platform of AI services for metadata and content enrichment of audiovisual media. Within the project, his focus was researching ontologies and the use of EBUCorePlus for data exchange between broadcaster archives. 

Filip Van den Abeele

Filip Van den Abeele is an independent pipeline engineer and internationally recognised expert in the oil and gas industry. As former Head of Science at VRT, Belgium’s public broadcaster, he became known for his ability to explain complex scientific and technical topics in an accessible and engaging way, often with a touch of humour.

A highly appreciated moderator, keynote speaker, and panel host, Filip is known for bringing fresh perspectives and thought-provoking insights to discussions on technology, energy, and innovation.

In addition to his media and communication activities, he is the founder of Subseawolf, a successful engineering consultancy specialising in the design, installation, and management of pipelines and offshore infrastructure.

Together with Lieven Scheire, he co-authored What If Oil Runs Out?, a widely acclaimed book exploring the future of energy. Combining scientific rigor with practical realism, the book examines both conventional and renewable energy sources while challenging common misconceptions about the energy transition.

Roelant Vos

Having worked as a consultant, engineer, trainer, software vendor, and decision maker in the corporate world, I bring a broad perspective on data management shaped by diverse roles and experiences.

A consistent theme throughout my career has been a passion for automation & code generation, reusable patterns, and model-driven design.

I believe these are fundamental to making data solutions simpler, more manageable, and more flexible – ultimately delivering greater business value.

My approaches, frameworks, and implementation techniques are published as Data Engine Thinking and shared regularly at www.roelantvos.com. Through Agnostic Data Labs, I’m also developing free-to-use software to put these concepts into practice.

Session Synopsis

Navigating the Future of Data & AI: A BARC Market Perspective – BARC Fellow

In this opening keynote, a BARC Fellow will provide an independent analyst perspective on the rapidly evolving landscape of Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. Drawing on extensive market research, vendor evaluations, and interactions with leading organizations across Europe, the session will highlight the most important trends, emerging technologies, and strategic priorities shaping the future of the industry.

Participants will gain insights into how organizations are progressing in their AI journey, where investments are being made, and which capabilities are becoming critical for creating sustainable business value. The presentation will also explore the changing roles of data governance, operating models, cloud platforms, and AI-driven innovation in an increasingly competitive and regulated environment.

Beyond technology, the session will address the organizational and cultural challenges that often determine success or failure. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of the opportunities, risks, and key decisions facing business and technology leaders as they navigate the next phase of data and AI transformation.

Who Owns the Truth About Our Media? Data Governance from the VRT Archive’s Perspective – Koen Renders

In a public broadcaster producing everything from breaking news and radio to streaming drama and multimedia-enriched articles, metadata is created everywhere — but accountability for it is rarely defined. Descriptions flow into the archive from many directions: through integrations with planning systems and publication platforms, through manual updates from spreadsheets, and through workflows the archive sometimes only discovers after the fact. Each route carries its own assumptions about quality, completeness, and meaning — assumptions made by teams describing content for their own immediate needs, not for its long-term life. As AI enters production and distribution workflows, the question of who governs media data is no longer academic: it determines whether content remains findable, reusable, rights-cleared, and trustworthy — and for a public broadcaster, whether it can honour its mandate as custodian of audiovisual heritage. 

This talk shares insights from an ongoing data governance exercise at VRT, approached deliberately from the archive’s vantage point. We examine three intertwined questions. First, where do the responsibilities of the archive end and those of production and data teams begin — and what happens in the gaps between them? Second, how do we establish traceability in an era of AI-generated and AI-modified content, where provenance is both harder to capture and more critical than ever? Third, can shared ontologies — specifically EBUCorePlus — serve as a backbone for company-wide governance across radically different media types, or do they promise more interoperability than they deliver in practice? 

Rather than presenting a finished framework, this talk offers an honest look at the tensions, trade-offs, and early lessons of governing data in an organisation where a news clip, a podcast episode, and a fiction series must somehow live in the same information ecosystem — and where the archive may be the only team with a view across all of it. 

Data Engine Thinking with AI – Roelant Vos

Truly understanding data takes time. It requires gathering deep insights about how data is used, defining data models, and iteratively improving them to accurately represent what is happening (or should be happening) with the data. This work constantly changes both the design and the implementation: the physical data model, the mappings, and the data logistics processes that move, interpret, and transform the data.

Data Engine Thinking treats this as a design problem. By capturing the design as structured, version-controlled metadata and recognising the recurring patterns in how data is integrated, the implementation can be automated. Deterministic templates turn metadata into code, documentation, and deployment artefacts. The design becomes the durable asset, and the generated output stays predictable and repeatable.

AI is a form of automation too, which raises the obvious question: where does it fit when it comes to data logistics? Generating code is easy these days, so can it take over the traditional, often laborious work of data integration, and how far can it go?

This session offers a practical, in-depth look at automating data solutions based on the Data Engine Thinking mindset, together with a grounded view of where AI genuinely helps, where it should be kept away, and how to draw that line with confidence. You will leave with patterns and principles you can apply directly to your own data solutions.