Meetup #18

About this event

Hello everyone and welcome to the Data & AI London meetup. We are excited to share the line-up for the 18th edition of the London Data & AI meetup. Check out these talks and reserve your spot - seating is limited and available on a first come first serve basis. Talk 1 - Stop Talking About Data Quality: What Really Matters About Your Data in the Age of AI (Chris Young) Our data needs to be cleaner before we can do AI." It's one of the most common reasons organisations give for not starting, and it's usually the wrong one. Legacy data is always dirty, and cleaning it at source can break the systems that run the business. Drawing on 20+ years of moving data from one place to another, Chris Young argues that waiting for clean data is often just a reason to delay. He'll show why starting from a real business problem matters more than a perfect data estate, and how AI can be put to work assessing, working around and correcting messy data itself. Talk 2 - Demystifying Local AI: How to Run LLMs on Your Own Hardware (Alistair Heath) Explore the architecture, privacy benefits, and practical use cases of local AI, and discover how to run open source models on your own machines to seamlessly power the AI tools and chat interfaces you already know and love. Talk 3 - Raise the Enterprise Ceiling (Matt Phillips) Two people with full-time jobs built a production-grade AI product in their evenings and weekends. Agents did almost all of the work across the whole business, not only the code. The models they used are the same ones most enterprises already pay for. So why do enterprises get so much less from them? This talk argues that the limit is not the model. It is the organisation around the model: gates where there should be guardrails, context split across teams and permissions, and work that passes from person to person. Matt Phillips names six conditions that let a small team use frontier models to their full ability. He then shows how a large organisation can raise its own ceiling. Please aim to arrive at 6pm. The talks will start around 6.30pm (give or take a few mins) and there will be pizza and refreshments as always on arrival :) Look forward to seeing you all soon!