AI Needs Context. Where Does it Come From?
Join Actian and Solita during Helsinki Data Week for an afternoon exploring how data catalogues and enterprise knowledge are evolving to give AI the context it needs to understand and act.
Date: 29 October 2026
Time: 15:00–17:00 | Drinks & snacks afterwards
Location: Solita office, Helsinki
What We’ll Explore
AI can access more enterprise data than ever, but access alone does not give it understanding. For AI to deliver reliable answers and act effectively, it needs the context behind the data: what it means, how it relates and how it is used across the organisation.
Together, Actian and Solita will explore:
- How AI is changing data catalogues and the way organisations discover, organise and use enterprise data.
- Why AI needs an enterprise context layer that connects data, metadata, content and organisational knowledge.
- How to start building trusted context for AI, bringing together structured, unstructured and tacit knowledge.
How AI is changing data catalogues and the way organisations discover, organise and use enterprise data.Join us for two expert perspectives, followed by an opportunity to continue the conversation over drinks and snacks.
Register Now
(i.e. sales@..., support@...)
Venue: Solita
Solita’s Helsinki office is located in Citycenter, Keskuskatu 8B, right in the city centre and just a short walk from Helsinki Central Station. The location is easy to reach by public transport and conveniently close to the Helsinki Data Week Opening Event, making it easy to join us as part of your Data Week programme.
Agenda
How Data Catalogs are Changing in the Era of AI
Speaker: Ole Olesen-Bagneux, Chief Evangelist at Actian
When Microsoft joined forces with OpenAI to bring conversational search to Bing, Satya Nadella called it “a new day for search”. AI is now bringing a similar shift to data catalogs, which have long served as the search engines for enterprise data.
As AI changes how organisations find and use information, data catalogs need to support new ways of organising and searching data: with AI, by AI, without human intervention and for AI itself. This session explores how AI is changing data discovery, how the role of the data catalog is evolving, and what organisations need to consider as AI becomes an increasingly important consumer of enterprise data.
The session draws on Ole Olesen-Bagneux’s forthcoming second edition of The Enterprise Data Catalog, published by O’Reilly.
Building the Company Brain: The Enterprise Context Layer for AI-Ready Organizations
Speaker: Juha-Pekka Joutsenlahti is Data Catalog Practice Lead and Data Advisor at Solita
AI is fundamentally changing how businesses operate. Processes are being redesigned around agents, and new business models are emerging. Rather than programming every step, we increasingly define the goal and let AI determine how to achieve it. This shift succeeds only when AI understands the business context in which it operates. Today, that knowledge is scattered across data platforms, documents, systems, and people leading to inaccurate AI.
The enterprise context layer brings it together into the company brain. If the brain needs memory, the context layer is its long-term memory: governed, durable knowledge of what the organization knows, what its data means, and how its concepts relate. Approaches like LLMWikis act more like short-term memory. They capture fast-moving knowledge quickly, but they need the long-term layer to stay consistent and trustworthy.
This session explores how to get started building it. We look at how structured data, unstructured content, and tacit organizational knowledge come together into trusted meaning, and how intent, meaning, and the model’s context window connect.
Our Speakers
Ole Olesen-Bagneux
VP, Chief Evangelist, Actian
Ole Olesen-Bagneux is a globally recognized thought leader in metadata management and enterprise data architecture. As VP, Chief Evangelist at Actian, he drives industry awareness and adoption of modern approaches to data intelligence, drawing on his extensive expertise in data management, metadata, data catalogs, and decentralized architectures.
An accomplished author, Ole has written The Enterprise Data Catalog (O’Reilly, 2023). He recently published Fundamentals of Metadata Management (O’Reilly, 2025), introducing a novel metadata architecture known as the Meta Grid. With a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Copenhagen, his unique perspective bridges traditional information science with modern data management. Before joining Actian, Ole served as Chief Evangelist at Zeenea, where he played a key role in shaping and communicating the company’s technology vision. His industry experience includes leadership roles in enterprise architecture and data strategy at major pharmaceutical companies, such as Novo Nordisk.
Ole is passionate about scalable metadata architectures, knowledge graphs, and enabling organizations to make data truly discoverable and usable.
Juha-Pekka Joutsenlahti
Data Catalog Practice Lead and Data Advisor, Solita
Juha-Pekka Joutsenlahti is Data Catalog Practice Lead and Data Advisor at Solita. He helps large Nordic organizations build the data foundations that enable their AI readiness. He believes AI’s biggest bottleneck isn’t technology but shared meaning, and his work focuses on building that shared meaning, from data strategy and information modelling to metadata management, ontologies & knowledge graphs, and data & AI governance.
