Big Data LDN 2026 · Olympia London

Scaling AI Starts Here

Our CEO Huw Ringer joins the panel on what it actually takes to move AI out of the pilot stage and into something an enterprise can run. Everything he references on stage is on this page, free, with no form to fill in.

Panel session

Scaling AI Starts Here: The Enterprise Strategy for Lasting Success

Date
Wednesday 23 September
Time
15:20 – 15:50
Venue
Olympia London
Huw Ringer
Huw Ringer
CEO, Smart Associates Limited

The work behind the panel

Three pieces of material built over the past year, covering the same ground the panel does. All of it is free and none of it is a product pitch.

Guide · PDF

Intelligent Analytics: A Practical Guide

Ten parts on what to keep, what to replace and what to build. Analytical maturity, the honest limits of LLMs, text-to-SQL, proportionate governance, and why waiting for better AI is a strategic error.

PDF, no registration required

Building at the Speed of Thought, narrated talk
Talk · Narrated video

Building at the Speed of Thought

What happened when a small database engineering company used AI to build five commercial products in weeks rather than years. Why thirty years of domain expertise was the real force multiplier, and why the engineering turned out to be the easy part.

Opens on YouTube

Tool · Free assessment

AI Readiness Assessment

Score your data environment across six dimensions and get a report back: a board-ready executive summary with a radar chart, findings and risks per dimension, and a prioritised 90 day action plan.

20 to 40 minutes, free, no card required

Three things I keep coming back to

If you only take three things away from the session, make it these.

1

Expertise is the multiplier

Not the tool
  • AI did not do the hard part. Knowing what to build is the hard part.
  • The diagnostic instincts that take fifteen years to develop live in people, not documentation.
  • That knowledge is exactly what makes AI useful, and it cannot be generated.
2

API-first is the prerequisite

Composable by design
  • Codify each piece of expertise as a small endpoint that answers one question.
  • AI orchestrates composable endpoints into workflows. It cannot orchestrate a monolith.
  • Extend what you already have rather than starting again.
3

The bottleneck moves

And nobody plans for it
  • When delivery collapses from weeks to hours, engineering capacity stops being the constraint.
  • Deciding what to build becomes the thing that holds you up.
  • Planning frameworks built around slow delivery need to change with it.

We keep databases running. Then we make them smarter.

Smart Associates has spent over twenty years on the platforms most people will not touch. That grounding is what makes our view on AI a practical one rather than a hopeful one.

  • Ex-Netezza engineers. The people who built and supported the platform, still supporting it.
  • Production, not pilots. Everything discussed on stage is running in a real business.
  • Offices in Surrey and Auckland. Support that follows the sun.

The products the talk is about

If the session prompts a question about any of these, the detail is here.

Smart Management Frameworks

Database automation and management, built from thirty-eight thousand lines of encoded operational experience.

Explore SMF →

Smart Data Frameworks

Data movement and transformation that treats every step as a composable, orchestratable endpoint.

Explore SDF →

Feature Factory

Machine learning feature engineering in the database, so the data never has to leave to become useful.

Explore Feature Factory →

Come and find us at the show

If the session raises something you want to talk through properly, get in touch and we will sort out a time during the two days or straight afterwards.

Arrange a conversation