From Back Office to Boardroom: The CDO's AI Opportunity with Ryan den Rooijen & Wade Munsie

Mar 19, 2025

57:11

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As technology rapidly evolves and businesses focus on getting real results, data jobs are shifting. Many data tasks now fall under the CIO or CTO, data leaders are moving into roles that affect bigger business plans, and more companies are using self-service data tools or seeking a path to AI—making CDO-led teams less necessary. How can data leaders adapt?

In this episode of Data Radicals, Satyen Sangani talks with Ryan den Rooijen, Writer and Consultant at Qstar.ai, and Wade Munsie, Interim Director of Data & AI at Heathrow. With years of experience in data leadership, Ryan and Wade explore how the CDO role is changing, the challenges in data and AI, and why the job isn’t always what people expect.

Listen to this episode to learn:

The future of data leadership, including how AI is changing the way we use data and why it's important to stay flexible and focused on real business results.
Why data leaders need to go beyond their usual tasks and help improve the whole business.
How AI and smart computer systems are shaping data management and what these new technologies could mean for the future of the industry.

From capitalizing on generative AI to redefining the CDO role, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge for anyone looking to understand the real-world challenges and opportunities in the data landscape. Tune in to hear practical advice and visionary thoughts from top data leaders.

*Satyen’s narration was created using AI

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“ For many of these organizations, there really is an onus on people like ourselves to prove ourselves in the organization. I think the biggest data culture challenge is really how do we make ourselves relevant to the day-to-day of the employee? How do we make sure that if somebody is on an oil rig or in a store or in a call center or on a trading floor or in a lab, they are going to do something different because of us? Because if they're not doing something different because of us, then honestly, we don't deserve to be here.” – Ryan den Rooijen

“ Traditionally, CDOs were in place to wrangle and collate the data and curate the data to a point that it was perfect. That was the ideal for a long time. I think that's probably an impossible task these days with all the different types of unstructured data around there. But also, is it needed? If we keep pushing for that nth degree, you are never going to achieve it. If you keep pushing for that from a quality point of view and a curation point of view, you forget about why you were there in the first place, which is value. If you don't get to that value point quick enough, it's very hard to explain why you were owed that budget in the first place, where all that cost went.” – Wade Munsie

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Time Stamps

*(02:23): Why is the chief data officer in trouble?

*(12:00): The CDO as a transformational role

*(23:52): Redefining data culture as value-driven

*(32:50): Data leaders as systems thinkers

*(45:09): How will AI impact data teams?

*(55:48): Satyen’s Takeaways

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This podcast is presented by Alation.

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