600 people gathered from across Scotland, the rest of the UK and abroad to attend this year’s sold-out DataFest conference at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms in May.
A focus on intelligent futures
Hosted by The Data Lab, Scotland’s Innovation Centre for data and AI, the event brought together participants from industry, academia, the public and third sectors to explore how data and AI are shaping our society under the theme “Intelligent Futures.”
Balancing practical industry applications with broader considerations of governance, accountability, and trust in AI, the programme examined how data and AI are transforming the systems, industries, and societies of tomorrow.
Highlights from the programme
The conference included presentations from a range of speakers, capturing key debates taking place across business, government and wider society:
- Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, the self-described “pathological optimist”, shared perspectives on providing factual, transparent information online
- Dex Hunter-Torricke, Founder of The Center for Tomorrow, previously at SpaceX and Google DeepMind, covered agentic AI and the future of leaders, reflecting on his time at major tech companies.
- Dr Julia Stamm, Founder of She Shapes AI, emphasised the importance of human-focused approaches in AI design and the value of maintaining diversity in innovation.
- Georgia Channing, AI for Science Lead at Hugging Face, discussed scaling up science in the era of agents.
- Colin Nwachukwu Ife, Head of Risk, Geordie AI, explored the reality of how enterprise AI is evolving.
- Professor Rachel Adams, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, spoke about why AI has done so little to engender global change and outlined three competing visions of how AI might address poverty.
- Dr Carl Strathearn, a lecturer in computer science and researcher in autonomous social robotics at Edinburgh Napier, spoke about humanoid robots and the laws needed to keep us safe.
Access to recordings
For those who wish to revisit the keynote speeches, recordings of the keynote sessions are now available on The Data Lab Community, our online community of data and AI professionals, which is free to join.
To watch these sessions, please visit community.thedatalab.com/page/datafest-2026.
DataFest 2027
Dates for next year’s conference have already been announced and will take place at Assembly Rooms again on the 12th and 13th of May 2027. A limited number of super early-bird tickets are available at datafest.global/tickets.
