Most of the work on a conference program is saying no. For BIAAS 2027 we have cut a lot of session ideas, including some that were well written by people who clearly know their subject. These are the tests we use.
Four reasons a session does not make it
It answers a question the room has already settled. Our delegates run data, analytics and AI functions in large organisations. Many of the debates that filled agendas in 2024 and 2025 are closed for them, and a session that reopens one costs them an hour.
The title is a format. "A fireside chat on AI" tells a delegate who is speaking and how, and nothing about what they will learn. We ask for a topic first and decide the format afterwards.
It is about the audience’s job titles. A session on the evolving role of the chief data officer tells chief data officers about a job they already do every day.
It restages a platform argument the market has moved past. Buyers in the room have made most of these choices. What they need now is help living with them.
What we are looking for
The sessions that survive deal with commercial and structural questions that are only now arriving. A few we would particularly like speakers to take on:
- What AI inference does to gross margin once it moves from an innovation budget into the cost of goods.
- How agents change software pricing that was built on seats.
- What happens to procurement when machines do part of the buying.
- Who carries the liability when an agent causes harm.
- What a business does when a model it depends on is deprecated.
- Where tomorrow’s senior analysts come from if AI takes the junior work.
- How to consolidate an estate after several years of experiments.
You will notice that our session descriptions on the agenda are broad. They are written as briefs for speakers. We keep statistics out of them on purpose, so that each speaker brings their own evidence.
If you have done the work
The proposals we look for describe something the speaker did, what it cost, what went wrong and what they would change. If that sounds like you, the speaker application is open.