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Ten questions worth bringing to BIAAS 2027

A preparation sheet for delegates. Pick three, write them on a card, and ask them in a session, on a panel and in a 1-on-1 meeting.

Harsh6 October 2026 · 3 min read

BIAAS 2027 runs on 23 and 24 March in Amsterdam, with keynotes, panels and 1-on-1 meetings. The delegates who get the most from two days like that usually arrive with a few sharp questions and ask each one more than once. A speaker’s answer on stage and a peer’s answer over coffee rarely match, and the difference is often the useful part.

Here are ten we would ask ourselves. Each has a note on what a good answer contains. Print the sheet, choose the three that matter most to your team this quarter and leave the rest.

Value and decisions

Question 1

Which measure told you the project had worked, and over what period?

Listen for a named measure, a baseline and a time window. In McKinsey’s 2026 survey 37% of respondents reported some EBIT impact from AI and about 6% reported 5% or more, so a specific answer is rarer than it should be.1
Question 2

Who owns the workflow now, and what did they change about it?

Listen for a business owner and a process that changed. Nearly three-quarters of McKinsey’s high performers had redesigned workflows.1
Question 3

Which decision was this built to support, and who answers for that decision?

Listen for one named decision and one named person. Gartner forecasts modelled decisions will be five times more trusted and 80% faster than ungoverned ones by 2029.2

Data and BI foundations

Question 4

Where do your definitions of revenue, customer and margin live, and who can change them?

Listen for one owner per term and a single place where definitions are held. Gartner recommends a context layer as core infrastructure.3
Question 5

Which data did you have to fix before anything else was worth doing?

Listen for concrete work: ownership, quality tests, pipelines. Data quality management topped BARC’s 2026 rankings of practitioner priorities.4
Question 6

How many of your dashboards would you retire tomorrow, and how do you know?

Listen for usage data, owners and a retirement process. An answer based on a feeling usually means nobody has counted.

AI in production

Question 7

What stopped a pilot from reaching production, and what fixed it?

Listen for a specific obstacle and a specific fix. In MIT NANDA’s review, 5% of custom enterprise AI tools reached production.5
Question 8

What can your agent do without a person approving it, and what does each run cost?

Listen for permissions, approval thresholds, a stop switch and a unit cost. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027, with cost among the reasons.6

Governance and culture

Question 9

Which of your AI systems have you classified as high-risk, and how did you decide?

Listen for an inventory and a written rationale. High-risk obligations for Annex III systems apply from 2 December 2027.7
Question 10

What did you do to get people to trust the numbers and use them?

Listen for something specific about people and process. In a Gartner survey from March 2026, cultural resistance outweighed funding as the main reason governance initiatives fail, by 60% to 40%.8

In a 1-on-1 meeting

Meetings are short. Open with your question, skip the company introduction and ask for one example. Offer your own answer in return, because the best of these conversations are exchanges. Write down numbers and names as you go, and end by asking what they would do differently if they started again.

Sources

All sources were published in 2025 or 2026.

  1. The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROIMcKinsey & Company, 25 August 2026
  2. Gartner Identifies the Top Trends for Data and AnalyticsGartner, 16 June 2026
  3. Gartner Says Lack of Semantics Causes Inaccurate Artificial Intelligence Agents and Wasted SpendingGartner, 11 May 2026
  4. BARC Data, BI and Analytics Trend Monitor 2026BARC, November 2025
  5. MIT Report Finds Most AI Business Investments Fail, Reveals "GenAI Divide" (coverage of MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025)Virtualization Review, 19 August 2025
  6. Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027Gartner, 25 June 2025
  7. The Digital AI Omnibus: deferral of high-risk AI obligations under the AI ActDLA Piper, 30 June 2026, updated 10 August 2026
  8. Gartner Predicts 60% of Organizations That Ignore Data Governance Culture Challenges Will Fail to Govern AI Successfully by 2027Gartner, 21 September 2026

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Two days of keynotes, panels and 1-on-1 meetings with senior data, analytics and AI leaders, on 23-24 March 2027.

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