Welcome back to This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast, where Brendan sits back down with co-host Lenno, a Chief Data Officer freshly returned to the Hot Topics CDO list, for a conversation about everything that happens before AI gets to be the exciting part.

Brendan and Lenno dig into why data governance gets written off as boring right up until someone rebrands it "AI enablement" — and why light, iterative guardrails tend to beat giant upfront frameworks that nobody ends up using.

From an Excel spreadsheet that quietly wrecks someone else's day to the Rubik's Cube problem of every data decision rippling sideways, they trace how the post-COVID shift to screens has cost us the "collision conversations" that used to build trust before things went wrong.

It all lands on the same place: data is the output, people are what bring it to life.