AI readiness is a common priority. Ime Akpan, Head of Data Engineering and Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Vanguard Europe, is executing on it at scale.

By leveraging Apache Spark, AWS Glue, and a serverless stack, his team laid a data lakehouse foundation that made the business more AI-ready than they realized, without a major platform overhaul.

In this episode, we hear more about Vanguard's AI-readiness journey: The foundations they needed, the data quality challenges they faced, and why "Context is King" as teams shift to intent-driven "context engineering" to ensure AI agents understand the why behind the data.

Chapters: 

00:00 Introduction

03:10 Vanguard 2026 priorities

10:00 Why lakehouse architecture

21:05 Data validation and quality challenges 

30:00 Scaling AI readiness

Ime Akpan is Head of Data Engineering and Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Vanguard Europe. He leads the technical execution of Vanguard's data pipelines, managing the complex ingestion, transformation, and rigorous validation of data for downstream analysts, data scientists, and business teams.

Roy Daniel is the Co-Founder & CEO of definity, the agentic data engineering platform for the Lakehouse and Spark ecosystem.

Subscribe to Data Innovators for more conversations with technical data leaders solving complex challenges across the data ecosystem.

#DataInnovators #DataEngineering #Lakehouse #AIReadiness #DataPlatforms #Podcast #definity