OM DENNE EPISODE
Amin Venjara, chief data and product officer at ADP, joins Data Faces on location at the 20th annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He explains why a contractor going on about wood, nails, and concrete will never win over a homeowner who just wants to entertain in the backyard, and why data teams make the same mistake when they pitch the business.
Amin walks through the framework from his session, value equals data plus capabilities, and how ADP treats its internal data platform like a product that builders across the company choose to use. He describes the annual Data and AI Day that drew 2,100 people, the hackathon that feeds it, and the metrics his team tracks to prove the platform is creating value. He closes with a concrete example of a data product that gives chat applications full customer context, so every team stops rebuilding the same stitching work.
What you will learn:
1. Why data alone does not create value, and what capabilities like semantic layers and entity resolution add2. How treating the data platform as a product changes the relationship with internal customers3. How a hackathon and a 2,100-person Data and AI Day make foundational data work visible to executives4. What a real data product looks like, using normalized customer context to power chat and agent experiences
Chapters:
0:00 Welcome from CDOIQ in Cambridge
0:24 Icebreaker: baseball on the radio and a love of math
2:09 Amin's role and what ADP does
3:43 Wood, nails, and the deck: value equals data plus capabilities
7:10 Treating the data platform like a product
9:13 Inside the hackathon and Data and AI Day
13:16 The metrics that prove the platform creates value
14:43 A data product in action: customer context for chat
17:25 Sign-off
Watch more Data Faces on location: https://tinytechguides.com/data-faces-podcast/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=cdoiq2026-amin-venjara&utm_content=descriptionConnect with
Amin Venjara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/venjara/ADP: https://www.adp.com
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