Akhil Ahuja

The AI Gold Rush: Models Are Shovels, Data Is the Gold | RAISE Summit 2026

Gareth Davies, Will Bryk, Dmitry Panenkov, Mark Surman, Alex Bouzari, Akhil Ahuja

This panel features industry leaders from Okta, DDN, Mozilla, Emma, and Exa discussing the strategic pivot from model-centric AI to a data-driven economy where proprietary data quality and security determine competitive advantage. Experts highlighted critical infrastructure challenges, noting that 48% of enterprises fail to secure AI agents while emphasizing the urgent need for sovereign data solutions and fair data markets to unlock the exponential costs of agentic inference. The discussion concluded that future enterprise success relies on "data network effects" and robust governance frameworks, as organizations transition from experimental sandboxes to production environments driven by headless, agent-based architectures.