Episodes

This week, Bren and Lenno, ask what happens when we rename things that already had an established name. Yes, here's looking at you "super intelligence"... Lenno tells the story of how a team renaming an SAP table in plain business terms made data easier to read and harder to build on. Whilst Bren recalls a business that had seven names for the same report. The bigger question starts with governance and both discussion how agrees what the words mean and how much of it does a business actually n...

This week Bren is joined by guest Jamie Fry as Lenno is enjoying some well-earned time off. Jamie runs the Hawkfry Group, a consortium of senior cloud and data specialists, as the conversation dives into the real returns made on using AI. Jamie puts a real number on it and explains where his teams lean on AI the most. But the real question is where does the human still have the biggest impact? The discussion looks at the conundrum faced by AI speeding up the technical work but the human work b...

This week, Bren and Lenno are still reminiscing about the CXO Data Summit in Crete, but they dive straight into a question that follows them into every boardroom...what does "data first," "AI first," or "cloud first" actually mean? Lenno questions whether it's really just about fixing whatever's in front of you and calling it a plan. And Bren lays out his theory that 80% of businesses are successful enough to never really need to change, so they throw money at data and AI initiatives without ev...

This week, Bren and Lenno are joined by Peter Laflin, a chief data officer who's spent the summer researching what it takes for neurodivergent leaders to thrive in data and AI teams. Peter shares what he's learned about building high-performing teams and creating genuinely inclusive environments for neurodivergent individuals. The conversation also touches on the leadership challenges and opportunities in managing a neurodiverse team. One question stands out...how many teams have been quie...

This week, Bren and Lenno record face-to-face for the first time at the CXO Data Summit in Crete, on what makes a transformation succeed. Lenno tells the story of the first SAP program, one that had to be pulled apart mid-flight. This painful lesson meant the next one, built on those battle scars, came in pain-free, on time and under budget. That's the essence of the episode...real capability comes from getting it wrong first. So what happens when AI removes the junior roles where those mistak...

This week, Bren and Lenno are joined by their first guest, Alberto Gonzalo Otero, a purpose coach who helps leaders and teams reconnect daily work with why they do it. Alberto talks through the power of "why," the questions he uses to get people past surface answers like money, and the team assessment he built to measure purpose and psychological safety alongside trust and clarity. The conversation also looks at courage and the relationship with purpose, and why staying in a role that doesn't ...

This week, Bren & Lenno venture into the world of security, starting with a media company whose entire channel went completely offline. Not because of a sophisticated breach, but because of a simple but stupid human action. This episode digs into why data sovereignty and geopolitics get all the corporate attention, while the far bigger risk sits closer to home. And ultimately they address the question that you can spend a billion dollars on security, but what's the point if it only takes one p...

This week Bren & Lenno dive into recent but potentially disturbing news of Google being on a buying spree. They didn't buy a bankrupt airline for its planes, but for it's data...years of emails, Teams messages and spreadsheets, all headed off to train AI models. This is a sharp reminder that everything we write on a work account, or hand over to an app, has become a monetizable asset, whether we intended it to or not. So if our data is worth buying, shouldn't we be the ones getting paid for it...

This week, Bren and Lenno discuss a shared frustration... chatbots. From there, they ask if AI is making customer service better, or if people are quietly rejecting it in favour of a real human They also unpack a LinkedIn story about connecting family calendars to ChatGPT instead of talking to their own kids. Honest, a little ranty, and very human so exactly the conversation the call centre script never lets you have.

Bren and Lenno pick up a question sparked by a full-body health scan at a Swedish startup and wonder how far can AI actually take healthcare? They discuss declining global birth rates and shrinking workforces, and what that means for healthcare, economic growth, and data privacy as health tracking gets more personal. There's also a cheeky ChatGPT sign, and an AI-planned run that did not go as planned. Warm, candid, and thinking out loud as always, this is the conversation still finding its sh...

Welcome back to This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast, where Brendan and Lenno, sit down to unpack what happens when AI adoption moves from personal experiment to company-wide bet. They start with why ChatGPT's real genius wasn't the model, but the humble Google-style search box that let everyone in from day one. From there, Lenno shares his own hands-on testing of AI models on messy address data, and the pair compare Klarna's AI-first retreat with IKEA's decision to retrain its workforce inst...

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 Exc...

Bren and Lenno pick up a conversation they'd normally have only behind closed doors, "what AI actually costs and what happens when the bill comes due?" Starting with pricing (why token costs, like mortgage rates or SaaS subscriptions, are unlikely to stay this low), is a price hike inevitable? And what happens if you have AI in critical processes when costs skyrocket?! A question that hits hard was if agentic AI can do the work of offshore teams, what happens to the people behind those jobs, a...

Brendan and Lenno are back for another unfiltered conversation on This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast. This episode tackles a question the data community has been circling for a decade without answering, "Who is actually accountable for data quality, and why does it never seem to stick with any one role?" Lenno shares a story from the world of a highly regulated chemicals business, asking when the data is wrong, whose responsibility is it to fix it? Both mull over data accountability and wo...

Welcome to the first episode of This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast, where Brendan Ellis sits down with co-host Lenno, a Chief Data Officer with 25 years of experience, to tackle the conversations that usually happen behind closed doors. In this debut episode, they dig into why the data world keeps repeating the same mistakes decade after decade, and why the arrival of AI hasn't changed that as much as people think. From dashboards nobody uses to AI projects launched before anyone's asked th...