Strategy and Diageo Show How a Universal Context Layer Can Simplify Data Complexity and Accelerate AI Readiness at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit London 2026
Strategy and Diageo highlighted how a universal context layer can help enterprises reduce data complexity, speed access to trusted information, and make AI more useful across the business during a full-house Solution Provider Session at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit London 2026.
In the session, “The AI Cocktail: How Diageo Mixes Data Governance and AI for Its Iconic Brands,” Diageo and Strategy explored a challenge facing many modern enterprises: despite major investment in platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake and Google BigQuery, business teams still wait weeks for trusted data, work from inconsistent metrics, and struggle to turn data platform scale into business speed.
The presentation described this as the “modern data paradox”. Organisations may have a mature lakehouse or warehouse architecture, but they often still face slow access, fragmented definitions and AI ambitions blocked by the absence of a shared context layer. In Diageo’s case, that meant Finance, Sales and regional teams were not always working from the same numbers, while data engineering teams were spending time maintaining pipelines instead of enabling the business.
