Cindi Howson's Linkedin Analytics

I have a flair for bridging business and technology, a 30-year career of industry firsts, with a unique ability to blend strategy with execution. I host the award winning The Data Chief podcast, in the top 1.5% of all podcasts, bringing best practices and industry visionaries to listeners around the world on AI, data strategy, AI literacy, and culture. I have the privilege of advising iconic companies on their data and AI strategies, cloud architecture, data and AI literacy, culture and people change, power and politics, garnering me awards such as DataIQ Top 100 in 2024 & 2023, WLDA Motivator of the Year in 2022, and top 25 AI Leaders. As Chief Data & AI Strategy Officer at Gartner MQ Leader, ThoughtSpot, I’ve helped grow the business from 250 employees to 1000, ARR from $30M to $150M, and valuation from $1B to $4B. I championed our integration with Diyotta that led to our DataFlow ELT capabilities as well as voice analytics with VoiceBase. As a company builder and woman in tech, I exec sponsored the creation of our DEI Liveboard and industry app, as well as our partnerships with Varsity Tutors, Girls Plus Data, Women in Data, Women Leaders in Data and AI, and the Mark Cuban Foundation AI bootcamps. Across my 30 years in the tech industry, I’ve installed Novell networks, assembled computers, led a team to deliver the world’s first global data warehouse and BI program, authored 7 books, keynoted at Harvard and MIT Future Compute, and pioneered research in data for good, AI ethics, NLP, led the Gartner IT Score Maturity Model, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI, and Critical Capabilities research. In teaching for TDWI for 15 years, I led BI bake-offs and trained a generation of CDAOs on measuring business value, data modeling best practices, and architecting analytics for scale.