Ep 6: Ime Akpan: Data foundation for AI readiness

Ime Akpan, Head of Data Engineering and Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Vanguard Europe, shares how the organization approached AI readiness at scale. The conversation highlights how his team used Apache Spark, AWS Glue, and a serverless architecture to build a data lakehouse foundation that prepared the business for AI without requiring a major platform overhaul.

He also discusses the core foundations needed to support this shift, the data quality challenges encountered along the way, and the growing importance of context engineering. As teams move toward more intent driven systems, he explains why context is king in helping AI agents understand not just the data, but the reasoning behind it.