In episode six, David speaks to Corey Patton, co-founder and CEO of Pramana – a platform that’s reshaping self-service BI by allowing users to search databases using natural and conversational language.

Corey caught the data bug through his love of sports – because there’s nothing a sports nut loves more that stats. His obsession with sports facts led to his first job as an editor and broadcaster for CNN/Sports Illustrated. But when he found out that the data being broadcast was found by “a guy in the corner reading through an almanac,” he knew that there had to be a better way.

After stints as a private chef and the owner of a racehorse stable, Corey returned to the world of sports data and ultimately became Director of Sports Development at Intel, where he took the company’s Saffron AI technology to professional sports leagues, teams, and athletes.

Founding Pramana in 2018, Corey is helping data become a two-way conversation through natural language processing – with sports teams, financial institutions, and pharma companies all able to ask simple questions to get instant answers from their data.

David was keen to get Corey on the data therapy couch to learn from his wealth of experience helping businesses to work more intuitively with their data. Is conversational questioning the future of data collection? How can businesses empower their people with more data curiosity? What has most surprised him from developing a new data tool?

Listen now to hear Corey’s story so far, and his thoughts on how everyone will be working with data in the future.

In episode five, David is joined by Zaf Kassam, head of data analytics at British B2B publishing company Informa.

Zaf explains how his early career saw him undertaking humanitarian development work in Afghanistan, where he discovered first-hand how data and analytics can shed light on problems that had previously been hard to quantify.

After a stint working at Google, Zaf built MeasureGrow – a marketing dashboard that helped companies improve their lead generation by unlocking unusual data sources. Here, he discovered that best way to present data to customers is similar to a successful sales pitch: lead with the conclusions and let the customer ideate on top of your base.

Find out how Zaf thinks data and development has become more democratic. Are data analysts becoming a thing of the past? How should businesses structure their teams to spread their tools to non-data professionals? And who is the person who’s had the biggest impact on his own career?

Listen now to find out Zaf’s answers to these questions and more.

In episode four, David speaks to Lee James, an experienced technology leader and strategist who is currently working at AWS.

Lee has been fascinated by how data feeds human interactions since spending his youth on his parents’ market stall. It was there that he learnt how finding and using the right information fast could influence a customer’s behaviour and purchase decisions.

He carried this passion for exploring patterns of customer behaviour into his career in data and technology. Before joining AWS, Lee was CTO at RackSpace where he helped lead the company’s transformation into public cloud, application, and machine learning and AI services. He was also the voice of RackSpace, responsible for analyst relations and the executive sponsor across many of their strategic accounts.

He has also held senior strategy positions at Betfair, where he built the first ever iOS application, and BP, where he rolled out the first global VMware farm.

Lee’s breadth of experience provides the basis of a fascinating session on David’s Domo Data Therapy couch. Together, they discuss the mentors who have shaped Lee’s thinking, explore why technical ability must be linked with human psychology to make lasting change, and reveal that happiness is the crucial metric that more businesses should consider.

Listen now to find out Lee’s thoughts on the biggest topics in data.