Data Amplified: structured data is crucial in a changing landscape
We’re back after an amazing three days in Madrid at Data Amplified 2024. We enjoyed an incredible range of fresh ideas, updates and discussions.
It was, as ever, a great pleasure to bring the digital reporting community together, catch up with old friends and make many new connections – and if you were there we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
Our opening keynote Joe Atkinson, Global Chief AI Officer at PwC, set the tone by reminding us just how important and extraordinary the XBRL standard is. “The data we’re talking about is not only structured but… it’s arguably the most structured and well understood data anywhere in the enterprise,” he remarked. There’s no doubt that this is a time of incredible change in the way we all work – and, as he reflected, we tend to both overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. None of us quite know what the future will look like, but “properly structured data is as important today as it ever was.”
The amount of structured data available is expanding, particularly with the arrival of sustainability mandates – and as a number of speakers emphasised, digital reporting is crucial in enabling access to data. “Unless the data can be used easily, unless the data can be analysed, it’s not useful,” said CA (Dr) Debashis Mitra, ICAI Past President, in his keynote exploring India’s leadership on sustainability reporting. Cristina Gil White, Interim CEO at GRI, had similar thoughts as she reflected on her own organisation’s digitisation journey. Going digital means users will be able to extract much more value from sustainability data, helping them understand what works in driving positive change. “As we convert to an XBRL standards organisation we will be much more future-fit.”
As Patrick de Cambourg, Chair of the EFRAG Sustainability Reporting Board, observed, “we cannot speak about burden reduction and not speak on digitalisation.” That’s true for users, who need fast, efficient, and easy access to data. It can also be true for issuers: we learned, for example, how Indonesia is hugely simplifying reporting for companies via a single submission portal that will enable them to report to multiple authorities.
Artificial intelligence is transforming how we understand and analyse data, and we heard from several speakers in our lively AI and analytics track on some of the new ways they’re pulling insights from data and the high value of structured data as fuel for AI models. It’s clear that there’s lots of experimenting and lots of learning to be done, whatever your role, and it’s going to be an exciting process. Users today want to do more and more with data, and digital reporting will be critical in enabling that.
There’s a huge amount to talk about as we go forward: regulatory modernisation, essential change and how we support regulators; cooperation and interoperability in the sustainability space; the best ways to leverage AI in report preparation and analysis; digital trust and traceability; handling and harnessing granular data effectively; and so much more. We can’t give you more than a taster of all our fantastic speakers here, but read on for some further coverage from Data Amplified in this newsletter, and look out for more over the coming weeks, plus conference videos to catch up on the sessions you missed. We’d love to hear your thoughts on #DA2024, and let’s keep the discussions going!
