Cindi Howson

Cindi Howson is the Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot and host of the award-winning The Data Chief podcast. Cindi is an analytics and BI thought leader and expert with a flair for bridging business needs with technology.  As Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot, she advises top clients on data strategy and best practices to become data-driven, speaks internationally on top trends such as creating a data culture, align to business value, and AI ethics, and influences ThoughtSpot’s product strategy. Cindi was previously a Gartner research Vice President, as the lead author for the data and analytics maturity model and analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, and a popular keynote speaker.  She introduced new research in data and AI for good, NLP/BI Search, and augmented analytics and brought both the BI bake offs and innovation panels to Gartner globally. She’s frequently quoted in MIT, Harvard Business Review, Information Week and is rated a top 12 influencer in big data and analytics by Analytics Insight, Onalytica, Solutions Review, and Humans of Data. She has been named DataIQ100 in 2023, Motivator of the Year, by Women Leaders in Data and AI (WLDA) in 2023, and CDO Magazine named her a Leading Data Consultant and Global Data Power Woman in 20222 and 2023. In 2021 she was named data leader of the year by Women in Data.  Prior to joining Gartner, she was founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth product reviews based on exclusive hands-on testing, contributor to Information Week, and the author of several books including: Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data, Analytics Interpreted, and SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference. She served as The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) faculty member for more than a decade. She serves on the board for Drexel University’s LeBow Business Analytics program and is a volunteer for Girls Plus Data, Women in Data, and the Mark Cuban Foundation, AI bootcamps. Prior to founding BI Scorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a global BI standards leader for Dow Chemical. She has an MBA from Rice University.

‍