Rory O'Driscoll

Rory O'Driscoll is VP of Data at AirHelp, the air passenger rights company, where he leads the analytics, data science and data engineering teams behind claim assessment and automation — a business where answers have to be defensible, not just plausible. Based in Barcelona, he previously held data leadership roles at wefox and across the Vista and Cimpress group, and holds an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the London School of Economics.

His team built AIDA, an analytics agent that answers business questions in Slack against a governed semantic layer rather than generating free-form SQL. His case: the agent was the easy part. What made it trustworthy was metric governance, and the people who gained most were not the power users but the account managers stuck in the analytics queue.

He speaks as an operator, not a vendor, on what self-service costs — and what the analyst's job becomes afterwards.