Data Mesh Live 2026: from principles to practice

11 & 12 June 2026 | Queen Elisabeth Hall, Antwerp - The second edition of Data Mesh Live took over the Queen Elisabeth Hall in Antwerp on June 11 and 12, again curated by our own Tom De Wolf in partnership with Aardling, with ACA Group back as Gold Sponsor. The theme said it out loud: how to scale data products. And the talks delivered on it.

Tom De Wolf and Ole Olesen-Bagneux

From "what is Data Mesh" to "here's how we run it"

The biggest shift from 2025 was the depth. While last year speakers spent a lot of time explaining the meaning and principles of Data Mesh and Data Products, this year the content went past the basics. The community is now working the practice out in detail, in real enterprises, at real scale.

That was the through-line across the two days. Decentralised ownership, governance, metadata, context, the practical design of data products that actually hold up. Less theory, more "this is what we tried and what happened."

Compared to last year where often the basics of Data Mesh and Data Products were explained, this year the content went beyond that. The Data Mesh practice is being worked out in depth in the community.

Tom De Wolf

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Data Mesh Lead

"Compared to last year where often the basics of Data Mesh and Data Products were explained, this year the content went beyond that. The Data Mesh practice is being worked out in depth in the community."

Tom De WolfData Mesh Lead

AI showed up, but with a job to do

Yes, agents and AI were everywhere. But not as hype. The interesting part was how the community framed AI inside Data Mesh: applied in a controlled way, where it adds value, and where it makes decentralised ownership more feasible instead of more chaotic.

A few angles that stood out across the program:

• AI as a builder: Using AI to improve self-service and to build data products based on the intent behind them.
• AI as a consumer: When AI consumes data products, it needs the context that human consumers carry as tacit knowledge. That changes how we provision data on the platform.
• Context is king: Knowledge products, knowledge planes and graphs all play a role as metadata. A lot of that metadata already lives inside enterprise systems, and the message was clear: don't ignore it.

Semantics and contracts took center stage

If there was one theme the community kept circling back to, it was meaning. How do you keep semantics consistent across a decentralised mesh so that two teams don't define the same concept in conflicting ways?

The Data Mesh concept is clearly turning into practical platforms, with maturity models, open standards like ODPS and ODCS, and a growing set of real tools. Data contracts sat right at the heart of it.

What our colleagues took home

We sent a few ACA people into the crowd. Here's what stuck with them.

The data contract sits at the center of everything you want to do with the data from a data product. From giving people insight to using AI to build further on that data. The hands-on lab on open-source tools for data contracts also stood out: those tools make it easy to set up data contracts without needing to know the technical details underneath.

Arne Van Der Stappen

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Solution Engineer

"The data contract sits at the center of everything you want to do with the data from a data product. From giving people insight to using AI to build further on that data. The hands-on lab on open-source tools for data contracts also stood out: those tools make it easy to set up data contracts without needing to know the technical details underneath."

Arne Van Der StappenSolution Engineer

Arne also made a sharp point about what makes this event different: it's not a data event, it's a Data Mesh event. It doesn't focus on data analysis, but on how you use a Data Mesh to organise your company around data. That makes it relevant well beyond data engineers, and as far as he knows, it's the only conference specifically about Data Mesh in Europe, maybe worldwide.

The session that stuck with me most was 'Make It Make Sense' by Juha Korpela, on using semantics to build context around the mesh. My takeaway for daily work: decouple domain-specific semantics from their underlying technical objects. That way end users never run into conflicting meanings for the same concept.

Hans Dekens

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Data Engineer

"The session that stuck with me most was 'Make It Make Sense' by Juha Korpela, on using semantics to build context around the mesh. My takeaway for daily work: decouple domain-specific semantics from their underlying technical objects. That way end users never run into conflicting meanings for the same concept."

Hans DekensData Engineer

A familiar face in the audience

A nice marker of how far this event has come: the conference grew noticeably since last year, drawing people interested in the work on Data Mesh, the concept Zhamak Dehghani laid the foundation for. Among the attendees was Martin Fowler, the software architecture thought leader who popularised refactoring and microservices, quietly listening in. The talks were serious, hands-on and grounded in what actually works out there in enterprises.

What we help our clients do

At ACA Group we help teams make it real in day-to-day complexity: platform thinking that empowers instead of controls, genuine domain ownership, data and platform as a product, and lightweight governance with guardrails instead of a thousand-page rulebook.