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