Sabaa Quao - Live from SocialWest 2026

Recorded live at SocialWest 2026 in Calgary, Sabaa Quao, venture studio advisor and AI strategist, joins host Lindsay Smith to explore how synthetic data is about to change the way every marketer builds customer models.

Sabaa spends his days advising startups at the intersection of AI and fintech, and points to Arima as one of the clearest examples of where this is headed: a synthetic model of society built on 25,000 to 50,000 data points per person, layered on top of a brand's first-party data to fill in the gaps that surveys, forms, and imperfect customer records leave behind.

Sabaa breaks down why ecosystems and compounding data models are the two biggest predictors of startup success, how synthetic data stays privacy-first while still getting richer over time, why marketing is behind industries like autonomous driving and fraud detection in adopting it, and what happens when predictive modeling becomes accessible to businesses of every size, not just the ones with a head of data and analytics.

Guesswork was never a strategy. Now it doesn't have to be the default either.

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Follow Sabaa Quao on LinkedIn and learn more about Arima at arimadata.com.

Follow guest host and Takt CEO, Lindsay Smith on LinkedIn.

Thanks to our Editors and Producers at TAKT.

This episode was recorded live in Calgary during SocialWest 2026, Western Canada's largest marketing conference, bringing together over 600 professionals for two days of actionable insights, expert speakers, and high-value networking.

SocialWest is part of the SocialNext series, Canada's leading platform for marketing conferences, media, and community.