---
title: "Mike Phipps"
category: "people"
role: "Lead AI Engineer"
company: "Gates Foundation"
linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-phipps-79339a38"
sourceLabels: ["Official speaker roster", "Official conference schedule"]
---
# Mike Phipps

## Profile
Lead AI Engineer at [[gates-foundation|Gates Foundation]].

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-phipps-79339a38)

## Biography
Mike is the lead AI engineer in business operations at the [[gates-foundation|Gates Foundation]], where he built and deployed SIP (Strategic Intelligence Platform), the foundation's enterprise-wide knowledge graph. Built on Neo4j and served to Claude through MCP, SIP unifies siloed structured records and unstructured documents into one semantic layer that agents can query directly. Before AI engineering, he earned his PhD at CERN in experimental high-energy nuclear physics, working with some of the largest datasets in science. His work now centers on AI-first data modeling, driven by the conviction that for most enterprise teams the durable moat comes from properly modeling and expressing their data assets and domain knowledge — not the commoditizing layers above.

## Conference Sessions
- [[2026-07-01-mike-phipps-your-moat-is-your-data-model]] — Your Moat Is Your Data Model (2026-07-01, 11:40am-12:00pm)

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph summarizes how this person appears across the conference source graph: scheduled sessions, linked videos, transcripts, and slide-derived evidence.

### Linked Sessions
- [[2026-07-01-mike-phipps-your-moat-is-your-data-model|Your Moat Is Your Data Model]]

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.