The recent Data + AI Summit 2024 was our biggest ever. Over 16,000 of our top customers, prospects, and partners attended in person, and an additional 40,000+ tuned in virtually. It was a packed four days filled with crucial product announcements, training, certifications, partner showcases and hundreds of breakout sessions. Most importantly, it was an opportunity for the entire Data and AI community to unite to share learnings, network, celebrate accomplishments, and continue collaborating on the future of Data and AI.
At the summit, we hosted over 1,000 tech executives at the Executive Forum, including over 125 participants in the CIO Circle. Our founders and executives shared valuable insights and lessons from Databricks' experience helping over 10,000 organizations thrive as Data + AI companies. Here is a glimpse of some of the talks from the Executive Forum:
- Arsalan Tavakoli, Databricks co-founder and SVP of Field Engineering, discussed the pivotal role of Compound AI in operationalizing Gen AI and emphasized the importance of open formats and standards for modern architectures.
- Naveen Zutshi, our CIO, highlighted how the Databricks IT department has been at the forefront of utilizing and testing our products for governance, warehousing, and ETL, and leveraging Gen AI to increase efficiency.
- Rochana Golani, our VP of Learning and Enablement, explained how data-centric companies continuously foster and expand their Data and AI culture through skills assessment, workshops, training, certifications, and the creation of centers of excellence.
- Robin Sutara, our field CTO, underscored the importance of the 3 Ps (People, Process, Platform) in building a solid foundation for successfully executing a Data + AI strategy.
To best serve our customers, we prioritize listening to their feedback and addressing their most pressing concerns. This year, three key themes emerged:
- Everyone wants GenAI: Every organization wants to implement Gen AI immediately in production. However, achieving this is challenging, with over 85% of AI projects failing to reach production. Customers are less concerned with standard benchmarks of the latest models and more focused on how well these models perform on their enterprise data. They seek quality AI responses without hallucinations, aiming to deploy AI quickly, cost-effectively, and securely while maintaining privacy and the ability to iterate.
- Security and privacy are under pressure: The interest and adoption of Gen AI have led to numerous AI-related regulations, lawsuits, and a new wave of AI cyberattacks. Organizations require a comprehensive governance solution that extends beyond data and dashboards to encompass their entire data estate, including models, tables, connectors, and notebooks.
- Data estate is highly fragmented: Companies deal with many platforms and software solutions with incompatible and proprietary formats. This results in vendor lock-in, data silos, and a fragmented approach to security and governance, leading to slow, complex, and expensive data platforms.
But it does not have to be this way. At Databricks, we built the Data Intelligence Platform to address these challenges so that customers can put reliable, cost-effective data and AI initiatives into production, while maintaining security and privacy on their own enterprise data, without getting trapped in vendor lock-ins or proprietary formats.
