The DAIS 2026 Speaker Spotlight is a series where we hand the mic to the speakers heading to Data + AI Summit and let them answer five short questions — in their own voice, no press-release polish.
Below, Khushboo Beniwal on hosting a panel that brings leaders from global publishing, gaming, identity services, and sports together — and why hyper-personalization is now the price of admission for earning a user's attention. Lightly edited for length — otherwise, the words are hers.
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Audiences are splintered across platforms, drowning in content, and fighting constant distraction — so relevance is the only way to earn their time.
— Khushboo Beniwal
The topic
What is your panel about, and who is it for?
From Insight to Impact: Building Hyperpersonalized Experiences at Scale.
I am hosting a panel that brings together leaders from a global publisher, a top gaming company, a major identity services provider, and a leading sports organization to explore how data and AI are breaking down silos and transforming how brands connect with audiences.
Panelists will discuss how they're using unified data, AI-driven insights, and creative innovation to deliver deeply contextual, relevant, and dynamic experiences at scale — where no two users should ever have the same journey, and content and advertising feel like one seamless, holistic experience rather than two disjointed tracks.
Why this, why now
What's changed in the last 6–12 months that makes this topic urgent right now?
We're finding more and more that audiences are splintered across platforms, drowning in content, and fighting constant distraction, so relevance is the only way to earn their time. Vertical, short-form video has become a core strategy for almost every content platform, and gen-AI is reshaping how people search and discover, which raises the bar: creators and brands now have to use hyper-personalization to show up with the one thing that feels made for this person, in this moment, on this screen.
The personal stake
Why are you the person hosting this panel?
I've sat in the trenches with media companies for nearly 15 years, watching personalization mature from simple rules to AI-driven, real-time experiences. I helped design and ship large-scale personalization for a leading global news publisher, and I deeply understand the technical, organizational, and business obstacles media companies and advertisers are wrestling with as they build for a world where no two users should have the same experience and where content and advertising must work together as a single, coherent stream.
What you'll leave with
What will someone be able to do on Monday morning that they couldn't do before?
This session is about closing the gap between "we have personalization" and "we're using personalization to reliably move our KPIs." The audience will learn how to stress-test their current strategy against today's realities — fragmented audiences, vertical video, AI-driven discovery, and seamless content-plus-ads — and how to re-anchor their roadmap on business outcomes like engagement, retention, and revenue. They'll leave with concrete patterns for unifying signals, tightening the feedback loop between experiences and metrics, and evolving their existing personalization stack to meet the expectations of today's audiences.
The bigger picture
How does this fit into where Databricks — and data and AI more broadly — is heading?
This session is a field guide to exactly where Databricks is investing: turning massive, messy signal exhaust into governed, AI-driven, real-time experiences that move the needle for your business. It shows how the Databricks Data + AI platform lets you ingest and organize behavioral and identity signals at scale, safely work with PII and consent, then layer on AI agents and real-time streaming to create the right experience for each user in milliseconds — so that every surface, from vertical video to in-game moments, can deliver a seamless blend of content and advertising on a single, governed lakehouse foundation.
Part of the DAIS 2026 Speaker Spotlight series — more voices dropping in the weeks ahead. Got a DAIS speaker you'd love to hear from next? Mention them in the comments — we're always listening.
