Amazing Week at the Data + AI Summit

Databricks held their annual Data+AI Summit in San Francisco last week at Moscone Center. With over 16,000 attendees from every part of the world of data, it was an event to remember! At this critical time in tech, with everyone seeking to better leverage data for a competitive advantage in the age of AI, this conference was a key gathering point for the data community.

Data + AI Truly Together

Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi kicked off this year’s keynote address, making a strong case that, in order to drive innovation and efficiency, data and AI must be together in a single data intelligence platform. He also introduced advances in Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, highlighting its ability to integrate data engineering, data science, and machine learning workflows seamlessly. These innovations continue to make Databricks the place for everyone to enhance collaboration, reduce complexity, and speed development of AI and data projects.

In addition to Ghodsi’s address, this year’s keynotes featured talks from leading AI researchers, including Stanford’s Fei Fei Li and University of Washington’s Yejin Choi, and product teams discussed innovations from Mosaic and Unity Catalog. Add to that an in person rock star appearance by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and you have quite a show! 

The Data Transformation Copilot is Here!

The Prophecy team was out in full force for the event, and put on a show of our own.

Prophecy co-founders Raj Bains and Maciej Szpakowski kicked things off with their thoughts on designing a Copilot for data transformation with Apache Spark and SQL. Raj began by introducing Prophecy’s new Data Transformation Copilot: created to make all users more productive by utilizing a combination of visual, AI, and compiler tech to let everyone fully leverage Databricks. Their presentation featured an engaging live demo by Maciej, going into detail about how Prophecy Data Transformation Copilot increases efficiency tenfold in comparison to traditional workflows. The lucky bunch who asked questions at the end of the presentation were surprised with blue gem plushies – a fitting Prophecy gift!

Unlocking Data to Win the World Series

One of our favorite moments was the second-day keynote when Alexander Booth took the stage. He highlighted the importance of leveraging data analytics and AI to drive performance in sports, especially showing how it positively impacted the Texas Rangers’ performance, leading them to win the World Series. By integrating new platforms and technologies, the Texas Rangers were able to optimize player performance, enhance game strategies, and improve overall team efficiency – this goes to show that data can be an MVP for a championship winning team!

Later that day, sporting real World Series rings, Alexander and Oliver Dykstra joined our Director of Product Marketing, Matt Turner, to talk about how Prophecy has played a role in advancing the team’s data driven decisions. Alexander and Oliver went into detail about how utilizing Prophecy’s platform allowed them to bring everyone into the data transformation process and make key decisions regarding their players, which have tremendously improved their performance throughout the season. Anyone who asked questions got baseballs signed by Oliver – a fun keepsake from this session!

Real World Evidence Makes an Impact

Our last customer speaker session of the conference was an engaging presentation hosted by Dan Rohtbart, VP of Engineering at Aetion, along with our VP of Product Marketing, Mitesh Shah. Dan spent the first half diving into how his team at Aetion has been leading the efforts to make real-world evidence data more accessible for their healthcare industry customers. He discussed the positive effects this has had with products like Aetion Discover, a visual-first application designed to help healthcare professionals explore real world data. Mitesh spent the latter half discussing how Prophecy’s platform has played a key role in launching the product – especially in terms of aiding with efficiency given their quick rollouts. 

The Data World’s Best-Known Authors

Our booth featured book signings each day of the summit from bestselling authors Matthew Housley, Adi Polak, and Sol Rashidi! Every morning at 11 am we had a crowd of readers at our booth, listening to each author give an overview and presentation of their book, followed by a Q&A and book signing. Getting to meet some of the data world’s best known authors was definitely a hit with the Databricks crowd! 

Live Interviews!

We were also lucky enough to have Ravit Jain from The Ravit Show stop by our booth for a 1:1 with our CEO Raj Bains and, as a bonus, engage in discussions with Maciej Szpakowski and Pravin Darbare! Raj laid out the need for the data transformation copilot and how helping all users be more productive will break through the data transformation bottleneck. Pravin and Maciej discussed the challenges organizations face in regards to transforming data on Databricks and other cloud platforms, options organizations have for transforming data, and how Prophecy’s platform addresses these challenges. Captivating conversations with great leaders in this space! 

But the team didn’t stop there. Raj joined The Cube for a fiery interview on the future of data transformation. When discussing how Prophecy’s goal is to improve data literacy and efficiency across organizations Raj says “you can’t move fast with data if people are dependent on other people, passing requirements back and forth in Word docs.” 

Prophecy’s Vikas Marwaha also got into the broadcast act, with a live show flow interview about our partnership with Databricks - streamed live to tens of thousands of attendees across 100+ countries.

Connecting with the Industry

The show was also a place for us to catch up with our friends in the analyst community, including Sanjeev Mohan (Principal, SanjMo) who wrote a fantastic blog leading up to the conference on Data Transformation Reboot: Use of Copilots in an Agentic Architecture, and  Stewart Bond (Research VP of IDC Canada), who joined our Cocktails, Copilot, and Clouds event at The View. 

Customers and Partners

Overall, this conference was a great success in starting up new conversations and relationships with the whole community! Our booth had a constant flow of new visitors, as well as repeat ones throughout the three days. And our happy hour at The View was overflowing with people from every part of our community. We are very thrilled to keep all these conversations going!

We can’t wait for next year’s summit!

Join us for our Data Transformation Copilot Week from June 26th-27th. Register here to attend our sessions!