Despite the critical role of analytics in guiding business decisions, organizations continue to face significant challenges in harnessing its full potential. As data sets expand and deadlines shrink, the urgency to scale analytics processes becomes paramount. What data leaders now need to focus on are essential strategies for analytics at scale, including fostering a culture of continuous learning, prioritizing data governance, and leveraging generative AI.

Libby Duane Adams is the Chief Advocacy Officer and co-founder of Alteryx. She is responsible for strengthening upskilling and reskilling efforts for Alteryx customers to enable a culture of analytics, scaling the presence of the Alteryx SparkED education program and furthering diversity and inclusion in the workplace. As the former Chief Customer Officer, Libby has helped many Fortune 100 executives to identify and seize market opportunities, outsmart their competitors, and drive more revenue from their current businesses using analytics. 

In the episode, Richie and Libby explore the differences between analytics and business intelligence, analytics as a team sport, the importance of speed in analytics, generative AI and its implications in analytics, the role of data quality and governance, Alteryx’s AI platform, data skills as a workplace necessity, using AI to automate documentation and insights, success stories and mistakes within analytics, and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Alteryx
• Alteryx SparkED Program
• [Course] Introduction to Alteryx
• Related Episode: From Data Literacy to AI Literacy with Cindi Howson, Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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Generative AI is fantastic but has a major problem: sometimes it "hallucinates", meaning it makes things up. In a business product like a chatbot, this can be disastrous. Vector databases like Pinecone are one of the solutions to mitigating the problem.

Vector databases are a key component to any AI application, as well as things like enterprise search and document search. They have become an essential tool for every business, and with the rise in interest in AI in the last couple of years, the space is moving quickly. In this episode, you'll find out how to make use of vector databases, and find out about the latest developments at Pinecone.

Elan Dekel is the VP of Product at Pinecone, where he oversees the development of the Pinecone vector database. He was previously Product Lead for Core Data Serving at Google, where he led teams working on the indexing systems to serve data for Google search, YouTube search, and Google Maps. Before that, he was Founder and CEO of Medico, which was acquired by Everyday Health.

In the episode, RIchie and Elan explore LLMs, hallucination in generative models, vector databases and the best use-cases for them, semantic search, business applications of vector databases and semantic search, the tech stack for AI applications, cost considerations when investing in AI projects, emerging roles within the AI space, the future of vector databases and AI, and much more.  

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Pinecone Canopy
• Pinecone Serverless
• LlamaIndex
• Langchain
• [Code Along] Semantic Search with Pinecone
• Related Episode: Expanding the Scope of Generative AI in the Enterprise with Bal Heroor, CEO and Principal at Mactores
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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One of the most immediate needs to come out of the generative AI boom has been the need for guardrails and governmental regulation of AI technologies. Most of the work already completed in the AI space has been industry-led, with large organizations pushing AI forward to improve their efficiency as businesses and to create new avenues for revenue. This focus on industry and revenue can potentially create more inequality in the world, with companies not interested in the negative effects of AI being driven by profit, towards profit. To combat this, the UN has set up an AI Advisory Board, with members from different nationalities, backgrounds and expertises to ensure that AI is for all, and not just for profit. In this episode, we speak to two members of the board. 

Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who helps business leaders, policy makers, and the general public make sense of the world around them. He is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world's leading political risk research and consulting firm, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs.

Ian is credited with bringing the craft of political risk to financial markets, creating Wall Street's first global political risk index (GPRI), and for establishing political risk as an academic discipline. His definition of emerging markets— "those countries where politics matters at least as much as economics for market outcomes”—has become an industry standard. “G-Zero,” his term for a global power vacuum in which no country is willing and able to set the international agenda, is widely used by policymakers and thought leaders.

A prolific writer, Ian is the author of eleven books, including two New York Times bestsellers, “Us vs Them: The Failure of Globalism” which examines the rise of populism across the world, and his latest book “The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—and Our Response—Will Change the World” which details a trio of looming global crises (health emergencies, climate change, and technological revolution) and outlines how governments, corporations, and concerned citizens can use these crises to create global prosperity and opportunity.

Jimena Viveros currently serves as the Chief of Staff and Head Legal Advisor to Justice Loretta Ortiz at the Mexican Supreme Court. Her prior roles include national leadership positions at the Federal Judicial Council, the Ministry of Security, and the Ministry of Finance, where she held the position of Director General. Jimena is a lawyer and AI expert, and possesses a broad and diverse international background. She is in the final stages of completing her Doctoral thesis, which focuses on the impact of AI and autonomous weapons on international peace and security law and policy, providing concrete propositions to achieve global governance from diverse legal perspectives. Her extensive work in AI and other legal domains has been widely published and recognized.

In the episode, Richie, Ian and Jimena cover what the UN's AI Advisory Body was set up for, the opportunities and risks of AI, how AI impacts global inequality, key principles of AI governance, the implementation of that governance, the future of AI in politics and global society, and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• UN Interim Report: Governing AI for Humanity
• AI for Sustainable Development Goals
• The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World by Ian Bremmer
• WEF Davos 2024: Sam Altman on the future of AI
• [Course] Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy
• Related Episode: What to Expect from AI in 2024 with Craig S. Smith, Host of the Eye on A.I Podcast
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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Remarkable people walk among us. Some of us may be remarkable ourselves. But none of us start out remarkable. The journey to becoming a person that makes a difference in the world is never easy, as with any story that includes a hero, there are struggles, tests and moments of self-doubt. Remarkable people overcome these feats, and when they are in a position to, they give back. But what kind of mindset do these people have, how do they make decisions? What keeps them on their path towards becoming remarkable. 

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and the creator of Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People podcast. He is an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley), and adjunct professor of the University of New South Wales. He was the chief evangelist of Apple and a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. He has written Wise Guy, The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and eleven other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University, an MBA from UCLA, and an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

In the episode, Richie and Guy explore the concept of being remarkable, growth, grit and grace, the importance of experiential learning, imposter syndrome, finding your passion, how to network and find remarkable people, dealing with failure, management and encouraging growth, work-life balance, measuring success through benevolent impact and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Think Remarkable by Guy Kawasaki
• Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People
• Connect with Guy on Linkedin
• Canva
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
• How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman
• Related Episode: Making Better Decisions using Data & AI with Cassie Kozyrkov, Google's First Chief Decision Scientist
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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We’ve heard so much about the value and capabilities of generative AI over the past year, and we’ve all become accustomed to the chat interfaces of our preferred models. One of the main concerns many of us have had has been privacy. Is OpenAI keeping the data and information I give to ChatGPT secure? One of the touted solutions to this problem is running LLMs locally on your own machine, but with the hardware cost that comes with it, running LLMs locally has not been possible for many of us. That might now be starting to change.

Nuri Canyaka is VP of AI Marketing at Intel. Prior to Intel, Nuri spent 16 years at Microsoft, starting out as a Technical Evangelist, and leaving the organization as the Senior Director of Product Marketing. He ran the GTM team that helped generate adoption of GPT in Microsoft Azure products.

La Tiffaney Santucci is Intel’s AI Marketing Director, specializing in their Edge and Client products. La Tiffaney has spent over a decade at Intel, focussing on partnerships with Dell, Google Amazon and Microsoft. 

In the episode, Richie, Nuri and La Tiffaney explore AI’s impact on marketing analytics, the adoptions of AI in the enterprise, how AI is being integrated into existing products, the workflow for implementing AI into business processes and the challenges that come with it, the importance of edge AI for instant decision-making in uses-cases like self-driving cars, the emergence of AI engineering as a distinct field of work, the democratization of AI, what the state of AGI might look like in the near future and much more. 

About the AI and the Modern Data Stack DataFramed Series

This week we’re releasing 4 episodes focused on how AI is changing the modern data stack and the analytics profession at large. The modern data stack is often an ambiguous and all-encompassing term, so we intentionally wanted to cover the impact of AI on the modern data stack from different angles. Here’s what you can expect:

• Why the Future of AI in Data will be Weird with Benn Stancil, CTO at Mode & Field CTO at ThoughtSpot — Covering how AI will change analytics workflows and tools 
• How Databricks is Transforming Data Warehousing and AI with Ari Kaplan, Head Evangelist & Robin Sutara, Field CTO at Databricks — Covering Databricks, data intelligence and how AI tools are changing data democratization
• Adding AI to the Data Warehouse with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO at Snowflake — Covering Snowflake and its uses, how generative AI is changing the attitudes of leaders towards data, and how to improve your data management
• Accelerating AI Workflows with Nuri Cankaya, VP of AI Marketing & La Tiffaney Santucci, AI Marketing Director at Intel — Covering AI’s impact on marketing analytics, how AI is being integrated into existing products, and the democratization of AI

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Intel OpenVINO™ toolkit
• Intel Developer Clouds for Accelerated Computing
• AWS Re:Invent
• [Course] Implementing AI Solutions in Business
• Related Episode: Intel CTO Steve Orrin on How Governments Can Navigate the Data & AI Revolution
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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Snowflake has been foundational in the data space for years. In the mid-2010s, the platform was a major driver of moving data to the cloud. More recently, it's become apparent that combining data and AI in the cloud is key to accelerating innovation. Snowflake has been rapidly adding AI features to provide value to the modern data stack, but what’s really been going on under the hood?

At the time of recording, Sridhar Ramaswamy was the SVP of AI at Snowflake, being appointed CEO at Snowflake in February 2024. Sridhar was formerly Co-Founder of Neeva, acquired in 2023 by Snowflake. Before founding Neeva, Ramaswamy oversaw Google's advertising products, including search, display, video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He joined Google in 2003 and was part of the growth of AdWords and Google's overall advertising business. He spent more than 15 years at Google, where he started as a software engineer and rose to SVP of Ads & Commerce. 

In the episode, Richie and Sridhar explore Snowflake and its uses, how generative AI is changing the attitudes of leaders towards data, how NLP and AI have impacted enterprise business operations as well as new applications of AI in an enterprise environment, the challenges of enterprise search, the importance of data quality, management and the role of semantic layers in the effective use of AI, a look into Snowflakes products including Snowpilot and Cortex, the collaboration required for successful data and AI projects, advice for organizations looking to improve their data management and much more.    

About the AI and the Modern Data Stack DataFramed Series

This week we’re releasing 4 episodes focused on how AI is changing the modern data stack and the analytics profession at large. The modern data stack is often an ambiguous and all-encompassing term, so we intentionally wanted to cover the impact of AI on the modern data stack from different angles. Here’s what you can expect:

• Why the Future of AI in Data will be Weird with Benn Stancil, CTO at Mode & Field CTO at ThoughtSpot — Covering how AI will change analytics workflows and tools 
• How Databricks is Transforming Data Warehousing and AI with Ari Kaplan, Head Evangelist & Robin Sutara, Field CTO at Databricks — Covering Databricks, data intelligence and how AI tools are changing data democratization
• Adding AI to the Data Warehouse with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO at Snowflake — Covering Snowflake and its uses, how generative AI is changing the attitudes of leaders towards data, and how to improve your data management
• Accelerating AI Workflows with Nuri Cankaya, VP of AI Marketing & La Tiffaney Santucci, AI Marketing Director at Intel — Covering AI’s impact on marketing analytics, how AI is being integrated into existing products, and the democratization of AI

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Snowflake
• Snowflake acquires Neeva to accelerate search in the Data Cloud through generative AI
• Use AI in Seconds with Snowflake Cortex
• [Course] Introduction to Snowflake
• Related Episode: Why AI will Change Everything—with Former Snowflake CEO, Bob Muglia
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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Databricks started out as a platform for using Spark, a big data analytics engine, but it's grown a lot since then. Databricks now allows users to leverage their data and AI projects in the same place, ensuring ease of use and consistency across operations. The Databricks platform is converging on the idea of data intelligence, but what does this mean, how will it help data teams and organizations, and where does AI fit in the picture?

Ari is Databricks’ Head of Evangelism and "The Real Moneyball Guy" - the popular movie was partly based on his analytical innovations in Major League Baseball. He is a leading influencer in analytics, artificial intelligence, data science, and high-growth business innovation. Ari was previously the Global AI Evangelist at DataRobot, Nielsen’s regional VP of Analytics, Caltech Alumni of the Decade, President Emeritus of the worldwide Independent Oracle Users Group, on Intel’s AI Board of Advisors, Sports Illustrated Top Ten GM Candidate, an IBM Watson Celebrity Data Scientist, and on the Crain’s Chicago 40 Under 40. He's also written 5 books on analytics, databases, and baseball.

Robin is the Field CTO at Databricks. She has consulted with hundreds of organizations on data strategy, data culture, and building diverse data teams. Robin has had an eclectic career path in technical and business functions with more than two decades in tech companies, including Microsoft and Databricks. She also has achieved multiple academic accomplishments from her juris doctorate to a masters in law to engineering leadership. From her first technical role as an entry-level consumer support engineer to her current role in the C-Suite, Robin supports creating an inclusive workplace and is the current co-chair of Women in Data Safety Committee. She was also recognized in 2023 as a Top 20 Women in Data and Tech, as well as DataIQ 100 Most Influential People in Data.

In the episode, Richie, Ari, and Robin explore Databricks, the application of generative AI in improving services operations and providing data insights, data intelligence, and lakehouse technology, the wide-ranging applications of generative AI, how AI tools are changing data democratization, the challenges of data governance and management and how tools like Databricks can help, how jobs in data and AI are changing and much more. 

About the AI and the Modern Data Stack DataFramed Series

This week we’re releasing 4 episodes focused on how AI is changing the modern data stack and the analytics profession at large. The modern data stack is often an ambiguous and all-encompassing term, so we intentionally wanted to cover the impact of AI on the modern data stack from different angles. Here’s what you can expect:

• Why the Future of AI in Data will be Weird with Benn Stancil, CTO at Mode & Field CTO at ThoughtSpot — Covering how AI will change analytics workflows and tools 
• How Databricks is Transforming Data Warehousing and AI with Ari Kaplan, Head Evangelist & Robin Sutara, Field CTO at Databricks — Covering Databricks, data intelligence and how AI tools are changing data democratization
• Adding AI to the Data Warehouse with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO at Snowflake — Covering Snowflake and its uses, how generative AI is changing the attitudes of leaders towards data, and how to improve your data management
• Accelerating AI Workflows with Nuri Cankaya, VP of AI Marketing & La Tiffaney Santucci, AI Marketing Director at Intel — Covering AI’s impact on marketing analytics, how AI is being integrated into existing products, and the democratization of AI

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Databricks
• Delta Lake
• MLflow
• Data Lakehouse Architecture by Databricks
• Building and Customizing GenAI with Databricks: LLMs and Beyond
• [Course] Understanding Modern Data Architecture
• [Course] Introduction to Databricks
• [Course] Introduction to MLflow
• Related Episode: Optimizing Cloud Data Warehouses with Salim Syed, VP, Head of Engineering at Capital One Software
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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One of the biggest surprises of the generative AI revolution over the past 2 years lies in the counter-intuitiveness of its most successful use cases. Counter to most predictions made about AI years ago, AI-assisted coding, specifically AI-assisted data work, has been surprisingly one of the biggest killer apps of generative AI tools and copilots. However, what happens when we take this notion even further? How will analytics workflows look like when generative AI tools can also assist us in problem-solving? What type of analytics use cases can we expect to operationalize, and what tools can we expect to work with when AI systems can provide scalable qualitative data instead of relying on imperfect quantitative proxies? Today’s guest calls this future “weird”. 

Benn Stancil is the Field CTO at ThoughtSpot. He joined ThoughtSpot in 2023 as part of its acquisition of Mode, where he was a Co-Founder and CTO. While at Mode, Benn held roles leading Mode’s data, product, marketing, and executive teams. He regularly writes about data and technology at benn.substack.com. Prior to founding Mode, Benn worked on analytics teams at Microsoft and Yammer.

Throughout the episode, Benn and Adel talk about the nature of AI-assisted analytics workflows, the potential for generative AI in assisting problem-solving, how he imagines analytics workflows to look in the future, and a lot more. 

About the AI and the Modern Data Stack DataFramed Series

This week we’re releasing 4 episodes focused on how AI is changing the modern data stack and the analytics profession at large. The modern data stack is often an ambiguous and all-encompassing term, so we intentionally wanted to cover the impact of AI on the modern data stack from different angles. Here’s what you can expect:

• Why the Future of AI in Data will be Weird with Benn Stancil, CTO at Mode & Field CTO at ThoughtSpot — Covering how AI will change analytics workflows and tools 
• How Databricks is Transforming Data Warehousing and AI with Ari Kaplan, Head Evangelist & Robin Sutara, Field CTO at Databricks — Covering Databricks, data intelligence and how AI tools are changing data democratization
• Adding AI to the Data Warehouse with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO at Snowflake — Covering Snowflake and its uses, how generative AI is changing the attitudes of leaders towards data, and how to improve your data management
• Accelerating AI Workflows with Nuri Cankaya, VP of AI Marketing & La Tiffaney Santucci, AI Marketing Director at Intel — Covering AI’s impact on marketing analytics, how AI is being integrated into existing products, and the democratization of AI

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Mode Analytics
• ThoughtSpot acquires Mode: Empowering data teams to bring Generative AI to BI
• Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
• [Course] Generative AI for Business
• [Skill Track] SQL Fundamentals
• Related Episode: The Future of Marketing Analytics with Cory Munchbach, CEO at BlueConic
• Sign up to RADAR: The Analytics Edition

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Just as many of us have been using generative AI tools to make us more productive at work, so have bad actors. Generative AI makes it much easier to create fake yet convincing text and images that can be used to deceive and harm. We’ve already seen lots of high-profile attempts to leverage AI in phishing campaigns, and this is putting more pressure on cybersecurity teams to get ahead of the curve and combat these new forms of threats. However, AI is also helping those that work in cybersec to be more productive and better equip themselves to create new forms of defense and offense. 

Brian Murphy is a founder, CEO, entrepreneur and investor. He founded and leads ReliaQuest, the force multiplier of security operations and one of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the global cybersecurity market. ReliaQuest increases visibility, reduces complexity, and manages risk with its cloud-native security operations platform, GreyMatter. Murphy grew ReliaQuest from a boot-strapped startup to a high-growth unicorn with a valuation of over $1 billion, more than 1,000 team members, and more than $350 million in growth equity with firms such as FTV Capital and KKR Growth. 

In the full episode, Adel and Brian cover the evolution of cybersecurity tools, the challenges faced by cybersecurity teams, types of cyber threats, how generative AI can be used both defensively and offensively in cybersecurity, how generative AI tools are making cybersecurity professionals more productive, the evolving role of cybersecurity professionals, the security implications of deploying AI models, the regulatory landscape for AI in cybersecurity and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• ReliaQuest
• ReliaQuest Blog
• IBM finds that ChatGPT can generate phishing emails nearly as convincing as a human
• Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs)
• [Course] Introduction to Data Security
• Related episode: Data Security in the Age of AI with Bart Vandekerckhove, Co-founder at Raito

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We are in a Generative AI hype cycle. Every executive looking at the potential generative AI today is probably thinking about how they can allocate their department's budget to building some AI use cases. However, many of these use cases won't make it into production.

In a similar vein, the hype around machine learning in the early 2010s led to lots of hype around the technology, but a lot of the value did not pan out. Four years ago, VentureBeat showed that 87% of data science projects did not make it into production. And in a lot of ways, things haven’t gotten much better. And if we don't learn why that is the case, generative AI could be destined to a similar fate. 

Eric Siegel, Ph.D., is a leading consultant and former Columbia University professor who helps companies deploy machine learning. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series and its new sister, Generative AI World, the instructor of the acclaimed online course “Machine Learning Leadership and Practice – End-to-End Mastery,” executive editor of The Machine Learning Times, and a frequent keynote speaker. He wrote the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, as well as The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment. Eric’s interdisciplinary work bridges the stubborn technology/business gap. At Columbia, he won the Distinguished Faculty award when teaching graduate computer science courses in ML and AI. Later, he served as a business school professor at UVA Darden. Eric also publishes op-eds on analytics and social justice.

In the episode, Adel and Eric explore the reasons why machine learning projects don't make it into production, the BizML Framework or how to bring business stakeholders into the room when building machine learning use cases, the skill gap between business stakeholders and data practitioners, use cases of organizations have leveraged machine learning for operational improvements, what the previous machine learning hype cycle can teach us about generative AI and a lot more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment by Eric Siegel
• Generating ROI with AI
• BizML Cheat Sheet
• Gooder
• Survey: Machine Learning Projects Still Routinely Fail to Deploy
• [Skill Track] MLOps Fundamentals