Simplifying Data And AI With a Data Lakehouse

Why do so many organizations find it difficult to leverage the power of data analytics and AI? According to Matei Zaharia, the cofounder and chief technologist at Databricks, the reason is not that data-related problems are intrinsically hard, but that the technology infrastructure that businesses build to manage their data is often more complicated than it needs to be. For the uninitiated, Zaharia started the Apache Spark project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009 before founding Databricks, and today is also an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He was in town at the STACK conference in November to share his insights about the future of data and the role of the data lakehouse. To illustrate the benefits of data, Zaharia started with a diagram to illustrate data and AI maturity against the competitive advantages that businesses can expect to gain.