At Databricks, we have had the opportunity to help thousands of organizations modernize their data architectures to be cloud-first and extract value from their data at scale with analytics and AI. Over the past few years, we've been fortunate to engage directly with customers across industries and regions about their data-driven aspirations – and the roadblocks that slow down their ability to get there. While challenges vary greatly among industries and even individual organizations, we have developed a rich understanding of the top four habits of data and AI-driven organizations. Before diving into the habits, let's take a quick look at how organizations have approached enabling data strategies. First, data teams have made technology decisions over time that propel a way of thinking that is based around technology stacks: data warehousing, data engineering, streaming real-time data science, and machine learning.

Artificial Intelligence is necessitating changing organizational structures and the creation of new roles, just as the internet did post-Netscape. The first International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN outside Geneva Switzerland in May 1994 is commonly recognized as the birthplace of the commercial internet. How business is conducted and who conducts business was forever changed. The internet spawned new businesses, new business models, new ways of doing business and so much more. All of which, over time, required companies to reorganize existing departments, create new internal organizations, invent new roles with people with new skill sets.

It has often been said that crisis reveals character, a truism for organizations as well as individuals. Crises compel organizations to rethink how they work, and often become the source of lasting change and growth. After the 2000–01 recession, for example, 15 percent of companies that had not previously been leaders in their industries emerged as stalwarts in their sectors and moved into the top quartile. Likewise, while most retailers did poorly after the Great Recession of 2007–09, a handful showed their mettle and delivered more than five times the average total returns to shareholders. Few would argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is more devastating than these events.

It has often been said that crisis reveals character, a truism for organizations as well as individuals. Crises compel organizations to rethink how they work, and often become the source of lasting change and growth. After the 2000–01 recession, for example, 15 percent of companies that had not previously been leaders in their industries emerged as stalwarts in their sectors and moved into the top quartile. Likewise, while most retailers did poorly after the Great Recession of 2007–09, a handful showed their mettle and delivered more than five times the average total returns to shareholders. Few would argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is more devastating than these events. It is a humanitarian crisis of the likes we have not experienced in recent times.