Tredence, the Data Science and AI Solutions company, announced it has raised USD 175 million in Series B funding from Advent International (Advent) to accelerate data-fueled growth and AI value realization for industries. Advent is one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors. The full financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. Advent will acquire a minority stake in Tredence with the $175 million investment. Advent has significant investment experience in the technology services and software sectors.

Did you miss a session from the Future of Work Summit? San Francisco headquartered Databricks, a company that offers the capabilities of a data warehouse and data lake in a single "lakehouse" architecture, today announced its first industry-specific offering: Lakehouse for Retail. Designed specifically for enterprises dealing in the retail and consumer goods vertical, Databricks says Lakehouse for Retail is a fully integrated platform that aims to solve the most critical challenges retailers and their partners face while trying to leverage surging data volumes for AI and analytics projects. The solution, which is generally available as of today, has already seen early adoption from major retail enterprises including Walgreens, Columbia, H&M Group, Reckitt, Restaurant Brands International, 84.51, Co-Op Food, Gousto, and Acosta. "With hundreds of millions of prescriptions processed by Walgreens each year, Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail allows us to unify all of this data and store it in one place for a full range of analytics and ML workloads," said Luigi Guadagno, the VP of pharmacy and healthcare platform at Walgreens.

In the past four years, about 90% of enterprises have experienced a turn that upset normal operations, and organisations with a higher adoption rate of contemporary technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) will have a competitive advantage, a Gartner report has said. Despite analytics including AI being part of "discretionary spend", there has been an increase in demand for such solutions during the current downturn. "This was not the case during the recession of 2008-09," said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group chief executive, Fractal Analytics. "AI is still discretionary but most of our clients in the last three months have come up to us and said that though it is discretionary, it is mission critical. It is super important to us and we are actually going to expand," said Velamakanni.