What we learned at Databricks' 2023 Data and AI World Tour
We sponsored three stops on Databricks' 2023 Data and AI World Tour: Chicago, London, and New York. Each stop drew a different industry, and the questions people asked in each city have aged better than a typical conference recap.
Chicago: retail and manufacturing
Retail and manufacturing teams kept circling the same tension: move fast on a pricing or inventory call, but don't guess. The sessions in Chicago were mostly about closing that gap without slowing the business down, using Databricks and Sigma together for retail and for manufacturing.
London: communications
The communications sessions centered on a narrower, more technical problem: catching an anomaly in near real time, on data that has to stay governed the whole way through. Unity Catalog did a lot of the talking here, since access control matters more once the data is moving quickly.
New York: financial services
Financial services attendees asked fewer "what can it do" questions and more "what does it cost." Sigma's lightning talk covered using Databricks SQL warehouses for BI workloads specifically, and Greenland Capital Management is the clearest example we have of that combination paying off in practice, not just in a slide.
What held up two years later
The industries were different, but the ask underneath them wasn't: give a business user a fast, honest number without asking a data engineer to rebuild a pipeline first. That's still the test we build against.
See it on your own data
Request a demo if you're running BI workloads on Databricks and want to see what a live warehouse connection looks like on your own tables.
