What does it mean to “Put AI to Work''? This phrase — the tagline for Dataiku’s 2023 Everyday AI conference series — underscores that game-changing moonshots are created by transforming how AI is used habitually every day in your organization. AI has never been hotter thanks to recent breakthroughs in Generative AI, but the gap between asking ChatGPT for recipe recommendations and the large ambitions of practical, enterprise-disrupting implementation has never felt more daunting.
Dataiku is bridging that gap for our customers to prioritize business-value-driving strategy as the foundational “why” to every project. Then, we support right-sizing AI use cases, tech and design choices, and practical implementation steps to “Put AI to Work” wherever your organization’s AI maturity may be.
To get AI to truly deliver, more than ever before, enterprises need to roll up their sleeves in these early stages. This is the moment where organizations must move away from seeing AI as mere process automation tools and into invaluable “team members” that actively shape creative and revenue-generating work.
Over 1,300 attendees across Everyday AI New York engaged with data, ML, and AI technologies through our keynote announcement, customer stories, hands on workshops, live demonstrations, and captivating discussions. Here are some of my favorite moments below. And if you’re pondering why you should delve deeper, it’s because these moments provide a glimpse into the future of AI’s role in our organizations and why it matters more than ever.
It was likely the best tech conference I have ever attended and it exceeded my expectations."
-Riley Buss, Manager, Big Data Engineering & Data Science, CHS Inc.
1. Diversity of Customers and Speakers
For enterprises to reach Everyday AI at scale, there needs to be a shared data culture among collaborators from diverse business and academic backgrounds. AI is a team sport, and building a winning strategy involves more than just tech-first profiles — it must ensure diversity of thought, team members from various backgrounds, and inclusionary practices. That’s why we’re thrilled to share that, at Everyday AI New York, 36% of our speakers were people of color and 39% of speakers identified as women.
At the start of the conference, we offered a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) breakfast panel where I spoke with Professor Renée Cummings, the first data activist-in-residence and professor of data science at the University of Virginia, and Christopher Peter Makris, senior learning manager at Dataiku. The session highlighted critical DEI topics such as bias in data and processes, workplace inclusivity, psychological safety, and ensuring organizations have frameworks and safeguards in place to mitigate bias and work towards more equitable outcomes in analytics and AI.
2. The LLM Mesh Announcements
The excitement continued as Dataiku’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Clément Stenac unveiled the LLM Mesh:
- A Unified and Secure Backbone: To build the best Generative AI applications, analytics and IT teams must reshape how they configure their Generative AI models and services to the organizations needs with speed, security, and agility.
- Right Size: It provides the components companies need to build applications, from out-of-the-box to fine-tuned advanced proprietary models.
And of course, it takes a village: We are joined in this venture by our LLM Mesh Launch Partners Snowflake, NVIDIA, Pinecone, and AI21 Labs and the full list of our LLM Mesh integrations can be found in this blog.
Notably, Dataiku CEO and co-founder Florian Douetteau spoke with Pinecone CEO Edo Liberty, NVIDIA GVP Malcolm deMayo, and SVP AI21 Pankaj Dugar in a fireside chat on the future of the Generative AI ecosystem to ensure enterprise success. Snowflake’s Matt Glickman spoke on the main stage with Dataiku’s Patrick Masi-Phelps in a session on “How Snowflake & Dataiku Supercharge Everyday AI Together” with a demo showcasing how Snowflake and Dataiku integrate together to quickly use Prompt Studios and get answers from conversational records.
3. Inaugural Exec Connect, the Senior Leadership Program
I’m really excited to be back at this conference. It’s really about the learning aspect, meeting people from the same industry and other industries, coming back with new plans and visions. It’s to see how the product has evolved and make sure we use it to the best of our ability in our organization.”
-Herve Riboulet, Air Canada
For the first time at an Everyday AI conference, we set up a specific, elevated executive program designed to encourage top AI professionals to learn from one another in a community setting, known as Exec Connect. The event combined executive-specific activities that helped connect top customers and leaders in analytics and AI over the most pressing questions facing organizations and offered exclusive content, including a CDO customer panel, Gen AI “real talk” conversation, and an open Q&A with Dataiku’s founders.
With its extremely positive reception, we will continue to bring leaders together throughout the year at Dataiku Exec Connect moments.
4. We Brought It to Life With the Extraordinary Team & Generative AI Walk-Through Experiences
Developing the ability to build AI — especially Generative AI — into an organization’s operations and processes is not easy nor immediate. Even with the most cutting-edge technologies and processes, nothing can be achieved without an extraordinary team. Dataiku’s core belief that bringing together technical and business users across a uniform platform and collaborative workstream is showcased in our first experience:
In our second experiential, we held a first-of-its-kind Generative AI walk-through, highlighting Dataiku’s Generative AI use case collection, framework for Responsible Generative AI, and robust platform capabilities designed to accelerate real applications with real safety. This immersive space helped viewers understand the basic components of an LLM, how to consider getting started to advanced techniques, and the utility of Dataiku and the wider technology ecosystem to supercharge AI projects.
5. Hands-On Labs
It wouldn’t be a Dataiku event without a hands-on element, the chance for practitioners and technical leaders to discover how-tos, new feature drops from Dataiku product experts, and the latest trends in analytics and AI through tech talks and interactive experiences. A benefit of attending in person is having this unique ability to participate in guided, hands-on sessions that provide real-time solutions on how to use the Dataiku platform. A few of our favorites were:
- Dataiku for Developers: A chance for coders to discover dozens of ways to interact with code in their projects, including using Dataiku APIs to programmatically perform tasks, build custom models and visualizations, create and share custom code with their team, and more. Go further on this topic in the Dataiku demo just for code-first practitioners.
- Beyond the Spreadsheet: Analysts got to learn how Dataiku can achieve the same data wrangling tasks as spreadsheet-based tools and take them to new places where spreadsheets can’t go. Check out this blog to move beyond the spreadsheet with Dataiku.
- 8 Hidden Gems in Dataiku’s Visual ML: Attendees got to discover some less well-known but extremely powerful features in Dataiku’s Visual ML such as model assertions and diagnostics, model overrides, what-if analysis, automatic documentation, and more. Go further on delivering more models with Dataiku AutoML here.
- Dataiku, MLFlow, and Cloud ML: Data scientists got to uncover how to import previously trained MLFlow models into Dataiku and train a Dataiku model in Visual ML and export it as an MLFlow or Python model for development in the environment of their choice. Get an overview of importing MLFlow saved models in Dataiku here.
- Build Once, Reuse Forever: Audience members learned how to automate pieces of their projects and create their own custom visual recipes (with no code required!) so they can build it once, then set it and forget it. Check out this blog for more insights on automations with data science and machine learning.
It Takes a Village!
We would be remiss if we didn’t thank our customers and all of our attendees that attended Everyday AI New York, our partners who sponsored the event, analysts who attended the Analyst Summit to learn more about Dataiku, Customer Advisory Board members, and Dataiku leadership. If you weren’t there IRL, we also announced the 2023 Frontrunner Awards winners — the extraordinary data and domain experts paving the way for Everyday AI, so be sure to check out their stories!