Last year saw the proliferation of countless AI tools and initiatives, many companies looked to find ways where AI could be leveraged to reduce operational costs and pressure wherever possible. 2023 was a year of experimentation for anyone trying to harness AI, but we can’t walk forever. To keep up with the rapidly changing landscape in business, last year’s experiments with AI need to find their feet and allow us to run. But how do we know which initiatives are worth fully investing in? Will...

There aren’t many retail giants like Walmart. In fact, there are none. The multinational generates 650bn in revenue, (including 50bn in eCommerce)—the highest revenue of any retailer globally. With over 10,000 stores worldwide and a constantly evolving product line, Walmart’s data & AI function has a lot to contend with when it comes to customer experience, demand forecasting, supply chain optimization and where to use AI effectively. So how do they do it? What can we learn from one of...

Generative AI has had a wide range of uses, but some of its strongest use cases are in coding and programming. One of the companies that has been leading the way in AI-assisted programming has been GitHub with GitHub CoPilot. Many software engineering teams now have tools like CoPilot embedded into their workflows, but what does this mean for the future of programming? Kyle Daigle is the COO of GitHub, leading the strategic initiatives, operations, and innovation of the world's largest...

Since the launch of ChatGPT, one of the trending terms outside of ChatGPT itself has been prompt engineering. This act of carefully crafting your instructions is treated as alchemy by some and science by others. So what makes an effective prompt? Alex Banks has been building and scaling AI products since 2021. He writes Sunday Signal, a newsletter offering a blend of AI advancements and broader thought-provoking insights. His expertise extends to social media platforms on X/Twitter and...

Driving impact with analytics goes beyond numbers and graphs; it's about telling a story that resonates. In this session, Brent Dykes, author of "Effective Data Storytelling" & the Founder & Chief Data Storyteller at AnalyticsHero, Lea Pica, author of "Present Beyond Measure" & the Founder at Story-driven by Data, and Andy Cotgreave, co-author of "The Big Book of Dashboards" and Senior Data Evangelist at Tableau, will unveil how to transform data into compelling narratives.  They...

You've just invested in licenses for your favorite analytics tool, but now what? In this session, Laura Gent Felker, GTM Analytics Lead at MongoDB, Tiffany Perkins-Munn, Managing Director & Head of Data & Analytics at JPMC and Omar Khawaja, CDAO & Global Head Data & Analytics at Givaudan will explore best practices when it comes to scaling analytics adoption within the wider organization. They will discuss how to approach change management when it comes to driving analytics...

Driving trust with data is essential to succeeding with analytics. However, time and time again, data quality remains an issue for most organizations today. In this session, Esther Munyi, Chief Data Officer at Sasfin, Amy Grace, Director, Military Engines Digital Strategy at Pratt & Whitney, Stefaan Verhulst, Chief Research & Development Officer, Director of Data Program at NYU Governance Lab, and Malarvizhi Veerappan, Program Manager and Senior Data Scientist at the World Bank will...

Creating a culture of continuous learning within analytics functions isn't just beneficial; it's essential. In the session, Russell Johnson, Chief Data Scientist at Marks & Spencer, Denisse Groenendaal-Lopez, Learning & Development Business Partner at Booking Group, and Mark Stern, VP of Business Intelligence & Analytics at BetMGM will address the importance of fostering a learning environment for driving success with analytics. They will provide insights on developing a culture...

Everyone has seen the reach and impact of generative AI, and with countless use-cases across a variety of fields, the question is often not "can we do things with AI?", but rather "what should we do with AI?". What are the key areas where generative AI has had a profound impact already? Which economies, industries, and businesses have taken full advantage of the abilities of GenAI already? It takes a lot of wisdom and experience within the data & AI space to distill high-level insights...

There is a concept in software engineering which is called ‘shifting left’, this focuses on testing software a lot earlier in the development lifecycle than you would normally expect it to. This helps teams building the software create better rituals and processes, while also ensuring quality and usability are key aspects to evaluate as the software is being built. We know this works in software development, but what happens when these practices are used when building AI tools? Saurabh Gupta...

Generative AI has made a mark everywhere, including BI platforms, but how can you combine AI and BI together? What effects can this have across organizations? With constituent aspects such as data quality, your AI strategy, and the specific use-case you’re trying to solve, it’s important to get the full picture and tread with intent. What are the subtleties that we need to get right in order for this marriage to work to its full potential? Nick Magnuson is the Head of AI at Qlik, executing...

Despite the critical role of analytics in guiding business decisions, organizations continue to face significant challenges in harnessing its full potential. As data sets expand and deadlines shrink, the urgency to scale analytics processes becomes paramount. What data leaders now need to focus on are essential strategies for analytics at scale, including fostering a culture of continuous learning, prioritizing data governance, and leveraging generative AI. Libby Duane Adams is the Chief...

Generative AI is fantastic but has a major problem: sometimes it "hallucinates", meaning it makes things up. In a business product like a chatbot, this can be disastrous. Vector databases like Pinecone are one of the solutions to mitigating the problem. Vector databases are a key component to any AI application, as well as things like enterprise search and document search. They have become an essential tool for every business, and with the rise in interest in AI in the last couple of years,...

One of the most immediate needs to come out of the generative AI boom has been the need for guardrails and governmental regulation of AI technologies. Most of the work already completed in the AI space has been industry-led, with large organizations pushing AI forward to improve their efficiency as businesses and to create new avenues for revenue. This focus on industry and revenue can potentially create more inequality in the world, with companies not interested in the negative effects of AI...

Remarkable people walk among us. Some of us may be remarkable ourselves. But none of us start out remarkable. The journey to becoming a person that makes a difference in the world is never easy, as with any story that includes a hero, there are struggles, tests and moments of self-doubt. Remarkable people overcome these feats, and when they are in a position to, they give back. But what kind of mindset do these people have, how do they make decisions? What keeps them on their path towards...

We’ve heard so much about the value and capabilities of generative AI over the past year, and we’ve all become accustomed to the chat interfaces of our preferred models. One of the main concerns many of us have had has been privacy. Is OpenAI keeping the data and information I give to ChatGPT secure? One of the touted solutions to this problem is running LLMs locally on your own machine, but with the hardware cost that comes with it, running LLMs locally has not been possible for many of us....

Snowflake has been foundational in the data space for years. In the mid-2010s, the platform was a major driver of moving data to the cloud. More recently, it's become apparent that combining data and AI in the cloud is key to accelerating innovation. Snowflake has been rapidly adding AI features to provide value to the modern data stack, but what’s really been going on under the hood? At the time of recording, Sridhar Ramaswamy was the SVP of AI at Snowflake, being appointed CEO at Snowflake...

Databricks started out as a platform for using Spark, a big data analytics engine, but it's grown a lot since then. Databricks now allows users to leverage their data and AI projects in the same place, ensuring ease of use and consistency across operations. The Databricks platform is converging on the idea of data intelligence, but what does this mean, how will it help data teams and organizations, and where does AI fit in the picture? Ari is Databricks’ Head of Evangelism and "The Real...

One of the biggest surprises of the generative AI revolution over the past 2 years lies in the counter-intuitiveness of its most successful use cases. Counter to most predictions made about AI years ago, AI-assisted coding, specifically AI-assisted data work, has been surprisingly one of the biggest killer apps of generative AI tools and copilots. However, what happens when we take this notion even further? How will analytics workflows look like when generative AI tools can also assist us in...

Just as many of us have been using generative AI tools to make us more productive at work, so have bad actors. Generative AI makes it much easier to create fake yet convincing text and images that can be used to deceive and harm. We’ve already seen lots of high-profile attempts to leverage AI in phishing campaigns, and this is putting more pressure on cybersecurity teams to get ahead of the curve and combat these new forms of threats. However, AI is also helping those that work in cybersec to...

We are in a Generative AI hype cycle. Every executive looking at the potential generative AI today is probably thinking about how they can allocate their department's budget to building some AI use cases. However, many of these use cases won't make it into production. In a similar vein, the hype around machine learning in the early 2010s led to lots of hype around the technology, but a lot of the value did not pan out. Four years ago, VentureBeat showed that 87% of data science projects did...

We don’t think about every decision we make. Some decisions are easy and intuitive, others can be riddled with doubt. In a business setting, decision-making is often crucial, and with that comes pressure to ensure we’re making the right decisions in the best way possible. We can often accompany decision-making with context, providing a narrative for how we might approach a decision, citing what data and insights have had significant input into our choices. But how do we approach storytelling...

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, woke up in a pool of blood nursing a broken cheekbone after collapsing at her desk in 2007. Various stresses and pressures in her life had manifested themself into an episode of extreme mental exhaustion. This event was the catalyst for her to write a book on well-being as well as start the behavioral-change company Thrive Global. Many of us have, or will, experience burnout at some point. The build-up of stress, negative emotions, and...

2023 was a huge year for data and AI. Everyone who didn't live under a rock started using generative AI, and much was teased by companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Meta. We saw the millions of different use cases generative AI could be applied to, as well as the iterations we could expect from the AI space, such as connected multi-modal models, LLMs in mobile devices and formal legislation. But what has this meant for DataCamp? What will we do to facilitate learners and organizations...