Recently, Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas said that the CEO role is highly replaceable. He believes future AIs like GPT-5 or GPT-6 could perform CEO tasks better by continuously processing information and making decisions.
Databricks chief Ali Ghodsi couldn’t agree less and is doing everything he can to ensure CEOs embrace and understand AI before it replaces them.
“Every company on the planet now wants to be a data and AI company. In the last 18 months, every CIO and CEO I meet from a Fortune 500 company or a small company thinks that data and AI will be super strategic for them over the next five years,” Ghodsi said in his keynote speech at the 2024 Data + AI Summit.
Ghodsi believes that CEOs worldwide find it challenging to understand their own organisation, and Databricks aims to make it easier for them by democratising AI and data.
“Your CEO will not access the data and ask questions directly from the data; instead, they will go to the data team and ask, 'Hey, can you get me this report?’” he predicted, saying that CEOs do not speak SQL or Python or, at the very least, don't know where to find the data and submit their own queries.
“We're really hoping that we can democratise this [AI and data] so that if you speak English or any other natural language, you should just be able to ask your question from the data, and many more people in the organisation should be able to get insights,” said Ghodsi.
Making CEOs Data + AI Literate
“AI is the future, there's no doubt about that. If CEOs are not aligned with this, I don't think they'll become CEOs in the future,” said Databricks India and SAARC region vice president Anil Bhasin, touching upon how the company is helping businesses in India with their AI initiatives.
Bhasin said that Databricks has launched a new Learning Festival, which will train practitioners and provide them with more hands-on training and certification.
Further, he said that the initiatives at the CXO level are really about thought leadership, understanding what they are thinking and whether they’re in any industry vertical or horizontal, depending on the industries served for digital natives.
“We provide what are called CXO roundtables, where customers share their problems and knowledge, and discuss their experiences,” added Bhasin. This, he said, was being done across industries, with an emphasis on value creation and go-to-market strategies for businesses.
Bhasin said that Databricks is the only company on the planet that is providing community training, learning enablement, and driving thought leadership at scale. “The fact that we want to build a CIO community around data in itself is a great value proposition,” he said.
Databricks believes in building strategic alliances and collaboration. Citing Databricks’ field engineering SVP Arsalan Tavakoli, Bhasin said that he was in India last year, where he met with top CXOs, CTOs, and CEOs who were very happy to see him because it was an exchange of ideas between the US and other parts of the world.
Ghodsi—who once stayed in Paharganj, Delhi, India, in the mid-2000s—told AIM that he would love to visit India soon, given the excitement around generative AI in the country.
“Every CEO wants to know what generative AI can do, but right now, it is all about experimentation and exploitation. I think it'd be another six months from now when it starts,” said Bhasin, saying that they’ve already got a couple of customers in India implementing them. Some of the notable ones include TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Celebal Technologies, Krutrim and LTI Mindtree.
“We firmly prescribe the notion that if you are not embracing data and AI, you’re really going to be left behind,” said Databricks vice president of field engineering APJ Nick Eayrs, adding that CEOs should just get started with AI to differentiate their products and services.
Making CXO’s Job Easy With Databricks
Databricks has launched a new tool called Databricks AI/BI, which will help CEOs gain insights across organisations through an AI-first approach. It leverages generative AI to enable self-service analytics, allowing them to ask complex questions and receive accurate answers without requiring data science expertise.
“A truly intelligent BI solution needs to understand the unique semantics and nuances of a business to effectively answer questions for business users. The launch of AI/BI is a step towards building such a system,” said Ghodsi.
AI/BI consists of two complementary experiences—AI/BI Dashboards, a low-code interface for quickly creating interactive dashboards, and AI/BI Genie, a conversational interface that uses natural language to address ad-hoc and follow-up questions. Both are powered by a compound AI system that continuously learns from usage across an organisation’s data stack, including ETL pipelines, lineage, and queries.
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