Talking Business to Your Data: Conversational Analytics
Webinar Speaker: Donald Farmer, Research Fellow
Date: Thursday, January 16, 2025
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
Self-service and democratization remain top priorities for organizations advancing their analytics strategies, according to TDWI research. Yet achieving true self-service analytics often falls short due to usability challenges and gaps in accessibility for business users.
Conversational analytics, powered by generative AI, promises to reshape the analytics landscape by enabling users to interact with their data using natural language, bridging the gap between complex data systems and non-technical stakeholders. Generative AI, infused into modern BI tools, provides the engine behind these capabilities, leveraging AI and large language models (LLMs) to deliver insights directly to decision-makers.
Join this webinar with experts from ThoughtSpot, Databricks, and TDWI to better understand how generative AI is helping to drive a new era of analytics that goes beyond traditional BI and data visualization. Discover how AI agents and governed data platforms empower business users to ask questions in their own terms and receive actionable insights. Topics include:
- How generative AI is being utilized to support conversational analytics
- Why simply layering a LLM front end onto existing data platforms is insufficient for deriving insights
- The future of AI agents in BI
- How ThoughtSpot’s advanced AI-powered conversational analytics platform and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform can help bring advanced workloads and intelligent decision-making closer to the business
Guest Speakers
Ari Kaplan
Global Head of Evangelism
Databricks
Ari is Databrick's Global Head of Evangelism, and a leading influencer in data and AI. The popular movie Moneyball was partly based on Ari’s analytical and scouting experiences innovating Major League Baseball, and creating the Cubs, Dodgers, and Orioles analytics departments. He is coauthor of “The Data Intelligence Platform for Dummies”, DataIQ “Top 20 Influencer in AI” 2024, co-host of the popular “Live from the Lakehouse” show, and was President of the worldwide Oracle users group (22,000 members) when Oracle acquired MySQL, Java, and Peoplesoft. Before Databricks, he traveled the world with McLaren Formula 1, assisting the racing strategy team to bring AI models to production. He is also President of the Independent Investigation into the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg, Sweden's humanitarian hero, leveraging data analytics to find missing prisoners. Caltech awarded him as an "Alumni of the Decade," IBM a "Data Science Celebrity," and the History Channel made a documentary on one of Kaplan’s analytical investigations.
Cindi Howson
Chief Data Strategy Officer
ThoughtSpot
Cindi Howson is the Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot and host of The Data Chief podcast . Cindi is an analytics and BI thought leader and expert with a flair for bridging business needs with technology. As Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot, she advises top clients on data strategy and best practices to becoming data- driven, influences ThoughtSpot’s product strategy, and interviews the industry’s top data and analytics leaders on The Data Chief podcast.
Cindi was previously a Gartner research Vice President, as the lead author for the data and analytics maturity model and analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, and a popular keynote speaker. She introduced new research in data and AI for good, NLP/BI Search, and augmented analytics and brought both the BI bake offs and innovation panels to Gartner globally. Prior to joining Gartner, she was founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth product reviews based on exclusive hands-on testing, contributor to Information Week, and the author of several books including: Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data and SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference.
Donald Farmer