The Future of Product Information Management: From Sprawl to a Single Source of Truth
Webinar Speaker: Donald Farmer, Research Fellow
Date: Monday, June 8, 2026
Time: 12:00 p.m. PT / 3:00 p.m. ET
Consumer goods companies, retailers, and manufacturers face a widening gap between the volume of product data they generate and their ability to put it to work. Catalogs are growing, sales channels are more diverse than ever, and global markets demand localized content at speed. Yet product information still lives scattered across spreadsheets, ERPs, marketing systems, and individual laptops.
Legacy product information management systems (PIMs) were built for a different era. Migrating modern product data into them often introduces fresh problems: brittle pipelines, slow onboarding of new sources, and missing attributions. The result is that even well-funded analytics and AI programs struggle to launch, omnichannel experiences are fragmented, and business users stop trusting the catalog they should depend on.
This webinar examines what a modern approach to PIM looks like when AI and lakehouse architectures are designed into the process from the start rather than bolted on. Drawing on enterprise case studies and current research from TDWI, the session explores how semantic matching, large language models for translation and enrichment, and governed data stewardship combine to dramatically compress implementation times. Donald Farmer, TDWI research fellow, will be joined by experts from Databricks and LakeFusion to discuss architectures, pitfalls, and patterns observed in real deployments. You will learn:
- Why traditional PIM architectures so often fail in the modern ecosystem
- How AI-powered entity resolution improves accuracy at scale
- What role LLMs play in translating and enriching catalogs
- How to govern product data without slowing down business users
- What measurable outcomes early adopters are reporting
Guest Speakers
Brian Land
Sr. Manager, Field Engineering
Databricks
Brian Land is a Sr. Manager, Field Engineering at Databricks, where he leads a team of solutions architects in the financial services strategics vertical. He brings a practical leadership perspective on helping organizations adopt and scale modern data and AI platforms.
Dave Bashein
VP of Product
LakeFusion
Dave Bashein is VP of Product at LakeFusion, where he leads the design and implementation of the company's Databricks-native Product MDM solution. He brings over a decade of hands-on experience in product information and master data management, including global PIM rollouts across 20+ countries and nearly six years consulting on product MDM, data quality, and business process re-engineering for enterprise clients. At LakeFusion he pairs that domain depth with disciplined product leadership, to deliver customer-focused features that differentiate LakeFusion PIM from its legacy competitors.
Donald Farmer