The Weekly #5

The Weekly is a regular post about a few items that caught my eye over the last 7 days. I’m always keen to hear of any new or particularly interesting stories so please feel free to share anything you come across.

This week, I attended the Big Data London conference at Olympia.

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Three things stood out for me.

1. It could have been called Big AI London
2. There is a lot of overlap
3. Snowflake has the biggest budget

It Could Have Been Called Big AI London

It certainly wasn’t 100%, but around 80-90% of companies and vendors in attendance must have been related to AI, or at least were trying to give that impression. A lot of companies have been wedging some sort of GPT into their solutions, maybe a chatbot or an agent for tasks like “tell me which category had the most sales in Q2”. We’ll see a lot more of this in the future I’m sure, but I also think this might be where the term “AI washing” might come into play. Companies that bolt the word AI onto their name, add some light GPT functionality and then call themselves an AI company. As with every other sort of ‘washing’ they’ll not doubt get exposed in time.

On a recent BBC article, they describe AI washing as:

When it comes to AI washing, there are several types. Some companies claim to use AI when they're actually using less-sophisticated computing, while others overstate the efficacy of their AI over existing techniques, or suggest that their AI solutions are fully operational when they are not.

Meanwhile, other firms are simply bolting an AI chatbot onto their existing non-AI operating software.

There’s a Lot of Overlap

It feel there were three main types vendors in the exhibition hall; data management, visualisation and AI platforms. Within Data Management, there were of course the storage and database solutions such as Snowflake and Databricks, but also Data Catalog’s like Matilion. For Data Visualisation, there were companies like MicroStrategy, DOMO and Qlik. (Tableau notably absent given it was Dreamforce this week.) And then there were platforms such as my own Dataiku, Alteryx and Alation.

When you think about it, this mix makes a lot of sense. For any data project you need to have data stored somewhere (Data Management), you then need to manipulate and work on it (Data Platforms), and at the end, you need to surface insights and results to your consumers and stakeholders (Data Visualisation). That said, it seemed there was a lot of companies offering many simular solutions and in an environment like a conference hall, seeing any differenciation was pretty hard. If I were a buyer for a business, I would certainly find this a large and confusing market to understand.

Snowflake Has the Biggest Budget*

One brand stood out more than others, and that was Snowflake. Not only did they have one of the largest stands, but they also dominated the advertising and sponsor space with some vast banners. And let’s not forget the Polarbear that often accompanies them on events like this, perfect for selfies to share back at the office.

*They might; I have no idea, but they go BIG at these events.

It was a good exhibition though, and it was exciting to feel the buzz around the industry. Conferences have struggled in recent years, but Big Data London felt, and looked busy. There were also genuine conversations about how AI can help businesses and plenty of advice and guidance on doing it successfully.

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