A look back on 2025A look back on 2025

As organizations navigate the AI revolution, the traditional boundaries between data infrastructure and AI systems are blurring. This session explores the critical convergence point where data management meets machine intelligence, examining how this intersection is reshaping enterprise technology stacks. Our keynote panelists bring complementary perspectives from operating and investing in this rapidly evolving landscape. Drawing from experiences spanning neuroscience, hardware architecture, product development, and venture capital, they'll unpack the technical and strategic considerations for organizations building modern data + AI platforms. Join us for an insightful discussion on how this convergence enables scalable AI adoption, the architectural patterns emerging across industries, and what the future holds as data infrastructure and AI capabilities become increasingly interdependent in driving business transformation.

George MathewManaging Director, Insight PartnersNaveen RaoVP of AI, Databricks

DuckDB Analytics Engine: High-Performance Data Processing Without Limits | Discover how DuckDB's revolutionary in-process analytical engine transforms data warehouse capabilities through a lightweight, versatile architecture. The engine features state-of-the-art vectorized query processing, morsel-driven parallelism, and advanced memory management that scales from embedded devices to powerful servers. This talk dives deep into DuckDB's innovative design principles, implementation strategies, and optimization techniques that enable previously impossible use cases on single nodes. Learn from real-world applications and performance benchmarks demonstrating DuckDB's impact on modern data analytics workflows.

Hannes MühleisenCo-Founder & CEO, DuckDB Labs

Enterprise RAG Systems: Building Robust LLM Knowledge Integration | Master advanced techniques in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for enterprise-scale language models. Learn strategies to overcome common RAG pipeline challenges including brittle parsers, suboptimal chunking, and manual query tuning. Deep dive into cutting-edge embedding models and reranking systems that enable automated, scalable knowledge retrieval. Discover practical approaches to building production-ready RAG systems that deliver consistent, high-quality results while minimizing maintenance overhead and manual optimization.

Tengyu MaCo-Founder & CEO, Voyage AI

Join us for a keynote panel that moves beyond theoretical discussions of AI ethics to explore the practical realities of implementing responsible AI safeguards. This conversation will unpack the complex trade-offs and technical challenges faced when deploying AI systems at scale. Panelists will share insights from building fairness and privacy protections into major platforms while maintaining innovation, and discuss how responsible AI has evolved into a business imperative. Topics include creating effective trust and safety protocols for generative AI, developing robust safeguards for user-generated content, implementing fairness frameworks across diverse products, and managing the tension between rapid deployment and thorough safety testing. Expect candid discussion about governance structures that work, persistent technical hurdles, and lessons learned from high-stakes incidents that shaped today's AI safeguards.

Krishnaram KenthapadiChief Scientist, Clinical AI, Oracle HealthDaniel OlmedillaDistinguished Engineer, AI & Trust, LinkedInRachad AlaoSenior Engineering Director, MetaJake BrillHead of Product - Integrity, OpenAI

Traditional AI infrastructure creates complexity by forcing data teams to juggle multiple specialized systems, fragmenting workflows and increasing operational costs. Marcel Kornacker, founder of Apache Impala and Apache Parquet, introduces Pixeltable, an open-source solution that revolutionizes AI data infrastructure through a declarative, incremental approach. This session reveals how a unified platform can solve common AI data challenges by bringing together data, computation, and models in a single, integrated interface. Attendees will discover how Pixeltable provides automatic versioning, enables incremental updates, and streamlines pipeline management for ML engineers, data scientists, and infrastructure teams seeking to overcome traditional data processing limitations.

Marcel KornackerCo-Founder & CTO, Pixeltable

Jacek Migdal and Piotr Migdal share insights from Quesma's database gateway for smarter queries, exploring how to tackle the legacy and underbuilt side of data ecosystems through interoperability layers. Drawing from decades of experience with enterprise data transformations and modernization projects that save millions annually, this session offers valuable perspectives on untangling complex data platforms and bringing order to chaos without greenfield assumptions.

Jacek MigdalCo-Founder & CEO, Quesma

Pranav Aurora and Zhou Sun share insights from Mooncake, a real-time search and analytics system built on object-store for GenAI applications, exploring open development principles on open table formats. Like the delicacy it's named after, this system offers valuable perspectives on building shared, open-source solutions that everyone can enjoy, particularly relevant for teams developing search and analytics capabilities for AI-powered applications.

Pranav AuroraCo-Founder, Mooncake LabsZhou SunCo-Founder, Mooncake Labs

Christophe Blefari and Claire Gouze share insights from Nao, an AI code editor specifically designed for data teams, exploring how to streamline fragmented analytics engineering workflows across multiple tools. This session offers valuable perspectives on creating unified environments tailored to data professionals' unique modeling needs, addressing productivity challenges from constant context switching between IDEs, CLIs, data warehouse UIs, documentation sites, and BI platforms.

Christophe BlefariCo-Founder, NaoClaire GouzeCo-Founder & CEO, Nao

Following their groundbreaking Data Council 2022 presentation, Hex continues to push notebook technology boundaries with an innovative approach to data analytics. This session delves into their unique, fully parallelized, multi-modal backend, revealing how sophisticated computational techniques are transforming data processing. Attendees will explore cutting-edge methods that redefine performance, flexibility, and computational efficiency in modern data workflows, gaining insights into the next generation of analytical computing.

Ganesh RamanarayananVP Engineering, Hex

Serhii Sokolenko and Brad Heller share insights from Tower's elegant 2-layer data stack where all compute engines coexist harmoniously, exploring how to run Python frameworks from ETL to inference on scalable single-node compute with Iceberg open storage. These Snowflake alumni and Big Tech veterans offer valuable perspectives on building simple yet powerful architectures that enable seamless collaboration between different processing engines without complexity overhead.

Serhii SokolenkoCo-Founder & CEO, TowerBrad HellerCo-Founder & CTO, Tower