024 Ari Kaplan (Databricks) on Lakehouses, LLMs, AI, and Evangelism

Chief Evangelist with Ethan Beute

Today’s guest is Ari Kaplan, Head Evangelist at Databricks. Ari joins Ethan Beute and breaks down AI, machine learning, and LLMs – and shares the unique and powerful role of lakehouses. Ari delivers a brief history of AI and predictive.

Ari also explains how the evangelism role was co-created and shaped within Databricks, as well as his priorities in his first six months in the role. Ari saw success evangelizing data science and AI at DataRobot so, he took a lot of his successes and failures and applied them at a larger scale at his current company.

Takeaways:

• The most important job of a Head Evangelist is:
  • Thought leadership (innovation, unique value, speaking, social, blogs).
  • Analysts (getting the word out to an audience that doesn’t know you, influencers, industry analysts).
  • Partnerships (partner network, getting others to talk about you jointly or solely, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta).
  • Customer engagement (non-sales approach, the art of the possible).
• Ari and his teams created the innovation of the lakehouse, revolutionizing the way data is managed. This company allows the use of both structured in data warehouses and unstructured data in data lakes, seamlessly consolidating them under a single and cohesive structure. The founders also developed an array of open-source solutions that attracted millions of downloads each month.
• An evangelist in a relatively new role may do well focusing internally for the first few months before shifting attention and energy externally to the ecosystem and market at large. This allows your internal stakeholders to understand the role and you to get your head and heart around the concepts and innovations you’ll be evangelizing.
• Ari believes that a human evangelist plays an important role in simplifying tasks, saving company resources, advancing technology, developing processes, and delivering superior outcomes. Being an evangelist lies in meaningful connections with people. Prioritizing the clients becomes crucial in this people-centered role.

Quote of the Show:

• “I’m not selling. I’m not putting a price point on. But I have to educate people on what is something, why should they do it, why should they look at it now?”

Links Related to This Episode:

• Ari Kaplan’s on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arikaplan/
• Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/
• Ari Kaplan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/arikaplan1

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