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KCAA: Inside Analysis with Eric Kavanagh (Sun, 20 Aug, 2023)

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KCAA: Inside Analysis with Eric Kavanagh on Sun, 20 Aug, 2023

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Mall with a Heart, kc AA Radio Lomalinda, where no listener is ever left behind. NBC News Radio, I'm Julie Ryan. The core of tropical Storm Hillary is nearing southern California after making landfall earlier today in Mexico. The National Hurricane Center says winds are now at sixty miles per hour as it barrels towards southern California about one hundred and fifteen miles south southeast of San Diego.

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to Hawaii on Monday. Former Vice President Mike Pence says he was never made aware of any broad based declassification of documents by former President Trump. Pence's comments on ABC's This Week were consistent with what former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reportedly told investigators for Special counsel Jack Smith. The former Vice president added that it's possible Trump did declassify the documents found at Marrow Lag without his or

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Analysis dot com. And now here's your host, Eric Kavanaugh. So, yeah, soks, welcome to the future. Indeed, as my hero William Gibson says, the future is here already, It's just not evenly distributed, at least not yet. And that's the purpose of our show is to distribute the future, at least tell you about what's coming down the pike. And I gotta say, folks, I have never seen the future come faster than

it has been coming in the last few months. So here on our show, of course, we talk all about the information economy, new jobs, new roles, new technologies, new business models, the ways of doing things, and wow, we kind of hit the inflection point, I guess, not five six months ago. And really you can peg it to chat GPT

as a large language model. It's not new. Large language model has been around for a while, for a couple of years at least, but this particular version came out mature enough and big enough and wild enough to really shock the business world. I can tell you that people are kind of freaked out. Even the folks at Google are nervous. And of course they have their own large language model called Bard, which is different than chat GPT in a

number of different ways. But the bottom line is that this form of artificial intelligence AI is absolutely shaking the foundation of how we do business. It's not perfect, and it really is important to understand the limitations of these things and understand the use cases when you use them, when not to use them. And there is all this talk of so called hallucinations. Well what is a

hallucination? Well, for those who don't know yet, Chat, GPT, BAR, these large language models, they are basically predictive engines for words, and they will deliver words based upon the prompts you give them. They've been trained on millions and even billions of points and tons and tons mountains of data, and so they can reflect back in pros all kinds of different concepts.

You can use chat, GPT or BAR to write a business plan, or to write marketing emails, or to write articles or blogs or short stories or all kinds of stuff. But it is generative in nature, which means it creates new stuff. And basically the way it works is it fuses together vectors of information based upon its model, its training, and also your prompts what

you give it. Well. Very quickly in this new world, we started seeing people talk about embeddings and trying to figure out ways to get these engines to be more accurate in specific domains of content, so in banking, or in healthcare, or in retail or marketing or whatever. Embeddings refer to actual, real corporate data that you either embed into the model itself, which is kind of complicated, or most people are talking about embedding them in a vector

database, which is then adjacent to the large language model. And what happens is when you give your prompts, the engine will reach into both areas, will reach into your vector database to see your trusted data, and then it'll reach over into its corpus of language and understanding to kind of fuse together some content that is reflective then of your corporate data. This is called training the models, and you do have to train these things for them to be very

good at what you want them to be good at. But they are very good right out of the box and all kinds of stuff. But what's fun from my perspective is that when we start talking about pointing these algorithms at your corporate data will, you have to be careful about that because a lot of companies really don't know everything that they have in terms of data, and historically it's been very difficult to figure that out because what would you do. Run

some query and you know, just run a report. Okay, here's our data. It's a very difficult thing to break down, to parse and to demonstrate, and frankly, it's just hard to crawl across all those objects, all those documents in your share point instance, or wherever it else you have

information stored. So it's important to remember that for basically every organization of any significant size or age, you're going to have a ton of data in the form of spreadsheets, in the form of PDFs and word documents and all kinds of different things. So you're gonna have all this information that can be very useful, but there may be sensitive innovation, then there may be wrong information

too. So this training is really important stuff. And we're going to talk to a company today that can help you figure out if you're at the starting line now this is not all that they do. But when I was talking to them about their technology and their services, I thought to myself, Hey, you guys have a really powerful story to tell in this whole large language model narrative is unfolding right now. And so to that and end, we've got Lewis wyn Jones on the line from Think Data Works, and of course

we have our buddy Eve Mulkers into Wings. He'll be joining us in a second. But Lewis, tell us a bit about yourself and Think Data Works and how you are able to help companies determine if they're ready for large language models and then kind of go down that road. Thanks so much, Eric, and and thanks for the sort of primmer. I think that you hit the nail on the head. There's so much excitement right now, and a lot of that has been because of what GPT has done in the past few

months. My company is, as you sort of suggested, is more in the sort of data management space, and that's definitely a less sexy place than what you're sort of seeing when you when you plug a prompt into chat GBT and see what comes out. But the reality is, if you scratchually hard at the surface, you start to realize that you do need to have well structured data in order to get well structured responses coming out the other end.

I think that what we see with chat GBT is the generalization of large language model and generative AI tech, which is why it's so exciting, right The fact that there's something out there that I can go, when I can plug a question into and get a pretty good response back, that's really exciting.

But the reason it's exciting for me is because I haven't been working in AI for the past, you know, ten years, trying to build these models, and the fact that my grandmother can go and do this is really sort of the exciting part of this. I think that if you want to start to have that tech embedded into the internal systems of most companies, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to get you to that place. And the things that get you to that place our management of your data assets.

I mean, you kind of mentioned it. Most people have data all over the place. They don't They've got a better inventory of their office furniture than they do of their data sets. And there's a lot of things that are required to make good on the promise of AI and actually start to generate value at the back end of your business. And so that's really where where our company sits on the VP of product here, and we've been building a

data platform for the past roughly ten years. We were born out of the open data space actually, which you know, for those people who are listening who don't remember what that was all about, but it was governments that were sort of giving data into the public domain and saying this could be valuable. The problem with it was that it was all over the place, it was a mess, there was no standardization, and you know is file formats from

the nineteen seventies. So what we did is we would sort of sit on top of all this data, standardize and make it accessible to people. And that's when we really realized that the thing that was happening with open data globally

was also happening within the enterprise itself. So the data is all over the place, it's a mess, it's you know, you don't know how to get the value out of it. And so the tool that we built to sort of standardize all this government data, we sort of turned towards business data and all of the tool and functional functionality that go along with that, which really does support it's sort of that data refinery in order to get the AI

analysis coming out the other end of it. So it's I would say that it's a prerequisite to start to get the benefit of large language models or any other kind of a modeling that you require. Yeah, and I think your background and kind of where you all came from is perfectly suited for this challenge because you were out there trying to reconcile, classifying, organize this vast amount of data, unstructured data, all kind of different formats, very unwieldy.

So that was your you know, kind of how you cut your teeth on that environment. And now you're able to do the same thing and help organizations again understand what they have, which for those who haven't tried, I promise, is a very difficult and challenging task to undertake, but it's very important

for lots of reasons. I mean, I kind of think that this is the sort of come to Jesus moment, if you will, for enterprises and all the data they've been sweeping out of the rug for the last thirty years. It's like we've known that we had to do something about it. But now you really really do have to do something about it, and you guys

can help with that process, right, Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think that it really depends when you're talking to because in certain boardrooms people are saying, well, we want streamlined analytics, we want to make data driven decisions, we want all this up, and they don't understand that in order

to get there, you need to have your house in order. And it's a step that you can't actually skip that sort of data operation step, the metadata management step, the good indexing, the good tagging, and the secure distribution throughout the enterprise. It's not a nice to have, it is a

prerequisite. And what we're seeing across the enterprise is that people who have skipped that step and maybe set up very good data and analytics divisions, who are trying to unleash the power of AI on the enterprise, what they're doing is they're generally sort of building one or two products a year. This is not fully automated, and this is not actually a system that is going to scale.

Well, it's a system that under the voot if you scratch it, like, if you get underneath it, it's a lot of ad hoc work, and what everyone wants to do to really maximize the benefit of this stuff is to automate those processes. And the way to automate them is to have your data environment set up in a way that will facilitate sort of the pulling in of data, the pushing back, the sharing, the sort of collaboration and the management of that data. Otherwise, what you're going to be doing

is basically manually curating data sets and pushing them into Tableau. And that is not AI as far as I'm considering. But that's here laughing, I'll bring you into comment on that. I mean, I think lewis to sit the nail on the head there. You really want to be strategic about this process, and it could be extremely valuable going through the inventory to understand where you've come up from. What's happening, right, go aheady, Yeah, what

I see. I think back of my years of doing software development, and this is what we see now in data management. But during it, back in the days, you wrote a piece of codes as such, and then some libraries came along you started using those libraries to be more proficient and more productive in creating your applications and your software and this is now happening with all the libraries. For example, if you take pythons that are available to access

APIs, to access the large language models. But still, like you say, Lewis, you take these things, you take one product, you build one product. But people don't think about the architecture to be capable of really scaling the products. And that's something where I see that is sometimes a misconnect between more technical people, especially in the IT department, compared to business people. Why they see the magic shining object and they think, well, it's

like you say, it's upload band. We've got our dashboard. Yeah, next time something changes, how faster we're going to Are you going to change the dashboard? How much effort will it take? You? Do you understand where your data comes from? And that is what when we talk about architecture, that you need to put these really solid foundations in place to be able to manage it. And that's very oftentimes for god and so I'm quite happy

that I've seen it through my career as well. These are the things we've been building over the time, and now all of a sudden it gets attention, it gets a name. Like for example, if you talk about observability,

Well, we need to know where the data comes from. Yes, we've been interrogating the method that are over time into our systems to understand how it looks like to Atto made it to deploy it in a continue look at software development as well, where now we have continuous integration and continuous development where this was not possible twenty thirty years ago, and I see that happening now with especially with the large language models and all the AI tools that we are

definitely looking at that. So once we've get this really into a continuous development mode where off the hook, I think it's going to be even more amazing and the speed is going to increase even more than we over the lost few months with the large language models. Yeah, and you know, I'll bring Lewis back into comment on something in particular. You mentioned architecture, and Lewis

that's really important, right. What Eaves is talking about here is building an information foundation that will allow you to then build apps more quickly, as opposed to just building one off bespoke apps which may solve a business problem for now, but will not scale very well and won't be optimum in terms of allowing

you to do other apps that use the same data. For example, we're talking about data products here, right, and so if you build the foundation, well then the individual products can be spun up pretty quickly and efficiently, whereas if you don't, if it's all the spoke and spaghetti wire is going in between them. Again, it may solve a particular problem, but it's not going to last for too long and it will amount to technical debt before long. Right, yeah, And I mean the thing is is this isn't

theory. This is we've seen this happen before. You know, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, people said, oh, if you dump all your data into a data lake, magic stuff is going to come out of it. Well what happened there. We got a bunch of really really messy data environments and people still struggling with this problem. And then said people said, okay, well the cloud will be the solution to all this problems. Well, okay, people started to centralize to the cloud, and now they're

going back to having a more sort of on prem and hybrid environment. People are looking for the magic bullet, the thing that's going to sit on top of an unstructured environment and pulled insights. That's not what's going to happen, and AI can never get there because it needs to be trained in a well architected environment, in a good sort of well balanced place where data flows evenly. And that I'm not saying that the previous technologies that have come out from

clouds the data lakes have been mistakes. They have and they've been extremely useful and they've taken us sort of forward. But I think now what we're looking at is you don't want to have to centralize everything into one place for a bunch of reasons, but you also can't have everything existing in random regions everywhere.

So really, what we're seeing, and this is just from an architecture perspective, is a new sort of reliance and focus on data virtualization, so you can actually connect to data wherever it is and you are centralizing access without actually centralizing assets themselves. And that's the sort of thing that you can do to really start to create this central observation platform for the data, and that's

going to be the key to unlock management and distribution within the enterprise. And then of course, yes, all the downstream benefits of connecting it to your analytical tools and if you need to your models that you're going to be building out the back end, but without it, you're just sort of trying to

build on pretty murky, swampy ground. Yeah no, that's a really really good point where you're democratizing access through a governed zone, if you will, Because we've talked about this for years now on this show and other shows too, that something like data governance cannot happen if you have eighteen to two hundred entry points where you're only managing five to seven of them, well then you don't have governance. Now. Historically, getting to that point was extremely difficult

because the technology it really wasn't up to snuff. If you try to go through that one choke point, things just wouldn't work fast enough. But I think we have seen the capability to expand out the scale out dynamically and be able to handle those things real quick. I think Lewis, we are at the beginning of another era because we now can pull that off efficiently and effectively, Whereas you know, five ten years ago, it wasn't really that possible.

What do you think, Yeah, No, I think you're right. Governance matured faster than the technology, and so the principles of governance were saying, Okay, you need to do this, this and this, and so people were writing extremely robust data privacy programs, but they couldn't actually implement them

with the tech that existed. Now that tech does exist, and I think that the kind of egalitarian approach to distribution within the enterprise and good governance are possible at the same time, So you can get increased access and increase governance at the same time, which before it was I think one or the other. Yeah, that's a really good point too, because you did have to

make a choice before. Now you don't have to make that choice. There are other choices you'll need to make, of course, but you can pull this off. And if governance is important to you, and it's important to most organizations, not just for security but also for quality, for quality product out the other side, you know you want to have some governance, so you know what's going into this, you know how to manage it. And we're getting there, folks, we're getting there. Well, don't touch that,

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Indeed, your host Eric Kavanaugh here with Eve Mulkers and Lewis Wynn Jones. Who are You're talking about the power of AI? Are you ready for it in your organization? I've been joking that my router may not be ready for the power of AI because it keeps crapping out on me. That's not very good. I have to call Armstrong Cable after this show and to read them

the right act. In the meantime, let's get back to our guests, and we were just talking about how the data management side really is so crucial,

and I'll throw this over to you first. Lewis, you know data management has always been important data quality, understanding your process as your workflows, all that stuff, what you have where it came from lineage, etc. And it's even more important now in the age of AI because these engines are very powerful and they will take whatever you give them and create something from that. And if what you're giving them is bad data, you're going to get

very bad results. Right, go ahead, Yeah, absolutely, And I mean I think that talking about the results. The thing that's kind of happening right now is that the people who are in charge of data management historically have been kind of the IT side of the organization, whereas the people who are in charge of the results, you know, the data products and those things

were more business. And what's happening over the past ten years, fifteen years, it's those two sides of the business have grown further and further apart. What we need to do, both like just sort of culturally but also through infrastructure, is to bring those two sides of the business back together again. Right, You need to have data management intimately tied to data productization and building AI and things like that, because alternatively, what you have if you don't

do that is the business side of the organization. Talking about AI and all of its potential to transform business and the IT side of the organization stuck in sort of data governance land, and you need to start bringing those two things together to sort of create a cohesive umbrella of data and analytics together, which are governed by single tools that are applicable to business users and IT users in equal measure. And that's I think that that's something that patchypt has actually done

really really well. Is made this something that can be used by anyone. Yeah, and you know, let me just kind of chime in here and say that, you know, there are lots of different values that you can get from data virtualization, one of which is just knowing which data is most important. I'll throw it over to Lewis first, but if you have a good data virtualization solution, you're going to be seeing in very clear fashion what data is being used, what data is important. That can help you that

architect the rest of your data foundation. Right, Oh, absolutely, I mean a data virtualization is one of those things that I think is close to that silver bullet that people have been looking for, because what it allows you to do is instead of getting tied up into this etl land where you're constantly having to move things from here and there you're just projecting it from where it lives into a centralized place and creating that sort of possibility for someone who maybe

doesn't have access to your sequel server to go see the data deps in it without it moving, without it breaking in of your governance rules. And that's why virtualization is a tool within a sort of larger data management framework that's really

really powerful to just provide that democratic access piece. Now, of course you want some layers of control on top of that about how you actually distribute the data, but just having the ability to project or create a lens through to the data from where it resides into another location that is more user accessible is

incredibly powerful technology. And then the next piece of that, of course, is once you've got access to that that piece of data, that virtualized data, being able to then connect it to your damn stream analytics from that same centralized place. Right, Because if you can't finish off that storyline, then you've just sort of checked the book out from the library, but you can't open it, right, it's not useful for you. So you need to

have that end to end integrated set up. And Eve earlier was talking about the architecture needs to be right there. And the problem is if you try to do this with seven different discrete pieces of functionality, they all need to play nice with each other, right, And what our approach has always been is that you need to have to be able to do all of these things from a single system that can virtualize the data, make it discoverable, and

then push it down where it needs to go. If you try to break that apart too far, it's going to get You're gonna get in the weeds again. Yeah. Well, and there is this question of scale. I think eve that's what's really shaking a lot of businesses right now, is that the scale of data that's available that needs to be processed to get some signal for AI is so much larger than it was five years ago, ten years ago, and all systems are just going to break. They're just not going

to be able to suffice. And so we're in this sort of transformative period of time now where organizations have to be very strategic and figure out what is my stepping stone to the next generation of technologies. And I think that's where data virtualization is extremely compelling, because again, you use it as this pathway of bridge to get to the next way of doing things that still is connected to your existing environment, because you know, rip replace is always very very

difficult, so difficult that it almost never happens. We've joked before about sun setting applications and other fantasies, right or other fairy tales. So it's difficult to do. So that data virtualization is a really powerful mechanism to solve these problems and open the door to the next generation of how to do things.

What do you think even yeah, we've been discussing about that, and what I see and in a virtualization layer, and which is not so understandable for the most of the people, is it's it's simplified or it's abstraction of the integration behind the scenes as such. If you're back in the days they've been building building point point systems, so you had to integrate each system with each and every other system within the organization. That takes a lot of time.

If something changes on one end, you need to change all the interacting systems. With virtualization, this is kind of glue what you put on top of that. If you think about object oriented programming, you had your clauses and and what's kind of abstraction layer and what you had through which you were talking

to the other systems compared to an API. In such a way, this is where integration solves well, where virtualization solves a part of the integration problem as such, but at the other end as well, allows you to s your systems because it's composable. You can change your database behind the scenes or depending on which type of query you want to run, is it more analytical

or more operational. Wise, you can talk to do different systems, but it looks like one and the same system if you're a user using the virtualization layer, and that helps into going much faster in building applications and systems on top of a virtualization layer. So for the future as well, you're kind of safe because you develop everything on the simplification layer, and if you need a more performance system, you simply let's call it still simply plug it in

the other system that is more perform more scalable as such. If we now see at the cloud, if you need the cloud, you can switch it off to the cloud and make it more scalable and move back to one prem So that will simplify your IT landscape in such a way. But my feeling is that we're still pretty far off on the virtualization level. A lot of organization are still very reluctant towards virtualization because they have back experiences in the day

where it was not performing it was pretty expensive. But if you see now the virtualization landscape together with some semantic layers, this is the time to really look into that and consider that if you're building modern data applications. You know, and a lot of terms get thrown around like data lake house and data lake and data warehouse, and of course a very popular term has been data

fabric over the last number of years. And when I think about the functionality that the data fabric should have, well, what does it boilt down to bost down to access governance? It boils down to automation or automation makes sense, and I think that's the ultimate data fabric that has the automation built into it to know when things are happening and to go and grab data sort before it's needed or before it's going to be needed, that kind of thing.

It seems to me that virtualization, if it gets robuffed enough, can fulfill that role of a data fabric. But I don't know, what do you think lewis am my splitting hairs or conflating things. No, I mean I think that that's I think that that's a fair point. I think we're still going to see where we land with the whole data fabric, data lakehouse.

The new nomenclature that I put my money right now on data fabric being being the one that sort of emerges triumphant because I think it's very realistic in terms of what is possible. Access, discovery, governance, observability are all made possible by having data virtualization and a data catalog blended together. Be throwing some data ops and some health monitoring there, and you've got a pretty slick d

you know platform. And then the final key I think is that actually, at the end of the day, being able to access that underlying data becomes really really critical. And this is you've mentioned, you know, some people have been bitten before with sort of virtualization tools and things like that. I think that that was based on a sort of system where just cataloging the data was enough, but at the end of the day, you still need to be able to provide access to that data, need to push it down to

where it needs to go in order to provide benefit to the organization. And these are the types of things that we've learned over the past decade that now we're getting right. And yeah, I think that fabric is really the solution to that. I think the next step is sort of also getting a solution that enables you to distribute your data and more holistically throughout the enterprise and in a secure way to really enable that democratization among business and technical units. Yeah,

that's a really good point. Even maybe I'll throw it over to you for commentary. Again, these are fairly loose terms, but data fabric, I think does boil down to the access layer that you want your apps to connect to. Because the end of the day, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about applications. They're going to connect to the data that they

need to get something done. So instead of the old fashioned process of just persisting data in mongo eb or mic sequel or whatever, that's a very linear, sort of limited approach, and instead you want this richer environment that any number of apps can tap into and quickly get what they want and get more than they would have gotten from just a single connection to a single database, righting, Yeah, the most important part is here that the centralized or the

central available governance what you can tie to your data products in such a way and that you either consume it to an applicational operational application an API, or you just do an export. You always have that same type of approach on who can access which data. Before it was only within the organization, and

we see more and more organizations exchanging it with external organizations. So there is the important part that you have an easy way of onboarding your external bodies and decide who can see what type of data in an easy way that you can govern them that data, where is it going to, who is using it for what? So you stay comply and know where your data is going there, especially in marketing, you want to know who are your consumers and who

is using your data. Especially in Europe, we're pretty strict on on understanding where that data is being used for privacy reasons and I think in that direction, data fabric is definitely a very nice architecture to support governance in a pretty

easy way. Easy in such a way, it's not out of the blue, it's not snapping with your fingers, but the tools are there and learned a lot from the past where you said in the beginning it was purely cataloging your data, understanding where it is and who maybe has access to that. But access was mostly a very ideal related thing in place, very technical, pretty complex, so getting your user account to have access to systems that took

months in some some organizations. So this is definitely not something if you want

to put a product into the walked in the next coming month. Now, these are all really good points, and you know, before the break comes up here, I do want to dive a bit deeper into the discovery side of the equation because we know we're talking again about how to get ready for leveraging a large language model, and that means you got to do some discovery and understand what's out there whereas there personally identifiable information, what is the nature

of this business information that we have, and create some sort of a topology or a map to better understand, and then you create your short list of things to work on. I scaring this data or do we really need that data? But it really does start with that discovery process, right lewis what do you think? Yeah, I think you're right. Discovery this sort of the pillar here, and again it's not the thing that's going to turn heads

in the boardroom being able to discover things. But at the end of the day, any sort of catalog or management solution is going to need to index everything to do with your data, and it's going to need to automate that that indexing process and then allow you to create sort of combinations of terms. And those terms might be based on what's in the data, but it might also be based on where does the data live, who's the owner of the data and my team, you know, for some of our users, it's

like what's the data cost and when's the contract term coming up? These are the things that I actually need to know. And that's metadata. That's not just about the you know, the structural build of the data or its descriptive elements. That's also sort of the administrative side of metadata, all of which

needs to be captured by the solution, indexed by the search. And then it can't just be a blinking cursor you know Google type search that where you you plug in, you know, personally identify a whole information and automatically everything comes back. You want to be able to create sort of rich combinations of things to get to what you're looking for, so that you can create these very highly curated lists, and then once you've done that, you need to

sort of have recourse to move data around if you need to. We talked a little bit about the expense that's that's driving a lot of this stuff, and you're able to do hot and cold storage from this platform, move it from a really performed warehouse to sort more open source one based on how much it's being used, and things like that. That all starts with discovery. All those benefits start from being able to just open the door and see what's

going on in your environment. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. And you know, you talked about the importance of metadata, and I love the comment you made about contracts and dating. What its is costing me and what value are we getting? You know, when you bring together the power of observability with the power of discovery and analysis and of course the human brain.

Let's not forget us humans. I don't care what it says. We're gonna be around for a while now and we'll be very important in this space. When you bring all that together, it starts to get very interesting. In things like ROI and TCO, which historically have been almost impossible to really quantify. I mean, you can tell the story and you can get people excited

about stuff. That's one way to keep investment in your projects. But we're getting so much better now at being able to determine the value of this particular solution against key metrics. For example, customer service improved by thirty percent because the tickets came down. Stuff like that, we're getting into space where it's very measurable and that it's very good news for this business. Will be right back. You're listening to inside Analysis. Do you own an annuity, either

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and learn your rights as a marine. Here's the number. Call eight hundred two five four three two one eight eight hundred two five four three two one eight. That's eight hundred two five four thirty two eighteen paid for express. Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host Eric kabinat right. Folks back here on Inside Analysis talking to Lewis Winnomes from Think Data Works and Eve Mulkers

from seven W Data and the Brink. There we're chatting about the power of AI and the importance of data discovery, and I keep thinking to myself that these foundational models, which is not just the large language models, but these

foundational models are going to fundamentally change a lot of different things. And if you think about how systems talk to each other on the average day, just transacting the work that needs to get done over the network, for example, there are so many efficiencies that we can gain from collaboration, from being able

to see what other people are doing. I'm talking to a company right now, in fact, writing a paper in my head for a company called dev rev which has built this really interesting object model and they're really fusing development with revenue management and isn't that what everyone wants? And through their system, you can see across roles and see exactly who's working on what at any given time. And because they thought through that metadata side of the equation ahead of time.

I'll fill this over to lewis what you're able to see is not just what all your individual developers are working on, but what kinds of projects are they are they maintenance projects, are they net new functionality projects? And then where is the value you'll be able to track? Oh, well, this

project that we launched two months ago is already generating some value. So you can actually start seeing ROI And to me, that's going to be the key is seeing across organizations who's working on not just up, down, but sideways. And once you can see up, down, left and right and really understand how your teams are coming together, that's a pretty compelling storyline. And

that comes from discovery, but it comes from data management. It comes from setting up your models efficiently such that people can see around and understand what's going on. But Lewis, I'll throw it over to you. I think that's going to be a real push forward in terms of productivity gains. Just the

observability across workloads, across teams. What do you think? Yeah, I mean you mentioned the critical word there, which is observability, and I think that a pound of observability is going to be a dash of observe ability is going to be worth a pound of cure or whatever it is. And the point here being that teams have always been building interesting things, right, You've got data teams. You've got data scientists who are doing great stuff, but

they might be doing it in a vacuum. And I think that when I speak to our clients and the people who use our platform, there's often some person who might be in governance, might be in charge of ROI, who's having to knock on a lot of doors and email a lot of people saying hey, can you give me an update on what you're working on? What data sets? Are you saying? What's going on here? That they can

still do their thing. I think the model shouldn't be too that you need to completely upend the good work that your teams are doing and force them all into a central place. The model should be that if you can have something that can sit on top of all the work that all of your different teams are doing, lurp up that information and then make it more generally accessible to

people without upending the work that's already being done. Then you're letting someone from your team who's in charge of establishing things like ROI or making good connections right saying, oh, this team's working on this data set. This team's working on this data set. If I sort of play a bit of matchmaker between them, maybe they can both run a bit faster. That's the real net benefit here. It's not in improving individual teams, although they will get that

benefit as well. It's about sort of across the enterprise having that sort of democratized view and observation platform and what you get the benefit that you get from from that. Yeah, knowing how teams can work together. I mean, I'll throw this over to Eve. AI can help with these things. I think AI is going to be very compelling for just suggesting things to people, pointing out stuff that maybe you hadn't thought of, because you'll never think of

everything. There was a great quote in a movie with William Hurt, like thirty years ago. I'll ever forget this. One of the characters says something like who they were criminals? And then one guy said, hey, man, you told me there's a hundred ways to screw up any crime. If you could think of fifty of them, you're a genius, right, So point being, you're always going to miss something, and that's where AI comes

into help. But to me, again, the power of the human mind just thinking through things and processing and figuring out what Lewis just referred to, Hey, these teams are working on something pretty darn similar. If I can just get them to connect and start sharing information sharing that at data sharing plans,

roadmaps. I mean, just knowing what people are working on is really compelling and just and team size, right, if you have a hundred developers, that doesn't mean you're accomplishing one hundred times as much as one developer, or even fifty times as much as two. It really depends on how well those teams work together, what the plan is, how that plan fits in

with what other people are doing. I mean, this is the strategy side of development, and I think all of that is enabled by these large language models, by these foundational models and the AI, and of course the data management and the virtualization. But Lewis'll turn that first over to you and then over to Eat to comment on. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think that's that's the key is if we want to make good on anything to do with AI, you can't have a bunch of developers in closed rooms

trying to figure this stuff out on their own. It needs to be an open door policy and there needs to be governance attached to it. Right, We're not in the wild West anymore, and you can't just say we're going to throw a large language model over our entire database, because there's PII in there. There's stuff in there that you don't want it to be trained on.

So you need to have governance, which for a lot of people has been a big hairy problem because they don't know how to do it, and so they've just said, well, our version of governance is no one gets access to anything. We've solved that problem. Now, that's not the way we're going to move forward, right, More people need access to more data and in a secure way. So that observation platform and letting it be mission

control for data teams. Right, So the person who's tasked with revenue gets to do revenue based stuff, and the person who's tasked with doing data stuff still gets to do their data stuff, and they get to do it in a quicker, faster, more integrated way. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Eging to comment on there. Yeah, a quicker and foster way I think to insights, and that's an important thing that you were discussing just before. It's an easy way of looking at the one hundred tasks or

even one thousand tasks. We see it in medical care as well, where the scale really helps you build those insights and give the insights at a hyper speed. And I think that's that's the power of what we're seeing and sometimes missing these interactions and communication lines within organizations. If you don't talk to the

person, you don't get these insights. It's by accident if you're around the water cooler that you have these type of discussions and say, hey, this is interesting what you're working on. Let's have a look and see if we

can do something together. And with the large language models, you get these these advices in such a way on the other hand as well, where it gives you a pretty complete list and you say throw in another of five points and you get the out of five points and after a while you understand, okay, we really exhausted the model. This is all we can get from it. But that's much harder from a human mind to get all of these aspects listed in such a way. So I think that the scale and the

speed that's the important thing. Where we see that it can augment on how we work. Like every was saying, thinking through the critical thinking, which is not yet in the models. I think we will see that in the future that the models will evolve and get more critical thinking as well, but this is still a very strong capability of what we have as a human being.

Yeah, and you know, I'll get back to the theme of the show here, which is using these technologies to discover what data you have, to classify it, to organize it, to understand it, and then maybe you're ready to leverage some of these large language models. But I am pretty excited, Lewis, to think about what you could learn about your business by connecting understand that you can possibly remediate so you can publish something in a vector

data base and go, oh, we shouldn't have done that. Let's pull

that out now to not have that exposed. But I have to think that these language models are a very profound mirror that you can use to reflect back what your business has been doing, because you will see stuff in there and it's almost like you want, if you're a big enough organization, you want to have a skunkworks team or you know someone who's just in there poking around seeing what's going on, to be able to develop your plan to govern and

access and virtualize better. What do you think, Lewis, I think that's such a great point I would if I was in charge of a large enterprise. The way I'd be looking at LMS right now is let's use this internally to understand a few things internally before we even think about the data products with it. I think the problem that I have with generative AI right now is the generative portal part. I think I'd like to use it for classification,

train it on very good models and things like that. But immediately dropping it in and thinking that some production ready tool is going to come at the other end of it, I think it is dangerous thinking. And I don't think that this limits the use for the enterprise of starting to integrate it, to

bring in and do some automatic sort of classifications of things. And chat pots are a great use for it. But let's not get ourselves like this is still pretty nascent technology, and things like large scale statistical analysis have been around for a long time and people haven't necessarily made good on those either. Why Because the management problem is still sort of very very at the core of this

issue. So I think chat ept the biggest thing that it's done is it's shown that business focus people need to be able to integrate with data in meaningful ways. And they did a really good job of making that possible for us. But we still got a lot of work to do in order to make sure that everyone can benefit from an equally Yeah. Well, there's a lot of education and guiding basically guidance provided to organizations to understand how to use it.

It's like any tool. You want to be playing around it to understand the contours basically, to understand what it does. We do have a show coming up on Thursday. As a matter of fact, eviill be delivering a keynote on master of the prompt. I'll give you some advice on how to leverage that prompt because it is very important how you phrase those prompts and which specific words you use and how you deliver the information to the large language model.

And it's just taking time. It's going to take time to see what comes back at you and learn how to fine tune these things. And remember, you can regenerate. They all have this capacity to regenerate. So it's like I didn't like that one, Let's do it again at a couple more keywords. To do it again, it comes out, it'll get you eighty percent of the way there. Then you have to get yourself the last twenty percent. But the folks you're listening to inside and out, you've eating lots

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