Data + AI World Tour Zurich

Top 3 reasons to attend

Discover the latest advances in GenAI, machine learning, analytics and data governance.
Learn how to drive insights with natural language, integrate data management with AI and governance, and support GenAI applications with quality, privacy and control.
See how leading companies are reducing TCO through automatic performance and storage optimization.

Agenda overview

Registration	8:00 AM - 4:50 PM
Expo	8:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Keynote & Customer Presentations	9:00 AM - 10:55 AM
Breakout Sessions	11:05 AM - 11:45 PM
Lunch	11:55 PM - 1:00 PM
Women in Data + AI Panel	12:10 PM - 12:50 PM
Breakout Sessions	1:00 PM - 3:20 PM
Afternoon Break	3:20 PM - 3:50 PM
Customer Presentations	3:50 PM - 4:50 PM
Reception	5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Customer & Sponsor Speakers

Digital, Data & AI Leader
OMV

Head R&D Data Platforms
Syngenta

Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Coca-Cola HBC

Data Scientist
Erste

Lead Data Platforms, Data and AI Expert
Swissgrid

Specialist Product Development
Swissgrid

Single Point of Contact IFRS Market Unit Switzerland
Helvetia

Lead Architect Data & Analytics
CSS

Head of Data & Analytics
Pilatus Aircraft Ltd

Business Unit Manager
D ONE

Data Scientist
DataSentics, an Eviden business

Senior Evangelist Qlik Data Integration
Qlik

Consultant
synvert

Data Engineer
Liebherr

Director of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics for GGM
Cognizant

Principal Solutions Architect
WhereScape

Senior Manager, Business Value Consulting
Databricks

Solution Manager
Erste

Architecting and Engineering Cloud and Data Infrastructures
Peak Scale

Data Engineer
Liebherr

IT Architect
die Mobiliar

Chief Data Officer
CSS

Senior Vice President & Global Head of Data & Analytics
Tech Mahindra Limited

Solution Architect
b.telligent

Senior Software Developer
Oriflame

Databricks Speakers

Lead Data Strategist
Databricks

RVP, Switzerland
Databricks

AVP, Field Engineering
Databricks

Enterprise Account Executive
Databricks

Data & AI Strategist
Databricks

Global Lead Architect
Databricks

Solutions Architect
Databricks

Sr. Solutions Engineer
Databricks

Sr.Solutions Architect
Databricks

Solutions Architect
Databricks

Featured sessions

“You can’t always get what you want” – AI Episode (inspired by Rolling Stones)

The session will provide a walkthrough from the public rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022 to the present, viewed through the
perspective of an enterprise company. It will highlight the challenges faced and lessons learned. The content will cover the "3P"
aspects (People, Processes, and Platform) and offer insights into the most valuable learnings from the OMV AI Journey. During the
30-minute talk, practical solutions will be shared on how to prepare an organization for AI and address common pitfalls.
The title of the presentation is inspired by the name of the song performed by the Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You
Want".

Allyship and Algorithms: Networking in the Age of AI Leveling the Playing Field

In an ever-evolving tech landscape, how can women harness the power of allyship, master the art of self-promotion, and leverage AI to level the playing field? Join us for a lively 40-minute panel where industry leaders unpack these critical themes. We'll explore practical strategies for building supportive professional networks, promoting oneself authentically, and utilizing AI as a tool for equality and opportunity. This session is not just a conversation—it's a catalyst for change, offering actionable insights to empower your career in Data & AI. Whether you're navigating your path or looking to elevate others, discover how allies and algorithms together can reshape the future for women in tech.

Building a Trusted Data Foundation for AI on Databricks

For companies looking to use the power of AI at scale, modernizing data engineering is not a choice, it’s
a requirement. Doing that right means having the ability to automate the discovery, integration, &
transformation of source data directly into Databricks, while tapping into advanced functionalities
directly within workflows. Learn how Qlik integrates with Databricks MosaicAI, and automates real-time
complete end-to-end data pipelines that are low or no-code. Spend less time integrating and
transforming data and more time performing rich AI driven analysis, LMM fine tuning, and feeding ML
(Machine Learning) & generative AI models like Databricks DBRX. Join this session & see a demo
highlighting how Qlik Talend Data Integration automates the delivery and transformation of sources
data, including SAP to the Databricks Intelligent Data Platform. Plus, hear examples of successful real-
time data integration into the Databricks Lakehouse from customers like Vale, Textron, Mercedes Benz,
Trek Bikes, and JB Hunt.

Comprehensive Guide to Mosaic AI: Getting GenAI Apps to Production on Databricks

Step into the world of rapid Generative AI application development with Mosaic AI. We'll explore the suite of tools within Mosaic AI that revolutionize how we create and maintain high-quality AI applications, cutting down the path to production.

Gain insights into:

- Efficient Application Design: Learn how to leverage Mosaic AI to design production-quality GenAI applications
- Seamless Maintenance Strategies: Discover strategies for the ongoing maintenance of your AI applications, ensuring they continue to meet evolving needs.
- Practical Integration Techniques: Witness a comprehensive end-to-end demonstration that showcases the practical application of these tools and strategies in real-world scenarios.
- This session is your gateway to mastering the intricacies of GenAI application development, offering actionable knowledge to streamline your projects with Mosaic AI and Databricks.

Data and AI Convergence: A Perfect Storm to Fundamentally Rewire Businesses for the Future

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, businesses face an unprecedented opportunity to transform their operations fundamentally. This keynote explores how the powerful convergence of data, intelligence, AI-ML, GenAI and automation enables comprehensive business rewiring, not just incremental evolution. We’ll delve into how companies can revolutionize customer experiences, streamline internal processes, and enhance decision-making capabilities. From AI-driven personalization to data-enabled supply chains and predictive analytics, we’ll uncover how organizations can leverage these technologies to achieve transformative outcomes. The keynote will focus on moving beyond incremental improvements to transforming business functions & processes, creating agile, responsive, and future-ready enterprises. We’ll examine the challenges of implementation, the importance of fostering a data-driven culture, and strategies for navigating this transformative journey.

Data Vault & Delta Lake: Building Scalable Data Architectures

As data ecosystems evolve, the need for robust, scalable, and flexible architectures has never been more critical.

This session dives into the future of data architecture by exploring how the strategic integration of Data Vault and Delta Lake is reshaping the way organizations handle complex, high-volume data. We’ll examine how this approach enables a future-proof, agile data foundation that drives advanced analytics, ensures governance, and supports rapid business innovation.

We’ll highlight:

The importance of aligning data strategy with modern analytics demands
How Data Vault provides a flexible yet structured framework for managing growing datasets
The role of Delta Lake in enhancing data quality, consistency, and scalability
Key benefits in data governance, lineage, and compliance for long-term success

Discover Unity Catalog: Your Guide to Governance for Data and AI with Live Demos and new features!

Gain an in-depth look at the latest in data and AI governance. Unity Catalog is the only solution that offers unified, open governance for both data and AI, native to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. In this session, we will cover the open source future of Unity Catalog and the newest features, such as enhanced governance with detailed row/column filtering, Governed Tags, Attribute-Based Access Controls (ABAC), and the latest updates in automated data lineage, governance for ML assets, and performance improvements.

This session, packed with demos, will illustrate how Unity Catalog's new features can streamline your data governance processes and simplify your analytics and AI initiatives. You'll also get an exclusive preview of our future plans. Plus, seize the opportunity to pose your most pressing questions to the product experts and learn why Unity Catalog is the best governance solutions for all your data and AI. Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to level up your data game with Unity Catalog!

Enabling Business Insights with Databricks: The Oriflame Data Warehouse Success Story

In this session, we will explore how Oriflame successfully modernized its data infrastructure by implementing a data lakehouse on Databricks. We'll discuss the journey from very first steps up to the sweet end, and how we leveraged Databricks to enable real-time business insights. Learn how this transformation empowered Oriflame to harness the power of advanced analytics, and boost data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Escaping the PoC devloop of GenAI at Erste Group by leveraging Databricks & MosaicAI

In this talk, you’ll discover our first use case and how it revolutionized the way bank employees interact with internal policies, making their workflows more efficient. We’ll share the obstacles we faced and the innovative solutions we devised to transition from PoC to production.

Join us on an journey from the challenges of Proof of Concept development to the successful implementation of a cutting-edge Generative AI Platform. Leveraging the power of Azure Cloud, Databricks, Document Intelligence, and our Container Platform, we transformed our initial struggles into a robust AI solution together with the help of our partner DataSentics an Eviden Business. Over the past year, we’ve accumulated valuable lessons through hands-on experience, and by analyzing user feedback from over 5,000 queries. This session promises to provide insights and practical knowledge for anyone looking to bring AI solutions to life.

Get Started with Data Engineering with Databricks (without labs)

In this course, you will learn basic skills that will allow you to use the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to perform a simple data engineering workflow.

Describe fundamental concepts about Databricks
Work with objects in Databricks such as catalogs, schemas, volumes, tables, compute clusters, and notebooks
Follow follow a basic data engineering workflow to perform tasks such as creating and working with tables
Ingest data into Delta Lake
Transform data through the medallion architecture
Use Databricks Workflows to orchestrate data engineering tasks.

Note: 1 hr lunch break included. This is a view only demonstration and the content will not include a comprehensive lab experience.

Get started with Generative AI with Databricks

Learn how to navigate the Databricks platform to build and develop Generative AI applications in this follow-along course. You will learn how to develop prompts, and compound AI systems using MLflow and Mosaic AI on the platform. Generative AI opportunities and challenges

How to set up a dev environment and get started with prompt engineering on Databricks with MLFlow
How to build a compound AI system with retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
Introduction to fine-tuning models and pretraining LLMs with Mosaic AI
How to approach governance for AI applications

Note: This is a view only demonstration and the content will not include a comprehensive lab experience

Getting Started with Databricks SQL: Live Demos and New Features

Join us for live demos on Databricks SQL and discover how our streamlined interfaces simplify data warehousing for analysts, developers, admins, and business users. Learn how to create a data warehouse, ingest and transform data, and build queries and dashboards effortlessly. This session will showcase the latest features, including new AI assistants for coding and dashboards, performance optimizations with serverless infrastructure, and enhanced observability with system tables. Additionally, we'll explore AI-powered capabilities that address performance, governance, and usability challenges in data warehousing, such as natural language queries and visualizations, and serverless, elastic infrastructure for better total cost of ownership.

Homing in on Pilatus Hub: A Success Story

Join us for an engaging session as we explore a success story at Pilatus Aircrafts Ltd., the leading Swiss airplane manufacturer. Discover the development of a cutting-edge data platform, where a metadata-driven framework was built entirely on native Databricks technologies.This platform transforms both critical ERP and IoT data into powerful insights, enabling real-time reporting and forecasting. Aligned with core principles of Value-Driven, Simplicity, Speed, and Continuous Learning, the project dismantled decentralized silos in next to no time and with an opportunistic and iterative approach, creating value through a central data platform on the fly. This agile approach, akin to the STOL feature of Pilatus’ legendary aircraft, homes in on innovation and efficiency. Learn how Fixing the Basics, Leveraging Assets, and Building Capabilities have redefined the company’s data landscape for sustainable success.

How Swissgrid is Juicing Up Grid Operation with Data and Machine Learning

Swissgrid, the operator of Switzerland’s electricity transmission grid, ensures secure and efficient power grid operations both within Switzerland and across central Europe. As the energy landscape evolves, our core business increasingly focuses on large-scale data analysis and the development of software solutions to address emerging challenges in grid operation.
To support this transition, Swissgrid has built a central cloud platform, creating a unified data ecosystem for deploying software solutions. We will present how the Swissgrid platform enables teams to efficiently integrate data, develop use cases and deploy applications to production.
We will also showcase how we leverage MLFlow in our development and CI/CD workflows to improve model management, accelerate the production-readiness of new models, and enhance forecasting accuracy.
We will present the use case of optimizing the balancing energy, which had a transformative impact on our grid operations. This case will illustrate how machine learning models have improved operational efficiency and economic outcomes, highlighting the critical role of data-driven innovation in our business.
Finally, we will share our pitfalls and lessons learned.

How to Implement a Databricks-Powered Quality and Alignment System for Financial Data

The Quality and Alignment System (QAS) was introduced to address issues of poor data quality from the source systems. QAS streamlines various processes by ensuring thorough data reconciliation and validation. The implementation of QAS has brought significant improvements to data handling, making it more accurate and efficient. The technical landscape of QAS, supported by Databricks, offers a streamlined and reliable data handling process, reducing errors and improving the quality of outputs.

How to migrate from Snowflake to an open lakehouse using Delta Lake UniForm

The Delta Lake Universal Format, or UniForm for short, expands Delta Lake's existing ecosystem by allowing one single set of data to be used across all the tools in your lakehouse architecture. With UniForm, you only need to save your data once, and then it can be accessed by any software that works with the main open table formats like Linux Foundation's Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, and soon, Apache Hudi. It does this by creating Iceberg or Hudi metadata alongside Delta Lake, maintaining a single copy of the underlying Parquet data files.

In our session, we'll explain what UniForm can do now and what it will be able to do, and we'll go over the best ways to add Delta Lake UniForm to your lakehouse architecture.

It All Starts With Data@Scale

Syngenta is a leading science-based agtech company. We help millions of farmers around the world to grow safe and nutritious food, while taking care of the planet. Our goal is to discover new, more effective crop protection solutions that safeguard the world’s food against diseases, weeds and pests, while also protecting ecosystems. That is why we have put AI at the heart of our research and development.

In this session we will explore how Databricks helped us go from data silos in R&D to integrated data and make what felt years away within reach. Join me in a personal retrospective of the challenges, joys and benefits of providing data@scale to the industry’s most productive innovation engine. Until then enjoy this video on the agriculture revolution.

LakeFlow Connectors: Introducing Databricks’ Native Ingestion Connectors

A major challenge data practitioners face is maintaining data ingestion pipelines—from on-prem database connectivity, to evolving SaaS APIs, to holistic governance.

This is why we built Databricks I/O: a set of native ingestion connectors for popular SaaS applications, databases, and file sources. These connectors are auto-optimized, low-maintenance, and integrated with the rest of the Data Intelligence Platform—from governance via Unity Catalog to orchestration via Workflows (and more). And you can do it all via a no-code UI or an API.

In this demo-packed session, you’ll learn about what’s launching, what’s on the roadmap, how to take full advantage of this product, and what customers have already said about it. You’ll also get your questions answered by the R&D leads who built it.

Reaching the summit: Building a future-proof data platform for a Swiss health insurance

Did you know that building a data platform is like embarking on a mountain expedition? Join us on this exciting retrospective on how we have built the most modern data platform for a Swiss health insurance leader.

We'll showcase the breathtaking vista from the summit – a scalable, secure, and compliant platform providing a 360° view of the data, empowering informed decision-making across all levels. Our ascent involved navigating challenging terrains: legacy system integration, data governance frameworks, and a cultural shift towards data-driven insights. We'll share our guiding principles: embracing cloud technology, implementing agile methodologies, and fostering close collaboration. Just like a successful expedition relies on a strong team, trust and shared vision were paramount. We'll highlight how these "soft" factors propelled us forward, enabling us to overcome challenges and celebrate milestones together.

Scaling Source Aligned Data Product creation with Fivetran on Databricks

In today's data-driven landscape, organizations face the challenge of integrating disparate data sources to create meaningful insights.This presentation focuses on data synchronization within a modern microservice architecture to develop source-aligned data products in a data mesh platform using Fivetran and Azure Databricks. We will explore how CI/CD automation practices facilitate seamless data integration and data governance, enabling organizations to efficiently manage and deploy data across multiple sources.

Event details and FAQ

How much does it cost to attend the Data + AI World Tour?	All Data + AI World Tour stops are free to attend.
In which language will the event be conducted?	The Zurich Data + AI World Tour will be conducted in English
I am having difficulties registering. How can I get help?	Please email emea-events@databricks.com.
How do I register for training?	When registering, please select you are interested in attending training. Registration for training will open closer to the event. You must reserve your seat in order to attend training.
Will you be providing meals with dietary restrictions in mind?	We will provide meals that are vegetarian and vegan. If you have other dietary restrictions, please email emea-events@databricks.com and we will do our best to accommodate.
Where is the event located?	JED Events, Zürcherstrasse 39, 8952 Schlieren, Switzerland