It’s long been said that good data is necessary before you can have good AI. But to an increasing degree, AI is also helping businesses manage, analyze, and generate their data too.
With AI code generation already well understood, businesses are also leaning on natural language processing and agentic AI to help their experts such as data engineers and data scientists automate their work more effectively.
What does all this mean for businesses looking to adopt AI? And how is the UK AI market maturing?
In this episode, recorded on the ground at Databricks AI Days London 2026, Rory speaks to Michael Green, UK&I managing director at Databricks and Richard Shaw, AVP Field Engineering at Databricks, to better understand how data and AI are converging.
Highlights
“Historically, if you look in organizations, people look at things as complex, you’re going to need technical teams, you’re going to need a data analyst team. And also, there was a timeframe attached to it as well that people, if they wanted that information readily, they’d have to go and speak to that team. They might not get the report back for 24, 48, hours, sometimes days, if not weeks. Actually, depending what it is, natural language has broken that down. It’s putting the power into the hands of the business. Putting that power into the hands of the C-suite.”
“Deterministic versus non deterministic is really what what companies are really interested in. Am I going to get the same result with the same question two times? Can I then trust it? Going back a few years, the approach was, some customers would say we’re always going to have a human in the loop at this point. That used to happen when cars first hit the road, you’d have person walking in front of me with a flag. But that’s not scalable, and you can only have so many people checking the output of these systems.”
“We talk about democratizing data and AI, we often reference that, it’s putting that into the hands of their organization. Going back to that point, I said about having my internal LLM, using their data that they’ve had locked and hidden away for years. So organizations, whether they’re new to market, digital natives, or whether we’ve got large based enterprises that have been around for decades, success for those organizations is unlocking the data, making sure that it’s completely governed, it’s seure, and then using generative AI and moving into the next modern area of the world to actually drive that value and be a game changer within the market.”
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