Breck Fresen

Your enterprise data is in the cloud, but most business teams still work in Excel, disconnected from Databricks and other cloud systems. Teams export CSVs of data out of cloud tools and immediately lose the scale, security and live connectivity of the cloud. In the transition to the cloud, most organizations have overlooked the most important tool — the spreadsheet. This session explores the role spreadsheets currently play and why making the spreadsheet a first-class citizen in your cloud data stack is a big opportunity. If your organization has modernized its data stack but still relies on legacy spreadsheet workflows, this talk will show how to bridge the gap and give business users secure access to Databricks data in a governed, cloud spreadsheet that is AI-enabled and scales with your data size.

Despite the proliferation of cloud data warehousing, BI tools, and AI, spreadsheets are still the most ubiquitous data tool. Business teams in finance, operations, sales, and marketing often need to analyze data in the cloud data warehouse but don't know SQL and don't want to learn BI tools. AI tools offer a new paradigm but still haven't broadly replaced the spreadsheet. With new AI tools and legacy BI tools providing business teams access to data inside Databricks, security and governance are put at risk. In this session, Row Zero CEO, Breck Fresen, will share examples and strategies data teams are using to support secure spreadsheet analysis at Fortune 500 companies and the future of spreadsheets in the world of AI. Breck is a former Principal Engineer from AWS S3 and was part of the team that wrote the S3 file system. He is an expert in storage, data infrastructure, cloud computing, and spreadsheets.