Francisco Macedo

Every enterprise has a data strategy. Far fewer have turned it into measurable, board-level performance. In this executive panel, senior leaders join Databricks VP of Product Craig Wiley to share what separates organizations that are generating real outcomes from those still building the case. They'll discuss the architectural decisions that paid off, the organizational obstacles they didn't see coming, and how Lakebase and Genie are accelerating the journey from insight to action. This is a peer-level conversation — not a vendor pitch — for executives who want an honest look at what it takes to become a genuinely data-intelligent enterprise. Audience Q&A will be a central part of this session.

Building an app has never been easier. Deploying an enterprise app— governed, scalable, connected to real-time data— has never been harder. Store associates, restaurant managers, and operations teams make thousands of decisions a day— but the apps they rely on are slow to build, disconnected from analytics, and starved of real-time context. The reason? A wall between analytical and operational systems that forces teams to maintain fragile ETL pipelines, over-provision databases, and wait months for production-ready tools. Lakebase tears that wall down. Databricks' serverless Postgres eliminates the infrastructure overhead, the ETL pipelines, and the DBA bottleneck that have kept intelligent apps out of frontline hands. In this session, we'll show what it means to build AI-first applications for consumer industries, walking through the end-to-end process: from use case design to live deployment, including a live app build on stage. Hear from brands already shipping Lakebase-powered apps, and leave with a repeatable framework for turning lakehouse intelligence into the tools your frontline teams actually use.