Thomas Russell

Every enterprise marketing organization is trying to escape the same trap: fragmented data, backward-looking reporting, and AI pilots that never make it into daily operations. At Databricks, we decided not to layer AI on top of a broken foundation — we rebuilt the foundation first. In this session, we’ll walk through our end-to-end transformation from descriptive analytics to AI-driven insight and activation, powered entirely by the Lakehouse. We’ll show how consolidating marketing signals into a governed, scalable data architecture unlocked a new operating model: real-time intelligence accessible to non-technical marketers, AI-assisted decisioning embedded in workflows, and closed-loop activation across our CDP. We'll talk about the vision, what worked, what broke, and what changed in how marketing teams plan, execute, and measure impact.

AI/BI Genie has transformed self-service analytics for the Databricks Marketing team. This user-friendly conversational AI tool empowers marketers to perform advanced data analysis using natural language — no SQL required. By reducing reliance on data teams, Genie increases productivity and enables faster, data-driven decisions across the organization. But realizing Genie’s full potential takes more than just turning it on. In this session, we’ll share the end-to-end journey of implementing Genie for over 200 marketing users, including lessons learned, best practices and the real business impact of this Databricks-on-Databricks solution. Learn how Genie democratizes data access, enhances insight generation and streamlines decision-making at scale.