Foundation First: Why Model-Agnostic Data Platforms Win

In 2024, two of the largest data platform companies, each with billions in revenue and dedicated AI research teams, invested in building their own foundation models. One spent roughly $10 million training a 132-billion parameter model on 3,072 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. The other released a 480-billion parameter model optimized for enterprise tasks like SQL generation and code. Both achieved strong results within their compute class.

Stream Governance: Making Compliance a Property of Data in Motion

As organizations have transitioned from batch processing to real-time streaming architectures, a critical governance gap has emerged. Legacy data governance tools designed for databases, warehouses, and file systems assume that information is stationary and focus on protecting, classifying, and auditing data at rest.

Building Secure, Resilient, and Compliant Fraud Detection With Confluent Cloud

Banking customers expect financial transactions to be completed quickly. Fraud analysis must execute in milliseconds, so traditional batch processing systems are inherently too slow. To safeguard transactions, institutions must shift to proactive, in-flight prevention. Confluent enables this shift by using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink to continuously correlate transactional and behavioral signals, blocking malicious activity before a transaction settles.

How to Architect a Clean Context Layer for Trustworthy AI

A CFO asks her AI agent a simple question: "What was our ARR at the end of Q3?" The agent finds the subscriptions table, spots a column called arr, sums it up, and returns $16.4M. Strong quarter. Everyone nods. The real number was $13.9M, but no one in the room knew it yet. I hear some version of this story from nearly every data leader I talk to right now, and it almost always starts the same way. They stand up an AI pilot. It looks sharp in the POC.

data:unplugged 2026 Recap - PAYBACK's Decade of Data Mastery

At the recent data:unplugged 2026 in Münster, Europe’s biggest festival for data and AI, the stage was set for a masterclass in data transformation. Julian Stock, Analytics Reporting Team Lead, and Andreas Weiß, Senior Reporting Engineer, from PAYBACK, Germany’s premier loyalty program, shared the stage to detail a decade-long evolution: the journey from a strict, ticket-based reporting system to a thriving, AI-ready data culture.

Collaborative BI That Drives Action: From Shared Insights to Shared Accountability

Here’s a scenario, and not an uncommon one either. A dashboard flags a margin drop on Tuesday morning. Someone from the Sales team adds a comment. Finance adds another. A colleague from Operations agrees the number looks wrong. By Friday, the issue is still open, and no one owns the fix. That is the gap in many business intelligence collaboration setups. The data was shared. The discussion happened. The decision never moved.

Reliable Pipelines, Predictable Bills: Why Settle for One Without the Other

Somewhere along the way, data teams accepted a trade-off: pipelines that just work, or bills that you can actually forecast, pick one. So you live with the silent failures, the schema changes that break dashboards overnight, and the month-end invoice that never quite matches the data you moved. Not because it's acceptable, but because it's familiar. In this session, we're challenging that trade-off head-on. We'll break down where pipelines fail quietly and where costs inflate invisibly and show you, live, what it looks like when your pipeline gives you full visibility into every sync, every record, and every dollar.