The annual Information Crew Awards showcase how totally different information groups from throughout the globe are delivering options to a few of the world’s hardest issues. 

Almost 300 nominations had been submitted by corporations from numerous industries and areas throughout six award classes. The competitors was stiff because the pool of nominees was narrowed right down to 29 finalists. Lastly, solely six winners had been chosen. Their outstanding tales of information and AI innovation are price sharing. 

Congratulations to the 2023 Information Crew Award winners:

Unified Lakehouse Award: Condé Nast

Condé Nast is a worldwide media firm producing award-winning journalism, content material and leisure for each platform right this moment and operates in 32 markets worldwide. Recognizing the immense worth of information in right this moment’s digital panorama, the information crew launched into an formidable journey to centralize all information in Databricks Lakehouse, eliminating the necessity for different information warehouses, together with cloud choices like Redshift and Snowflake. With a unified view into over 3PBs of information, they’ll deal with any analytics or ML workload on one platform whereas additionally saving them $6M in infrastructure prices and $2.6M in information engineering productiveness. However it’s not nearly IT impression; they’re additionally delivering worth to the enterprise. 2000 ML fashions are serving predictive analytics to drive options in areas like segmentation, personalization, and subscriber churn, and over 200 enterprise customers are accessing stories by way of Databricks SQL, with all information entry securely managed and tracked with Unity Catalog. The information crew at Condé Nast isn’t stopping there — they’re waiting for notice extra price optimizations with Serverless deployments of Lakehouse parts and speed up extra worth to the enterprise by leveraging Lakehouse information.

Finalists: Epsilon, Mercedes-Benz, Siam Industrial Financial institution, and Texas Rangers.

Information Crew Disruptor Award: JetBlue

By leveraging the ability of LLMs and Databricks Lakehouse, JetBlue is deploying AI & ML merchandise with the objective of optimizing operations, rising new/current sources of income, decreased delays, and enhancing effectivity. They started by shifting their information and AI platform off a highly-constrained multicloud information warehouse (MCDW) to the extremely versatile Databricks Lakehouse, which may mesh information from numerous sources after which quickly experiment and iterate on ML fashions and options together with LLMs. With their groundbreaking BlueSky operational digital twin and embedded LLM chatbot launching in phases, JetBlue is empowering decision-makers with invaluable insights, enabling them to supply market-leading Buyer experiences whereas attaining important price financial savings and operational efficiencies — from real-time climate to components availability, to crew scheduling and extra. The optimistic impression goes past conventional purposes of AI & ML. Utilizing Databricks, JetBlue is seeing enhanced ROI throughout numerous AI & ML merchandise and a decrease complete price of possession financial savings. These monetary advantages proceed to supply ample TCO runway for added industry-leading merchandise additional solidifying their place as an {industry} disruptor. JetBlue’s trailblazing strategy is setting a brand new normal for the {industry}, shaping the way forward for air journey for the higher.

Finalists: Bread Monetary, Burberry, Kelly Providers, and the U.S. Division of Veterans Affairs.

Information Crew Democratization Award: Nationwide

Nationwide is on the forefront of spearheading transformative change throughout the insurance coverage sector. Their main goal is to develop personalized insurance coverage options that cater to particular person necessities. It locations a robust emphasis on safe information protocols all through the group and has chosen Databricks Lakehouse as its go-forward information warehouse supplier. Nationwide seeks to rework the insurance coverage {industry} and supply policyholders with better worth and personalised experiences via the efficient utilization of information.

Finalists: Barilla, GSK, HealthVerity, and Rivian.

Information Crew Transformation Award: Unilever

Unilever is among the world’s largest shopper items corporations with a portfolio of main, purposeful manufacturers; an unequalled presence in future development markets; and a determinedly business focus as a sustainable enterprise. As suppliers of Magnificence & Properly-being, Private Care, Dwelling Care, Diet and Ice Cream merchandise, it has gross sales in over 190 nations and merchandise utilized by 3.4 billion folks each day. The Unilever Compass, its sustainable enterprise technique, is got down to assist ship superior efficiency and drive sustainable and accountable development whereas enhancing the well being of the planet; enhancing folks’s well being, confidence and well-being; and contributing to a fairer and extra socially inclusive world. Information and analytics play a pivotal half in strategic supply. With petabytes of information – together with regional and buyer information – at Unilever’s disposal, democratization is vital to the power to modernize information technique and remodel operations. Unilever’s European in market Information and Analytics crew has undergone an formidable transformation utilizing Databricks Lakehouse to simplify and standardize European information. The Information Engineering crew created a sturdy information basis that harmonizes information throughout all European markets (39+ markets) into a typical, built-in and unified information platform. This has enabled cross Europe trade-offs and simplified the decision-making course of, making it clear and uniform throughout all enterprise items and markets in Europe. Enterprise customers are supplied with metadata-driven instruments that permit them to effortlessly deal with or usher in extra information to reply their particular enterprise questions with minimal help from the engineering crew. These instruments had been initially examined with 12 tasks throughout totally different features in Europe, the place lots of of latest objects had been created shortly and securely. The established framework right this moment empowers enterprise customers all through the group to be data-driven in methods not potential earlier than. Harmonized European information foundations, constructed on prime of Unilever’s Information as a Platform information lake, have reworked Unilever’s strategy to information and its capacity to democratize the supply of worth to the enterprise. With a consolidated view into exterior and inside information sources on a scalable, open platform, 2400 day by day customers in Europe now have a holistic view of efficiency throughout the area. This permits decision-making throughout each side of the enterprise to tell the granular development alternatives and most dear actions throughout Europe.

Finalists: Albertsons, AXA France, Humana, and IFC/World Financial institution.

Information for Good Award: Australian Crimson Cross Lifeblood

Australian Crimson Cross Lifeblood is aware of that saving lives begins with the convenience of entry to organic merchandise, so life-giving donations can allow life-changing outcomes for Australia’s most susceptible. Their Efficiency and Analytics crew is utilizing information and AI to strengthen engagement and help communities by recruiting new donors, recognizing current donors and optimizing provide chains. Using Databricks Lakehouse, Lifeblood can effectively run granular and correct forecasts to grasp native dynamics. For instance, by processing real-time information inside their donor facilities, they’ll predict wait instances and cancellations, alerting donors of potential appointment delays. They search for alternatives to grasp what drives native donations, in addition to what donor presents could improve donation frequency via complicated segmentation and advertising attribution fashions. With Databricks Lakehouse’s unified structure, Lifeblood has made it simpler to draw extra beneficiant donors and strengthen bonds inside their neighborhood, saving numerous lives alongside the best way.

Finalists: BlueConduit, CareSource, Inari Agriculture, and McKesson/Ontada.

Information Visionary Award: Jawad Khan, CDAO, Tufts Drugs 

For too lengthy, healthcare journeys have been disjointed, leaving sufferers and their caregivers with a irritating expertise that leads them to hunt care elsewhere. To handle this, Jawad Khan, Tufts Drugs’s CDAO, started to architect a contemporary information platform dubbed WIISE (Wellness Intelligence and Data Sharing Enablement) utilizing the Databricks Lakehouse to get rid of the disparities between data programs and ship affected person information seamlessly to inside and exterior customers. Khan’s crew merged over 50 disparate digital well being data programs from over a dozen distinct EHR distributors, giving information analysts, for the primary time, the power to make use of a single question to look three many years of archives for over 4M sufferers’ data that had as soon as been unfold throughout totally different, proprietary databases. Revolutionary companies which have resulted embody WIISE Scheduler, an AI-based appointment scheduler matching affected person signs to applicable specialties, and persona-based dashboards and stories. In the present day, Tufts Drugs delivers on the imaginative and prescient of frictionless care to sufferers. Its widespread information mannequin permits unprecedented entry to many years of information, representing thousands and thousands of affected person data, throughout disparate legacy programs and operational information shops.

Finalists: Jamelle Brown – CTO at First Orion, Tim Dickson – CIO at Generac Energy Methods, and Michel Lutz – CDO at TotalEnergies.

Let’s Elevate a Glass

Congratulations to our 2023 Information Crew Award winners! Keep tuned for the 2024 Information Crew Awards.