In recent years, unification has been the theme of enterprise data management. Pulling data together logically into a pool and running queries against that pool can yield major benefits.

Machine learning offers even more power and more insights — a lot more.

“The human being will always be involved very closely, but the machine and the data can really help [by seeing] a correlation in the data that would be impossible for a human being alone to discover,” said Benoit Dageville (pictured, left), co-founder and president of products at Snowflake Inc.

During during Snowflake’s 2020 Data Cloud Summit, Dageville and Florian Douetteau (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Dataiku, spoke with Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. They discussed the ways Snowflake and Dataiku complement each other and where the intersection of these technologies is headed in the years to come.  (* Disclosure below.)

Breaking down walls to reveal new possibilities

One interesting possibility lies in the way not just data, but also employee knowledge and skills are empowered via such an architecture.

“Once you solve the issue of the data silo with Snowflake, you don’t want to bring another silo, which would be a silo of skills,” Douetteau said. “You need actually to simplify the access to technology. And to get there, [you need to break] up the silos. I [endorse] a collaborative approach.”

How, in this vision of the future, would skill sets evolve? Douetteau sees it in terms of experts becoming more fluent in the way their host businesses work.

“It will be first about being able to speak the language of the business, meaning [the way] you translate data insight, predictive modeling, and so forth into actionable insights or business impact,” he said.

And Dageville has already seen how machine learning can help organizations adapt in real time to the looming threats of COVID-19.

“Companies all of a sudden saw their revenue line dropping,” he said. “So we saw all our customers basically [asking], ‘What is it going to be the impact on my business? How can I adapt? How can I adjust?’ Our customers all of a sudden started to consume the COVID data from our data marketplace.”

And looking ahead, Dageville expects medical research to benefit from machine learning in data clouds.

“I fundamentally think that data processing of images, doing AI on these images, and discovering patterns and potentially flagging disease way earlier is going to have a huge impact in healthcare,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Cloud Summit 2020. Neither Snowflake Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE