Artificial intelligence is the new avenue for organizations to operationalize their data.

With Databricks Inc.’s recent unveiling of Lakehouse Apps, companies such as Kumo.ai Inc. are building valuable machine learning and graph neural network capabilities accessible within the Lakehouse, right where the data is stored.

“Kumo.ai is an AI platform company — we make AI as easy as SQL, and today we’re a SaaS platform,” said Hema Raghavan (pictured), co-founder and head of engineering at Kumo.ai. “It requires us to export your data into our SaaS platform and for us to be able to train the large models that we do. With today’s announcement, what that means is when we’re working with customers whose data is in the Databricks ecosystem, in Delta tables for example, the compute is actually pushed down to Databricks, so data never leaves Databricks. You get the goodness of Kumo, without data ever leaving that ecosystem.”

Raghavan spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at the Databricks Data + AI Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Lakehouse Apps’ value from a Kumo.ai standpoint.

Facilitating added value delivery through an app ecosystem

From training large language models to running analytics and simulations, AI tasks often imply moving the data in and out of the data platform — which can often be risky, delicate and resource-intensive. What Databricks has done, therefore, is create an enabling platform for solutions partners to attack certain pain points for end users while mitigating security and governance risks, according to Raghavan.

“Kumo is a 30-person, one-and-a-half-year-old startup,” she said. “Our asset is that we run graph neural networks on relational data. A platform that actually allows Kumo to do what it does best, which is developing the algorithms that it has the best in-house team to develop for and enable that for the world without having to think of security governance and everything that comes with it, is what a platform — a true enabler like Databricks — does in that ecosystem. It lets us focus on what we do best.”

With Lakehouse Apps, platform users don’t need to have mastered everything — companies like Kumo.ai assume the position of providing expertise in specific areas, Raghavan added.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Databricks Data + AI Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE