TheCUBE has been tracking how generative artificial intelligence is going to change everything. Powering that trend has been the AI innovators — the newsmakers, the entrepreneurs and everyone else building the next big apps.

How innovators are applying AI was a central focus of the Supercloud 6 event. The AI trend is real, and is powering all of the trends and markets, according to theCUBE Research chief analyst Dave Vellante (pictured, right).

“It starts at the bottom of the stack,”  he said. “We’ve talked about this in Barcelona, on our theCUBE Pod, with companies like Nvidia, Broadcom and other semiconductor players. But it’s really all the way through that stack. It’s an orthogonal slice through it.”

Analysts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with AI innovators and entrepreneurs during the event. They explored why innovation is needed to effectively deliver AI services at enterprise scale as AI hype clashes with business.

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the “Supercloud 6: AI Innovators” event:

1. Generative AI is driving a systems revolution in technology infrastructure and software.

For more than a decade, the team at theCUBE has been chronicling the evolution of big data. All of a sudden, the huge growth wave known as gen AI hit the scene, according to John Furrier (pictured, left), theCUBE Research executive analyst.

“We were talking about next-generation cloud just about a year and a half ago, when we started talking about supercloud,” Furrier said, as part of opening remarks for Supercloud 6. “But what it’s morphed into is really super chips, super applications, super infrastructure.”

The thing going on with gen AI is that while the game is still the same, it’s now being played out under new conditions, according to Furrier. There is new infrastructure, new software abstractions and new kinds of chips, server and component configurations.

“But the developer action is super robust. Linux Foundation with [KubeCon + CloudNativeCon], you’ve got massive open-source development,” he said. “All this is going on at the same time. You have this perfect storm of innovation.”

All told, Supercloud 6 was an opportunity to unravel the complexities of AI innovation. While last year may have seen lots of excitement and experimentation around AI, the second half of this year is really when companies may start to see a return on some of its investments, according to Vellante.

“I think it’s throughout the stack. We had a lot of discussion today, both online and offline, about the silicon level. Of course, we’re setting up for GTC next week,” Vellante said. “We’ve got companies like Groq going after the very low latency piece of the market. But Nvidia’s got a really, I think, strong moat.”

Then, as one moves up the stack, there are big takeaways when it comes to the data platforms piece. There are still huge gaps in the data estates and the data strategies, Vellante added.

“Companies are filling those gaps, but there’s a long way to go,” he said. “Which says to me, there’s a lot of room for innovation, and that’s going to come from a couple of places.”

It could come from existing platforms, such as Snowflake Inc. and Databricks Inc. It could also include Oracle Corp., SingleStore Inc. or other existing platforms that are evolving to catch the AI wave, according to Vellante.

“Then you have all these startups coming in, saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to be laser-focused on solving these problems and filling these gaps, bringing together unified metadata and unified governance,’” he explained. “Either they’re going to hit escape velocity or they’re going to get acquired or they’re going to be a niche.”

Evolving personas and evolving use cases for AI really stood out at Supercloud 6, according to theCUBE Research principal analyst Rob Strechay. Companies are looking closely at how to use AI in their products, he noted.

“Embedding the AI in the products as well as using the models to fix the models, kind of discussion, and then looking beyond that,” Strechay said. “How do they make it easy for other organizations that are not at the top of the pyramid to actually adopt AI?”

Here’s the complete opening event analysis video:

2. Companies such as Walmart and Uber are leveraging AI to enhance user experiences.

As a part of Supercloud 6, there were interesting instances of AI practicality advanced by Walmart Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. For Walmart, it involves Element, which is a full-fledged machine learning platform that is also cloud- and large language model-independent.

At Walmart, there has been significant growth in the usage of AI and machine learning over the last few years, according to Hari Vasudev, executive vice president of the global tech platform at Walmart Global Tech, the technology and business services organization within Walmart. Even prior to generative AI taking off, the company was using predictive AI quite ubiquitous across its enterprise, including for functions in supply chain, e-commerce, stores, managing real estate portfolio and even internal applications, such as financial systems and people systems

“More and more, what has happened recently is we have had hundreds of data scientists, machine learning engineers spread across different geographies,” Vasudev said.

What the company realized very quickly was that it became very hard to be able to develop and execute AI and machine learning projects with speed and sustainability. The company also wanted to be fairly cloud-vendor agnostic.

“We want to have the ability to fine-tune these models using Walmart context data,” Vasudev said.

Element gives the company the ability to span multiple public clouds and its own private cloud. The company wants to pave the way for sustainable and ethical AI development at scale, Vasudev added.

Meanwhile, few companies embody AI-driven innovation quite like Uber, which has seen much evolution over the years. The company has sought to navigate the physical world, which poses a lot of complexity, according to Uday Kiran Medisetty, distinguished engineer at Uber.

“We cannot predict what’s going on, but we need to stay agile to adapt best in the industry and then figure out what works for us,” Medisetty said. “We redesigned our core ordering system back in 2015.”

The company took a leap of faith in 2018-2019 tyhat led to a two-year rewrite of the core ordering system using cutting-edge new SQL technologies, according to Medisetty. From there a new SQL spanner system enabled a robust platform capable of handling online orders and driver sessions at internet scale.

“We cannot always keep rewriting it every one, two years,” he said. “We have to have a pragmatic choice on whether it makes the right sense for the right time. We also have to think longer term on if we were to think for the next five years, does this architecture handle the kind of scale that we are predicting for the next five years?”

Here’s the complete video interview with Hari Vasudev:

3. AI innovators are revolutionizing data, security and cloud collaboration.

At Supercloud 6, various other companies weighed in on how AI is enhancing and securing enterprise operations, integrating with data management and driving innovation and efficiency within cybersecurity. For companies such as Snowflake and Nvidia, this moment is one where AI, data management and cloud computing are intersecting and bringing forth transformative change.

“I think this year is going be a massive sea change,” said Matt Hull, vice president of global AI platform solutions at Nvidia Corp. “The biggest explosion was [that] ChatGPT really woke up everyone, every enterprise, every individual, every researcher out there as to what was possible with AI.”

The integration of zero-trust principles with AI is also being watched as part of the evolution of cyber defense. Why the key principles around zero-trust remain the same, Gen AI enables more dynamic responses, according to Deepen Desai, chief security officer of Zscaler Inc.

“All of these threat actors are after your data. Once they’re in, once they move around, they’re trying to steal data,” Desai said. “This is where generative AI helps with data classification and security models.”

Data, of course, is everything in this new wave of AI. For Databricks, the route forward is all about the integration of data-driven AI within a unified stack, according to Craig Wiley, senior director of product for machine learning and AI.

“If you look at, for example, any of the cloud, the hyperscaler AI platforms, I think what you find is that there are these distinct AI platforms separate from all of the rest of the tooling,” he said. “They can be connected to all the other tooling through clear APIs, but Databricks has really done this differently. Databricks has said, ‘Hey, what if data and AI were managed completely within the single stack?'”

Finally, there’s no innovation without developers. That’s where MongoDB Ventures aims to help out, looking across the customer base and considering how to introduce new technologies, according to Suraj Patel, head of MongoDB Ventures.

“Generally, we’re looking at a lot of infrastructure software, a lot of developer tools,” he said. “The last year and a half has been very exciting … focused a lot on looking at companies building in the AI space and, in particular, companies that are enabling developers, which is our key audience, to build with AI.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Matt Hull and Baris Gultekin, VP of AI products at Snowflake:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 6: AI Innovators” event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

Photo: SiliconANGLE