Data + AI for everyone: highlights from the 2025 Databricks Summit

The Prophecy team had an amazing week at the 2025 Databricks Data + AI Summit!

With over 22,000 in-person attendees and another 40,000+ virtual guests at the keynotes, it was the biggest and best data event of the year. 

Data democratization with Ali Ghodsi and Jamie Dimon

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi kicked things off in the opening keynote, saying, “Our mission is to democratize data + AI”. Data estates have grown more and more complex, and, according to Ali, “it is still really hard for organizations to succeed at Data + AI”. 

Databricks simplifies that architecture and, with Unity Catalog, streamlines security and access. The result? A renewed focus from Ali and the team on getting data to every data user. “In the past, you had to be someone who knows Python, or SQL, or Scala, or Java to get value out of your data. It now should be enough that you just speak natural language to your data.”

Ali is putting his money where his mouth is, launching, along with many new platform features, Databricks Free Edition to let everyone “have a slice of Databricks forever”.

But even with all those advances, all eyes were on Jamie Dimon, CEO of Databricks and Prophecy customer JPMorganChase, as he took the stage.

Dimon immediately jumped into the fray with his usual no-holds-barred approach, saying,

the hardest part is the data

and how his focus is on “getting all the people that run the business to understand the power of data and AI”. 

He shared that JPMC takes an inclusive approach, bringing data and AI into leadership, declaring that “this is too important to leave to the technologists”. Instead, he laid out a strategy of constant assessment and improvement that results in data and AI playing a part in every major decision and process.

Data for all data users

Prophecy co-founders Raj Bains and Maciej Szpakowski took to the stage to share what’s next for data preparation: agents to help with every phase of the process. 

Over and over at Prophecy, we’ve heard from the data team that they are bogged down creating and maintaining data pipelines and from business teams that they are blocked from the data they need. This slows the adoption of Databricks with the back-and-forth between the business users—data analysts, data scientists, and business leaders—and the data engineers, causing pipeline creation to take months instead of days.

In their session “Reinventing data prep with AI: Build an agent-driven production pipeline in 7 minutes”, Raj and Maciej debuted Prophecy agents, enabling all data users to collaborate and work together on the same platform. Prophecy agents interact with users to discover data, explore data, and build pipelines. As the title promised, Maciej built a production-ready pipeline just by interacting with agents in under 7 minutes!

The Raj and Ravit Show 

Ravit Jain, the data world’s most enthusiastic voice, joined Prophecy CEO Raj Bains for another great episode of The Ravit Show. While the focus is on AI outcomes, everyone now knows “you can’t have AI until you have data”. 

For Raj the push to “get data into the hands of the business” has to be balanced with “get the governance right”. This is paying off with Prophecy’s work with customers like JPMC. “They are true technology leaders” and JPMC is “getting the power of Databricks to business teams by enabling all data users with Prophecy”.

What’s next? Data preparation agents to help you move much faster, but also have the visual and code to get it right.

Tackling GenAI

Mitesh Shah, VP of Product Marketing at Prophecy, shared findings from our survey of over 500 data leaders on the impact of GenAI on data teams in his session “Ready for GenAI? Survey says governed self-service is the new playbook for data teams”.

The good news? The expectations are high! And so are the results, with data teams that are applying GenAI seeing 30-50% productivity gains. 

But even with that promise, the biggest factors still holding back GenAI adoption are faster access to data and improving data governance. Once again, delivering governed self-service is the solution to powering AI!

Taming FHIR, live on stage! 

Prophecy’s Itai Weiss and Matt Turner continued the conversation with their session “Taming industry-specific data sets: How to simplify access & collaboration to FHIR and beyond”. 

Standardizing industry-specific data can speed access. However, industry standards can be complex, having to address multiple entities and support extensions. As a result, processing them falls on the data engineering team. And when things change, those same data engineers end up on the hook for every update. 

The FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard is one such format that has seen rapid adoption in healthcare. But covering over 180 entities and with deep extensions, it also has a reputation for being ‘impossible’.

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Itai took to the stage to show how Prophecy’s visual and AI data preparation can speed access to FHIR and, more importantly, bring the domain experts into the process of keeping the data up to date. 

With this new approach, Prophecy was indeed able to ‘tame FHIR” and define a process to democratize access to all industry-standard data standards.

For more on how Prophecy speeds access to FHIR data, contact our team.

The data community in Napa, on the town in SF, and at The View

We started the week off with an amazing wine tour with our partners, Sigma, Databricks, and Aimpoint Digital. With three stops and plenty of time for data chatting in between amazing wines, we learned a lot!

We were also out on the town with our partner Lovelytics for a happy hour for Databricks Health and Life Sciences customers. With a packed house and sharing platform modernization strategies for mission-critical and highly regulated data, it was a great night out!

Finally, our evening event at The View was, once again, the must-attend party of the event. We hosted alongside our friends at Sigma, Atlan, and Anomalo and brought data leaders, analysts, and thought leaders together for a night of great conversation and views!

All roads lead to Prophecy

Our booth was at the crossroads of the main event ‘avenue’ and the Databricks. With a steady stream of traffic every day. And with back-to-back demos and meetings right up until they started taking away the rugs, it was the hub of all things self-service data prep.

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We kept things going with a booth talk with Prophecy’s Lance Walter and industry analyst Sanjeev Mohan on the future of the data stack. 

And with our new mascot Gemma keeping everyone on their toes, Lego giveaways, and an espresso station, the fun never stopped!

See you next year!

Catch the Prophecy team at next year’s event!

In the meantime, connect with our team and pick up the conversation on how well-governed data preparation is your key to AI.