Celebrating Achievements in Data Intelligence: Presenting the 2024 Databricks Data Intelligence Award Finalists

The annual Data Team Awards spotlight data teams and the pivotal role they play in business operations across industries and markets. By continually raising the bar, these innovators demonstrate the technology and ingenuity needed to thrive in today’s business world.

With more than 200 nominations from around the world, the Data Team Awards underscore the breadth of innovation happening in the data and artificial intelligence spheres. As we look forward to the Data + AI Summit, Databricks is gearing up to showcase these trailblazers and share their journeys of data-driven transformation and innovation.

The Data Team Data Intelligence Award honors teams that have excelled in harnessing the power of data intelligence within their organizations. These teams have implemented sophisticated data analytics and AI tools to extract, interpret, and transform intel into actionable insights that anticipate market trends, tailor services to customer needs, and respond swiftly to competitive challenges. Finalists exemplify this commitment to leveraging data as a cornerstone of their business strategy and define the meaning of being insights-driven.

Below are the finalists for 2024’s Data Team Data Intelligence Award:

Ahold Delhaize USA

Striving for enhanced efficiency, Ahold Delhaize USA (ADUSA), a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, needed to migrate from legacy systems to a more streamlined and robust solution. ADUSA adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform as its enterprise data platform for analytics, machine learning and business intelligence across its U.S. locations and immediately realized a substantial reduction in its annual Hadoop spend. ADUSA supports many data-informed initiatives, including customer personalization, loyalty programs, food waste reduction, environmental initiatives, logistics, forecasting, and inventory management. Utilizing the Data Intelligence Platform, ADUSA was able to develop a self-service data platform, allowing its data engineers to build pipelines that support data science and AI/ML applications. 

One of the significant wins was the ability to analyze promotions and sales performance at scale across different customer segments, enabling the company to leverage real-time data to make informed business decisions. This ultimately makes it easier to support shoppers at more than 2,000 local brand stores, providing them with the products they need and offering healthier choices and personalized recommendations. Ahold Delhaize USA is part of the U.S. family of brands, which also includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands – Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford, and Stop & Shop. When considered together, the companies of Ahold Delhaize USA (ADUSA) comprise the largest grocery retail group on the East Coast and the fourth largest in the nation, serving millions of omnichannel customers each week across an expansive data landscape that spans shoppers, products, and geographies. 

Fraport AG

Fraport, Germany's largest airport, ensures seamless journeys for private and business travelers through Frankfurt Airport. Recognizing the need to modernize and digitize its operations, Fraport embarked on an evolution aimed at automating numerous manual processes. Central to this evolution was the adoption of a robust data intelligence platform. In collaboration with Databricks, Microsoft, and initions, Fraport digitized and optimized capacity planning, a critical aspect of airport operations. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform has given Fraport a new level of control over ground handling procedures by offering early warnings of understaffing during critical loading and unloading times. With this information, Fraport can make informed decisions more promptly, allocate resources effectively, and mitigate any issues that might impact flight schedules or the passenger experience. Building on this success, Fraport continues to refine its operations by optimizing turnaround prognoses, further reducing aircraft downtime. These initiatives elevate customer satisfaction and generate significant financial benefits while solidifying Frankfurt Airport's position as a premier international hub.

Mastercard 

Mastercard has adopted Databricks as one of its cloud-based partners supporting the company as it delivers new and innovative products to market while continuing to uphold the highest standards of data governance and privacy. Mastercard uses the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform as part of its multi-step journey to deepen its commitment to recognizing AI’s potential as a foundational element for commerce. Mastercard’s using the breadth of fully automated capabilities, ranging from data lineage, sensitive data identification, model development, and model governance, it can seamlessly marry data discovery to product development while ensuring compliance and transparency of data use.

The Databricks technology ecosystem creates opportunities for both organizations to broaden innovations and solutions to help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Also, by Mastercard’s leveraging capabilities such as Clean Rooms, Generative AI Development, AI-driven Documentation/Tags, Text2Viz, Contextual Search, and the Databricks Assistant, the outcome is a self-service, collaborative environment for its data experts, AI/ML technologists, and business partners that enables Mastercard to grow its AI product offerings.

Providence Health

Providence, a national, not-for-profit Catholic health system with 51 hospitals and more than 1,100 clinics in the U.S., faced several challenges in managing and deploying its inventory of AI and ML models. These models are crucial for improving healthcare outcomes. As the use of large language models (LLMs) increased, fine-tuned by Providence's extensive electronic health records (EHR), the need for a solution to streamline model deployment became critical. 

Providence is partnering with Databricks to create a centralized "Model Marketplace" on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. The Model Marketplace initiative was designed to democratize access to a diverse range of ML models, allowing more than 120,000 caregivers to easily and efficiently access tools supporting their daily decision-making. By aggregating models from more than 65 different Databricks workspaces into a single, accessible location, the marketplace will simplify deployment, reduce complexity, and enhance model visibility and usability across the organization. The implementation process involved setting up automated workflows to regularly export the latest production versions of models from various development workspaces into a centralized, curated workspace. This approach used external storage as an intermediate repository and ensured that only the most current and vetted models were available for deployment. Providence now benefits from streamlined operations, enhanced compliance with healthcare regulations, and accelerated deployment of innovative AI solutions that directly improve operations and patient care.

All Data Team Award finalists and winners will be honored during a ceremony at the Data + AI Summit on Tuesday, June 11, at 6:30 PM on the expo floor. Join us as we celebrate the achievements of these exceptional data teams together!