Unveiling the Leaders in Data and AI: The 2024 Finalists for the Databricks Data Visionary Award

The Data Team Awards annually recognize the indispensable roles of enterprise data teams across industries, celebrating their resilience and innovation from around the world.

With more than 200 nominations, the awards showcase the behind-the-scenes successes in data science and artificial intelligence. We look forward to highlighting these forward-thinking clients across six categories at the Data + AI Summit in June.

The Data and AI Visionary Award is presented to an executive innovator who has spearheaded the integration of data, analytics, and AI into their company’s strategic initiatives. These visionaries exemplify unparalleled foresight and inventiveness, charting new paths for data's role in predictive insights, innovative problem-solving, AI, and beyond.

The 2024 finalists for the Data and AI Visionary Award represent the pinnacle of this pioneering spirit, setting new standards for what it means to be at the forefront of data-driven exploration and achievement.

Chevron Phillips Chemical Company - Brent Railey, Chief Data & Analytics Officer

Chevron Phillips Chemical is a chemical manufacturing company. Under the leadership of Chief Data & Analytics Officer Brent Railey, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company embarked on a transformative journey to harness data and advanced analytics for a competitive edge. Scalability challenges led to the adoption of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which unlocked new avenues for data utilization and business insights across the company. A notable success was integrating manufacturing, supply chain, 3rd party, and IoT data into the Data Intelligence Platform, enabling predictive capabilities for manufacturing and optimization capabilities in supply chain resourcing, yielding significant cost savings. Improved resource allocation and additional cost savings were also realized from predictive models showing factory-to-factory delivery ETAs. As an industry leader, Railey advocates for IoT data integration with manufacturing and supply chain analytics for enhanced operational efficiency while keeping up with generative AI innovations and capabilities. With a focus on delivering tangible results, Railey and his team exemplify the transformative potential of data and analytics in a non-digital native environment.

Fox Corporation - Melody Hildebrandt, Chief Technology Officer 

FOX, a leader in the media industry, produces and distributes news, sports, and entertainment content through its primary brands, including FOX News Media, FOX Sports, FOX Entertainment, FOX Television Stations, and Tubi Media Group. Melody Hildebrandt, CTO of Fox Corporation, is charged with strategizing how the company can leverage emergent technology to connect the entire portfolio of FOX content to audiences in the most compelling and innovative way possible. Her technical and industry leadership has recently been seen in the development and launch of Verify, an open source protocol for media companies to enforce guardrails in how their content is leveraged by AI companies and LLMs. Partnering with Databricks, Fox is at the forefront of revolutionizing media interaction, ushering in a new era of immersive digital engagement. Through the Databricks fine-tuning API, they have trained several custom LLMs with distinctive style and tone, unlocking many Gen AI applications. Moreover, FOX continues to innovate in extracting insights from video to develop novel video discovery and playback experiences.

HEINEKEN - Ronald Den Elzen, Chief Digital & Technology Officer

Ronald den Elzen, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, ambitions to make HEINEKEN the best-connected, most relevant brewer for digital-age consumers and customers. Becoming the best-connected brewer requires an end-to-end digital transformation anchored in HEINEKEN’s overall business strategy. Data is essential and “connects all the dots,” from consumers to customers, from employees to suppliers. By the end of 2023, HEINEKEN had implemented eB2B apps in 34 markets and launched a new eB2B brand, eazle, in nine markets. The eB2B platforms connected 700,000 active customers and achieved nearly €11 billion in gross merchandise value, a 28% increase from 2022. HEINEKEN has connected over 4,500 machines in its breweries and collected 180 billion machine data points from its proprietary IoT platform. Data Management, Advanced Analytics, and Insights Enablement are essential for HEINEKEN to win in today's and tomorrow's worlds. The amount of data available has moved from predominantly internal (transactional) data to much more external data, including streaming data from various IoT sources. Through its strategic collaboration with Databricks, HEINEKEN uses all this data to increase consumer understanding, serve customers, optimize our marketing, and drive operational efficiency across all markets where HEINEKEN operates.

KPMG - Jodi Morton, Chief Data Officer

KPMG LLP, the U.S. firm of the KPMG global organization of independent
professional services firms providing Audit, Tax, and Advisory services, experienced obstacles with its on-premises data centers and legacy technology, which needed to scale in order to meet its diverse analytical needs. Jodi Morton, Chief Data Officer, led a transformation of the firm’s approach to data management. Recognizing the limitations posed by existing systems, Morton drove the adoption of a cloud transformation and data modernization program. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allowed KPMG to consolidate business intelligence and AI workloads, reduce the risks associated with data sprawl and simplify data governance. KPMG improved data accessibility and management across its different teams by enabling flexible, safe, and secure environments for project and engagement teams to collaborate with third-party market data in accordance with contractual terms and conditions by leveraging Unity Catalog. Morton’s leadership resulted in more flexible, secure environments for collaboration, enhanced data management controls and increased explainability through advanced data lineage. Now, KPMG enjoys regular data and analytics product sharing, accelerated time to market and strengthened confidence in its ability to meet commitments while adhering to the ethical standards of AI lifecycle management. 

Rivian Automotive - Wassym Bensaid, Chief Software Officer 

When Rivian, known for its groundbreaking electric vehicles and accessories, wanted to streamline its data management processes and democratize data access across the company, Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid built a new platform using Databricks as a foundation. The EV maker is a leader in the "software-defined vehicle" category – meaning it developed its technology stack from the ground up, with connectivity, data and AI at the heart of its architecture, and it continually adds new features through over-the-air software updates that improve the full vehicle experience.

With its advanced diagnostics and data analysis capabilities, Rivian developed a solution to remotely monitor vehicle performance and a broad set of vehicle diagnostics data, and use AI to predict maintenance needs, as well as energy and charge profiles. These capabilities, powered by Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform, not only slashed operational expenses for the company, but also facilitated a more agile, data-driven enterprise – and, ultimately, a better, more convenient experience for customers.

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!