From Legacy to Lakehouse: Proven Best Practices From Databricks and McKinsey on Modernization

As enterprises race to operationalize AI at scale, legacy data warehouses have become a critical bottleneck. In this session, Databricks and McKinsey share proven, real-world best practices for modernizing data platforms to unlock analytics, GenAI and agentic workloads with speed, governance and cost efficiency. Drawing from large scale transformations including McKinsey’s Nebula platform, we outline a pragmatic modernization blueprint that balances risk, payback period and business impact. Attendees will learn how to migrate from brittle legacy architectures to an open lakehouse and federated data mesh, reduce total cost of ownership by up to 40%, accelerate time to insight and enable secure self-service analytics and AI across the enterprise. This talk delivers concrete lessons for executives and practitioners navigating modernization in the AI era.