Ali Ghodsi (Databricks): every company will be an AI company
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi on why in ten years every company will be an AI company – and how he plans to take on Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The next revolution in cloud computing will not be driven by Microsoft or Google – but by companies like Databricks. The US software company helps businesses analyse vast amounts of data in the cloud. In this episode of Handelsblatt Disrupt, CEO Ali Ghodsi speaks with me about the data business, artificial intelligence and the company’s expansion plans.
“In ten years, every company will be an AI company,” says Ghodsi. Almost every firm is collecting data, he argues. Siemens and Thyssen-Krupp, for example, have installed sensors on their machines that gather information and transmit it to a central storage system. Machine learning can then be used to predict equipment failures or analyse customer behaviour.
The conversation ranges well beyond Databricks’ business model. Ghodsi explains how he plans to hold his own against Amazon, Microsoft and Google, why he is expanding his European operations, and what advantages US universities offer.
Ghodsi was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden and earned his doctorate there. After a brief period of research and founding a Swedish data-transfer company, he received a fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
The advantage of US universities, he says, is their proximity to industry in Silicon Valley. The interplay between private enterprise and academic research – particularly at Stanford and Berkeley – creates “a very fertile environment in which you can focus on research problems that are very close to practice.”
For a software company, Europe is an attractive location because of its strict data protection requirements, he says. Databricks is currently developing a research and development centre in Berlin. “We will invest ten times as much this year,” says Ghodsi. Above all, he wants to continue expanding the engineering team.