India could be world’s first data AI-driven economy: Databricks’ India head Anil Bhasin

India’s data revolution could be an inspiration for other countries to see the benefits of digitisation, said Anil Bhasin, Country Manager, India, Databricks, at YourStory's Mumbai edition of TechSparks 2023.

“India is witnessing the biggest experiment in history. Never before in our living memory — maybe even in the future — will you have a country that’s seeing a transformation where 1.4 billion lives will be digitised,” Bhasin said during his keynote session on ‘The Data Lakehouse Paradigm’, where he spoke about the new data storage and management platform, data lakehouse, which Databricks pioneered.

The advent of the internet and subsequent widespread use of online applications began generating tonnes of data, Bhasin explained, but even with conversations in recent years of Big Data becoming the new oil, not many organisations have successfully monetised that data.

However, that will change soon.

“I believe we can make India the world’s first data AI-driven economy… Enterprises are either data-leaning (or data-forward), or they’re not. I can’t see how any organisation that isn’t data-leaning within the next 15 years will survive,” he said.

Bhasin said Databricks was on a mission to help organisations leverage data through their data lakehouse platform, which meshes the performance and reliability of data warehouse platforms with the flexibility and scalability of data lakes. By keeping their platform open source, Databricks only charges customers for data processing.

“Databricks brings all your data, AI, and analytics on one platform, and it can be used and accessed by data engineers, scientists, and machine learning teams,” he said, adding that the key takeaways for the platform were that it offered a unified capability, is open source and scalable, and helped customers have high performance data strategies at a low cost.

“There needs to be a cultural shift in how we leverage data. How many times do we really look at the value data delivers to our business? Companies only focus on cost savings and productivity, but they never ask how it can increase our business revenues,” Bhasin said.