Every June, Databricks fills Moscone Center for the Data + AI Summit. This means more than 30,000 people from 150+ countries. It's the largest data and AI gathering in the world. The opening film had one job: make that room feel something in the moments before the CEO walked out.
The difficulty is that the subject, enterprise data infrastructure, is abstract by nature. The category often focuses on the data, the future, the infrastructure. What was needed was a focus on people and connection.
If you're not deep in the tech world, you may not know Databricks. There's a good chance most of the companies you interact with every day do. Databricks is where the world's biggest brands turn an enormous volume of data into intelligence. Around 70% of the Fortune 500 run on it. If AI is the brain everyone is racing to build, Databricks is what connects that brain to the real world.
Ali Ghodsi, Databricks' co-founder and CEO, who puts it plainly: AI doesn't have an intelligence problem, it has a context problem. The models are already brilliant. What they're missing is connection. Connection to what's real, and to what matters inside each individual company.
The film isn't a demonstration of what the technology can do. It's about the ultimate mind, waiting to be connected to something real, and the argument that intelligence on its own was never the thing that mattered.
It played across the full keynote array at Moscone, a wall of screens wrapping the hall, in the dark, to thirty thousand people. Work made for that space has to hold two things at once: legible from the back of a room that size, and intimate enough to land on one person in it.
