Generative AI is electrifying. Charge ahead or get shocked.

By Chet Kapoor, Chairman & CEO of DataStax

The energy around AI is nothing short of electrifying. It’s not just a buzzword or part of a science fiction storyline. It’s our new reality and will be the most important and disruptive innovation of our lifetime.

The market and opportunity ahead are massive. A large majority of applications will include AI by 2025, and let’s be honest, you can’t put a price on GPT. Think about what the world will look like in five, 10, or even 15 years. It’s hard to imagine a future without this technology, and every business in every industry will go through a transformation.

At the same time, the pace of innovation is breathtaking. Over the last decade, AI has surpassed humans in image, handwriting, and speech recognition. Just in the last few months, AI is outperforming us on common sense problem solving, college math, and code generation. But, like with any new technology (e.g. cloud, mobile, social, crypto, VR), there’s a lot of noise and misconceptions to sort through.

Every business today needs an enterprise-ready stack to deliver on the magic that is possible with AI. Let’s dive into what that looks like and how you can get started now. 

The generative AI differentiator

Up until this point, we’ve seen customers create great products, applications, and experiences using predictive AI. But today, every customer and prospect I speak with is thinking about how generative AI (GenAI) can benefit their business.

Don’t get me wrong: Both are needed to deliver a competitive experience, combining customer context with relevant and accurate content. But GenAI is fundamentally different from previous iterations because the capabilities are so human-like. 

Enterprises are racing to provide this human level of interaction with their customers. As applications become more “human,” the data platform must act more like human memory, too. Just like how you cannot “turn off the brain,” the platform needs to be real-time, available 24/7, and able to ingest massive amounts of information including GenAI algorithms. 

GenAI done right: secure, scalable, and real time

If generative AI is all about delivering value at unprecedented speed, this means every leader needs to bring GenAI to their data and apps yesterday. 

Unfortunately, most businesses attempting to leverage generative AI will fail in execution. Many will hastily implement their generative AI prototype without considering the challenges around security, performance, and customer experience. Others will realize that it is too costly to deliver the scale they desire.

On the other hand, leading companies will use an enterprise-ready stack that is secure, scalable, and real time, with a low TCO. The bottom line? If you are not leveraging the power of GenAI in your business right now – and doing it right – you will be left behind.

An enterprise-ready stack

We’ve spent the last few years at DataStax evolving an awesome stack that makes real-time AI accessible to everyone at 3x the scale and ½ the cost: 

● It’s built on the most powerful and scalable open-source database on the planet, Apache Cassandra 

● We have a world-class database-as-a-service called Astra DB that delivers market-leading unit economics

● We offer event streaming via Apache Pulsar to help practitioners move real-time data in and out of the database

● We provide support for real-time AI with Kaskada’s feature store and recently added vector search for generative AI, which is changing the game and helping enterprises deliver powerful apps using large language models like GPT-4

● The technology is battle-tested, globally available, and compliant to the highest standards, like PCI, HIPAA, and SOC2

Getting the best-of-breed stack in place is easy: it’s open source and as-a-service. We provide the infrastructure to help you deliver the GenAI experiences that will set your business apart and redefine every industry.

I am extremely excited about what the future holds. When we separate the noise from the truly valuable aspects of generative AI, the outcome will be far beyond what we’ve ever imagined. People can be more productive, businesses can invest in new innovations, customers can enjoy better experiences, and we can all move society forward.

You can watch the replay of DataStax’s recent I Love AI event here, with insights from the brightest minds in the industry, including leaders from Google Cloud, Netflix, Capital One, Priceline, and Docker. 

About Chet Kapoor:

Chet is Chairman and CEO of DataStax. He is a proven leader and innovator in the tech industry with more than 20 years in leadership at innovative software and cloud companies, including Google, IBM, BEA Systems, WebMethods, and NeXT. As Chairman and CEO of Apigee, he led company-wide initiatives to build Apigee into a leading technology provider for digital business. Google (Apigee) is the cross-cloud API management platform that operates in a multi- and hybrid-cloud world. Chet successfully took Apigee public before the company was acquired by Google in 2016. Chet earned his B.S. in engineering from Arizona State University.