ETR Insights presents an interview with the Head of Data Science for a large technology and business services enterprise that adopted generative AI early, though despite initial industry enthusiasm, there is a growing realization that generative AI cannot address deep-seated structural issues; there is a particular discrepancy between executive expectations and the actual capabilities of AI. This executive is skeptical of “prompt engineering” as a distinct discipline, seeing the skills as essentially those of a business analyst. They use both open-source models from OpenAI and select tools like Salesforce Einstein Analytics for specific use cases, within an otherwise generically unified Microsoft tech stack. Pinecone is praised for RAG, a quickly evolving but temperamental alternative to semantic search. Read on to learn more about why this firm still uses both Databricks and Snowflake; the coming disintermediation of ETL and data visualization vendors; and why companies still tend to favor managed solutions like Confluent over developing directly in Apache Kafka.
