Is there a conference on the face of the planet that isn’t talking about AI right now?
This is, of course, a rhetorical question — and as AI becomes pervasive, there seems to be a growing appetite for practitioners to go beyond the abstract to explore the real-life use cases and applications that have reliably made it to production in companies around the world. That was the topic in the air as hundreds of enterprise developers, architects and AI practitioners gathered at the iconic Chase Center on a bright and beautiful day last week in San Francisco at SingleStore Now, our annual AI conference.
While last year’s event explored the possibilities of generative AI, this year moved firmly into the realities, led by a star-studded list of speakers from 6Sense, Adobe, Amazon, Groq, IBM, LiveRamp, LlamaIndex, Outreach, Pyler, SAS, Snowflake and of course, SingleStore. The keynotes, fireside chats, use cases and demos all centered on one topic: how to assemble the foundation, data and platform you need to make AI succeed at enterprise scale.
A common theme from every speaker was the need to think ahead and proactively plan for the needs of the AI era. “Steve Jobs once said that you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only do so looking backwards,” said SingleStore CEO Raj Verma. “And that takes future-proofing, which is why SingleStore is so focused on ensuring you can work with any and all data types with speed, simplicity and scale.”
Watch these blogs for more insights from Raj later this week, when he’ll recap his keynote and explain why he thinks simplicity is the ultimate in elegance as well as the ultimate enabler for the future of AI.
Raj’s talk was followed by announcements on what’s new at SingleStore, including new platform features like scheduled jobs, cloud functions, GPU notebooks and dash apps, and recent integrations like our partnership with Snowflake.
But perhaps the biggest news was the announcement of SingleStore’s acquisition of Australia-based data integration platform, BryteFlow. By integrating BryteFlow’s capabilities into our core product to complement our existing functionality, we’re creating an experience known as SingleConnect.
The vision behind SingleConnect is that you can just point and click to a source you want to bring in data for real-time analytics — be it any data platform or now large applications like CRM, ERP and contact centers. It means with a click of a button, you can move your data into SingleStore.
After the morning sessions, guests gathered for lunch in the Modelo Lounge overlooking the home of the Golden State Warriors, with SingleStore messages lighting up every aspect of this massive space. In addition to being a highly impressive view, the SingleStore SQrL took a break from answering your SingleStore functionality questions, and was on hand for selfies.
In the afternoon,we moved into technical sessions, with real use cases from customers like Outreach and 6Sense who are building and scaling enterprise AI applications. To support Large Language Models (LLMs) in the open-socket world we’re heading into, our speakers stressed the need for context and data with relevancy, accuracy and near-zero latency. Groq helped us understand the infrastructure layer, while LlamaIndex discussed the framework used to create agents for advanced RAG capabilities. And LiveRamp demonstrated how they have built the world’s largest identity graph using SingleStore.
That’s not to mention everything we learned from our partners, IBM, AWS, Snowflake and SAS. By the end-of-day happy hour held on the veranda at Above the Rim, we’d earned our cocktails with friends.
As we look forward to next year — when we check in on Year 3 of the AI revolution — we’d like to thank our event co-sponsors AWS and Snowflake for helping us put on a day packed full of learning and mutual inspiration.
Want to experience what our attendees did? Go to singlestore.com/spaces to see many examples; just click on those notebooks to get started and follow along. You can also join our webinars, held several times a week. And finally, keep an eye out for videos and deep-dives into each session, features released and more.
