 Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of Teradata Possible. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Streche. We're here in Florida. This is a three sort of session conference that Teradata hosts. There's been one in London, one in Singapore, and this is the final one of the year here in Orlando. Rob, what are you expecting? This is a really exciting place to be. Yeah, I think, again, what's going to be really exciting is to see a lot of the customers that are going to be joining us, a lot of the other analysts that we're bringing on as well, and a lot of the executives that are going to be able to talk about what is the next role of AI, what they're doing with data lakes, what they're doing with Data Lake House and Data Warehouse all under one real platform. And I think that we're going to get a really big exposure to what people thought of Teradata was not where they are today. And I think that's exciting. The innovation that we're going to get to see is really exciting. So you did a preview where you spoke with Teradata's CMO, Jacqueline Woods, who's a really impressive and cool person, and I encourage everyone at home to check out Rob's preview of the event. We're going to have her on later today. But she talked about how this conference really, the idea for the conference came out of coming of COVID and helping companies, companies realizing they need to reimagine, retool the way that their teams interact, the way that, frankly, everyone gets their job done. And so I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about what you heard from Jacqueline and what you make of it from an analyst's point of view. Yeah, I think what I'm excited to hear more about is how do you simplify data teams? How do you simplify the jobs of the data scientists? And I think that really a lot of what Teradata is aimed at is really bringing that knowledge that they have for making bulletproof systems for almost like 30 years at this point to this data lake, data warehouse, where it's been more of a, hey, here we go with open source. But there's also a lot that they're going to be talking about simplifying open source and open source communication between them being a commercial product and the open source you can use with them. And I think that's exciting because that bridges the gap with developers. And I think that's a big piece. I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are later on as we go through these discussions because I think it will change how people work in these events and how they're really tied together from a data team perspective as well. That's my jam, so I'm excited to get into that. But we all know at these conferences there's what happens on the main stage and in these sessions, but really why people come is for the hallway conversation. So who is attending here? I know that you've got some analysts buddies, but there's plenty of customers, plenty of Teradata executives, of course. What, who's here and what is the chatter about? So I think what's interesting is the others that are out there in this space have so much marketing and so much hype. And I think there's been a real, hey, we're here to see why Teradata is still important. And I think those hallway conversations range like you said from customers to financial analysts all the way to people who are here with Teradata themselves. And there's actually a lot of excitement about how they're really innovating. And I think that's really the main theme that people have come for is to understand the innovation and how Teradata takes that forward. Well, I mean, a lot of it, I mean, obviously marketing is a huge part of this. And you talked to Jacqueline Woods and we're going to have her on later today. But the tagline here is fueling the future. And you see fuel, that word fuel all over the place. And I mean, sometimes you're just looking at marketing, come on, but I mean, but it actually does really feel like this is where we're going. This is the fuel of what is going to take us forward. Yeah, I think, you know, it's an overstated, you know, data's the new oil. I hate that term as well, but it is the fuel of all of these systems, all of AI, all of being able to do analytics, being able to build recommendations engines for your, you know, your e-commerce site, being able to better service your customers. And I think that a lot of the innovation, and I think we'll have Hillary Ashton on, who's their Chief Product Officer later on today too. And I'm really excited to hear how they bring that all together as well. Yeah, well, you mentioned AI. And AI is of course dominating our national conversations, of course dominating conversations here. We're going to hear a lot about the potential, but also the peril, because I think that while there is so much excitement, and while executives by and large research shows that they are very excited and bullish about the future that AI will have on their products and services, on their workforces, there's also a lot of concern and even fear about data privacy, data security, compliance. What do you think we're going to hear more about today? I think how you make AI accessible. I think it's accessibility. It's how you make it easier for the developers. It's how you really bring this all together and how you know that my data team can execute on this. There was some post put out about, you know, Chief AI Officers and another CXO role. I'm like, my head is going to explode. I mean, we have Chief Data Officers, Chief AI Officers, Chief This, Chief That. I'm like, okay, we have a lot of Chiefs and not enough people actually doing the work. And I think this is going to be an interesting turning point if you can make that a lot easier so that you don't, you can bring the skill sets up and up skill people through the tooling. I think that's what I'm excited to hear about this week as well is Teradata has been there trying to make it simple for years. How do they now take that to the next level with this new set of business objectives that their clients are having? Right, I mean, and that's what point that Jacqueline Woods made when she spoke to you last week is that this has really exploded in the public imagination now, but you know, for the last seven or eight months, but we've been working on this for years and this is our wheelhouse people. Absolutely, and I think, I mean, those of us who've been doing this for a while, AI is not new. Generative AI and how it's applied is definitely new. Large language models and how fast they are is new, but really where are you going to use it and what's the ROI, you can capture out of that. And I think some of the discussions we get to have this week or today is really going to be around, how do you get the ROI out of that Teradata system? What is the business case? What's the use cases that people are solving for and how is that innovation really helping them? So return on investment, this is something that keeps executives up at night all for millennia, but what is, what do you think that's going to become of that? Because I mean, AI is real, it's here, but it's also nebulous. So how do you think executives should be thinking about the return on investment? I think they have to, you know, business case back, customer back, and really understand what are they building it for? You know, why are you building AI? Because AI, for AI's sake, is just dumb. And like, I hate to say it so bluntly, but going and building yourself a large language model and think you're going to compete against ChatGPT or one of these, or Bard or one of these others, that's absolutely insane. And I think that what you need to be focused on is, hey, do I need to upskill? And I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, is hey, I've built this for my CFO organization so that when I bring on new accountants, they understand our terminology, they can ask questions in self-service so that they can get up to speed on what it means to be an accountant in the CFO's office at company acts versus how long it takes them to get up. I think that's a perfect business case where you can upskill and build out your training that may take somebody's learning curve from three months down to three weeks or something like that of coming into a new organization. So I'm really excited about that type of stuff. And it could really help anyone at any stage of their career too. Because I mean, what you just painted was something that could really help someone who's new to the organization maybe early in their career, but it could also help the more seasoned veteran workers too. Yeah, and I think again, you look at it from HR to financials to customer success or customer service, there's a lot of different places that you can go with this to make it applicable. And I think that's where, again, making it easy to go and do these, not so large language models or SLM segmented language models so that you have them very specific to your company's data internally to you so it's not bleeding out into the models and retraining models but that you're the security around it and being sure that it's segmented for that actual business case. But then of course we get back into the security and the compliance issues that are the big concerns. Yeah, I mean that's top of mind and I think we'll dig in there definitely today with some of the guests that we have on. So much to unpack and dig into. I'm excited for the day, Rob. I am too, this is going to be a lot of fun. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Teradata Possible.