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I was chatting with a friend of mine about the advent of robotic surgery and he was lamenting the challenges associated with training younger doctors. Before robotic surgery, medical surgeons stood shoulder to shoulder alongside seasoned surgeons operating. Today, the head surgeon manipulates a robot independently while students watch through a window or video.

A lot has been written about training AI. But what about training humans?

Shouldn’t the same pattern reverberate through the work that we expect the next generation of AI to automate, including paralegal functions, accounting, computer programming, and sales development?

Databricks revealed some sensational growth this week, as they did last year. Exiting this quarter to $2.4 billion annual run rate, the company’s revenue growth is accelerated year-over-year by 10 percentage points.

Net dollar retention is a major driver of growth at 140%, which is top decile. The table above shows the other data points that we’ve collected through their press releases in the last two years.

What stood out to me in yesterday’s Apple announcement wasn’t the headline, but the subtitle.

“Setting a new standard in privacy.”

For privacy to become one of the leading selling points of software, competitive dynamics & user preferences have evolved.

The mantra repeated over the last 20 years on the internet has been privacy is dead. Users simply don’t care. People are willing to trade their privacy for free & targeted experiences.

One line of software can impact a billion rows of data.

A short SQL statement can delete a table, reformat date into the US format, or compute the average quota attainment by account executive by region over a company’s history.

As data has become a critical component of analytics & production systems, data engineers require more sophisticated tools to manage their data transformations.

Last week, public software markets suffered significant compression. MongoDB fell 24%; UIPath fell 36% ; Salesforce fell 15% ; Workday was down 11%.

Weaker revenue projections tend to cause sell-offs.

These large drops aren’t unprecedented. In 2016, valuations fell 57%. Is it different this time?

Growth rates have changed meaningfully. The 25th, 50th, & 75th percentiles for public growth rates have halved in the last 18-24 months. The grey bar indicates Covid ending & marks the beginning of the slide.

If I asked you, “When someone turns in a work assignment, how accurate is it? 80%, 90%, 95% or perhaps 100%?”

We don’t think this way about coworkers’ spreadsheets. But we will probably think this way about AI & this will very likely change the way product managers on-board users.

When was the last time you signed up for a SaaS & wondered : Would the data be accurate? Would the database corrupt my data? Would the report be correct?

NVIDIA’s growth is an index on the growth of AI. “Compute revenue grew more than 5x and networking revenue more than 3x from last year.”

Data center revenue totaled $26b, with about 45% from the major clouds ($13b). These clouds announced they were spending $40b in capex to build out data centers, implying NVIDIA is capturing very roughly 33% of the total capex budgets for their cloud customers.

“Large cloud providers continue to drive strong growth as they deploy and ramp NVIDIA AI infrastructure at scale and represented the mid-40s as a percentage of our Data Center revenue.”

For the past few days, I’ve been using the Mac ChatGPT app OpenAI demonstrated last Monday.

It’s unquestionably the future of human-computer interaction. Conversing with a computer is much more natural than typing. Imagine speaking t a colleague with the entire internet at their disposal. But also a verbose colleague without much sense of social cues.

Tapping a keyboard shortcut, the ChatGPT app loads & four little bars reminiscent of Google transcription software appear in the app. You can choose from 5 mellifluous voices who speak fluidly & naturally.

Ramp published its quarterly spending trends & revealed how businesses are spending on AI. There are many great data points that underscore the growth in AI but there are important nuances in the patterns.

First, AI growth rates across the most popular vendors have fallen 78% annually. On average, these AI businesses are growing customer counts 105% ; the median is 38%.¹

On Thursday May 30th at 9:30 Pacific time, Office Hours will host Benn Stancil.

Benn co-founded Mode, a analytics platform acquired by ThoughtSpot. He writes about the future of data & analytics on his blog & asks deep questions about core tenets of software including Do software companies actually have good margins? & Disband the analytics team.

With a unique lens on data & software, Benn will share his views on some of these bigger topics including BI’s third form.