Databricks Customer Success: AI Transformation in Telco and Manufacturing

Summary

Nokia, SBA Communications, and TK Elevator share how they are breaking down data silos and harmonizing legacy data environments onto unified lakehouse architectures using the Databricks Data and AI platform.
Nokia's chief data and analytics architect describes using Databricks to harmonize what he characterized as thousands of separate databases and data lakes into a unified foundation, central to Nokia's five-year data and analytics strategy.
This video shows how Databricks Genie enables self-service analytics and conversational business intelligence, extending data access beyond technical teams to business stakeholders across telecommunications, infrastructure, and technology sectors.

Databricks Customer Success: AI Transformation in Telco and Manufacturing

Enterprise organizations face persistent challenges unifying fragmented data systems and enabling teams to leverage AI for competitive advantage. This panel brings together customer leaders from Nokia, SBA Communications, and TK Elevator, companies transforming their data and AI foundations using Databricks and Genie. Hear how these customers break down data silos, implement conversational AI, and drive business adoption across their organizations.
Discover how organizations implement Genie for self-service analytics and business intelligence, harmonize legacy data environments into unified lakehouse architectures, leverage ontology and metadata management for better governance, and accelerate adoption beyond technical teams to business stakeholders. These real-world success stories demonstrate practical approaches to enterprise data modernization and AI deployment across telecommunications, infrastructure, and technology sectors.
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Chapters

FAQs

How is Nokia using Databricks to unify its data infrastructure?

Nokia's chief data and analytics architect Nuno Ribeiro describes using Databricks to harmonize what he called thousands of databases and data lakes into a unified foundation, following defined best practices and rules to make data easier to consume. Databricks is a core piece of Nokia's five-year data and analytics strategy.

What is Databricks Genie and how are enterprise customers using it for business intelligence?

Databricks Genie is a conversational AI capability that allows business users to query data using natural language without needing SQL skills or reliance on technical teams. This video shows how enterprises like Nokia and SBA Communications are implementing Genie as a self-service analytics portal to extend data access beyond technical teams to business stakeholders.

Which industries are featured in this customer success panel?

This video features customer leaders from Nokia in telecommunications, SBA Communications in communications infrastructure, and TK Elevator in the vertical mobility and manufacturing sector. All three organizations discuss their journeys using the Databricks Data and AI platform to modernize data infrastructure and deploy conversational AI.

What role does ontology and metadata management play in enterprise AI deployments?

The panel discusses how ontology and metadata management are critical for enabling AI systems to understand business context and ensure governance across large, decentralized data environments. Establishing rich metadata and a shared business vocabulary helps ensure that agents and analytics tools produce accurate, trustworthy results for business stakeholders.

Full transcript

[00:21] Welcome back to the Summit Live studio. I'm Adam Crown and I lead industry marketing at Databricks for healthcare and life sciences. I've had such an incredible opportunity to be able to bring industry segments to the show and I couldn't be more excited to introduce
[00:36] an incredible customer, Nuno Ribeiro. He's the chief data and analytics architect at Nokia and we're going to talk a little bit about the work that they're doing to transform the organization both inside and out. So, Nuno, welcome. It's so great to officially see you. Thank you for being here. First and foremost, I flew in from
[00:53] Kansas City. You came a little bit further. Where'd you come from? From Portugal, Lisbon. Awesome. And thank you for having here. Welcome. Exciting times for you, Databricks, and also for Nokia. So, really nice to be here. Yeah, thank you for being here. And so, you do a lot of really incredible things
[01:08] at Nokia. Tell us about your role. Okay, so I'm leading the enterprise architecture at Nokia for data and analytics. I've been championing Databricks overall at at Nokia and trying to define the strategy where we want to be in 5 years and how we are
[01:24] going to evolve our architecture on the data and analytics and Databricks is a core piece of that strategy, for sure. Incredible. You know, I get a chance to work with a lot of customers across the industry and the common thing that I hear, agents, conversational AI, even
[01:40] traditional dashboards, it requires bringing all of the data together in a single foundation. So, when you think about that challenge, the work that you're doing at Nokia, how do you bring everything together, both the technology as well as the teams? Yeah, well, you know, Finland is known by having 1,000 lakes, like and I think
[01:58] historically Nokia followed the same approach 1,000 databases and data lakes and so on. We are trying to break that and we are trying to harmonize everything together and Databricks is allowing us to to do that. So, we are defining a few rules, best practices, trying to harmonize
[02:14] everything together and put the data easier to be consumed and that's how Databricks is helping us. So, modernizing the legacy, building the new things and the exciting times will come. That's incredible. Now, Databricks Data and AI Summit, so much happening here, a
[02:29] lot of energy, a lot of announcements as well, right? So, what is the most surprising thing that you've discovered using Databricks at Nokia cuz you've been doing this now for a few years, right? Yeah, indeed. So, everyone talks about Genie, very important. Um, I think
[02:46] together with Genie, uh, we are seeing a um, an important move at Databricks. So, we are moving away from just being focused on technical teams to also to business teams and this is what is helping us also to grow internally at Nokia with Databricks. The business teams are seeing the how powerful
[03:01] Databricks is, how important important it is and they are now embracing this technology. That's incredible. So, when you think about how you look at the market and how you both, uh, think about your customer 360 as well as helping your teams be more successful, how are you thinking about
[03:18] Databricks helping support the pre-sales process at Nokia today? Yeah, actually that was one of our most important projects we we we are Salesforce um, shop. So, we had our analytics mainly focused on Salesforce and we decided to
[03:34] use Databricks to to create a 360 view over sales and pre-sales and our lakehouse is following that approach and we have a bunch of reports and a data model built on that and everyone is using it,
[03:49] everyone is happy about it and it's very important to keep that in mind because opportunities are around the corner, right? That's incredible. So, there's so much potential in the future around data analytics and AI. What future do you see with Databricks and Nokia?
[04:05] So, like I said, since now the business is much more related with the technology, I do see that it can grow a lot at uh Nokia. So, the we're going to get business asking for the technology. We don't need to push them to use it or to explain the
[04:21] whys. They will come natural to us and I think that is very important. Of course, Genie is the the answer for everything. We are going to move away from the traditional dashboards. People just ask. They are already used to get the the mobile going to ChatGPT or something and
[04:36] ask a question. They can now do it the same with Genie and Databricks and know about their data. So, that that is promising. Love that. I love that. So, we have an awesome program here over the next 3 days. Hopefully, you can take advantage of it and take a few things back heading back to Portugal. My last
[04:53] question for you is, what are you excited to hear about here at Data and AI Summit? So, know more about Genie and the potentials that Genie has to offer. Um it's changing a lot from the last year or so. Now, I think they are making
[05:08] a little bit more understandable for the common user to know how to use it and to be more affordable for us and that's what I want to listen. How can we fully embrace that's uh feature from Databricks. Awesome. Well, you've got two more days
[05:23] of many sessions, many connections to make. You know, thank you. It's been so great getting a chance to talk with you and enjoy the rest of your week. Thank you and thank you for having me here. Absolutely. Thank you. Bye-bye. Awesome. Well, I've got an opportunity to bring on one more customer. Felix Perez is from
[05:40] uh SBA Communications. He's the executive director for data analytics and AI at the organization and we're going to spend the next few minutes talking about what he's seen from a data and AI perspective at his organization. So, welcome. Really appreciate you being here. Oh, it's a pleasure. Tell us a little bit more about you,
[05:56] your role, and a little bit more about SBA Communications. Okay, so at SBA Communications, I am the executive director of data analytics and AI. That's a pretty broad umbrella. So, I do everything from the data warehousing to the analytics, obviously, and the AI. And AI for us has really
[06:13] been a little bit of a journey that we've accelerated very quickly recently. One other thing that I do, too, um unrelated to all that is is robotic process automation. So, I'm I'm really more on the transformational side of the of the department. Okay, awesome. So, when I think about a lot of the challenges in the data and AI
[06:30] space today, it's being able to actually bring all of the data together. So, when you thought about some of the challenges at SBA Communications previously, what data fragmentation or challenges did you see around data access? So, our biggest problem that we had is when our company started, there was
[06:47] really no off-the-shelf solution we could buy for SBA to run the organization. So, we had to develop a lot of our systems ourselves. And through that development, because of the speed and rate at which we had to deliver to the users, there were very few constraints on the front end. So, you have data being put into fields
[07:03] where it doesn't belong, and you have a lot of data quality issues. So, that's always been a challenge for us, and a lot of those challenges have been addressed through reporting and and uh just just a lot of a lot of support. What Databricks and Genie has done for us has helped us to accelerate our
[07:20] process by just giving the relevant data that's needed into the places that it belongs when people are asking the questions. I've seen so many people have the aha moment when it came to Genie. It's now allowing them to talk to their data in a way they just couldn't before.
[07:35] Exactly. So, were you when you think about some of the really exciting use cases that are getting unlocked, maybe talk a a bit more about what you're seeing there. Okay, so for us where where Genie is really transformative for us is that it is more than just a chatbot, it is more than
[07:51] just analytics. We've turned this into a portal. We have turned this into an a BI AI portal that marries data from our geospatial data to our transactional systems to our um to to statistical information to
[08:08] contract data. All of that comes together and that's been a big opportunity for us and that's that's where I was talking about that transformational part. Is for us a use case is we get a lot of ad hoc questions and those ad hoc questions would take days and teams of people to answer. We
[08:24] can get those answers in seconds now. It's incredible. So, technology is important but we always talk about the people in the process that go along with it. You've got to bring along the organization through this new technology. So, a lot of folks are learning about Genie. What would you impart on them when you think
[08:40] about not just the technology but the people in the process? Oh, yeah. So, you have to understand the business process. So, that's that's really the the key part of it. One of the things that you guys are are just releasing now is ontology. Ontology is a big thing for us because we have a lot of you know, if
[08:57] if if we we we break our business down, we're we're a a um telecommunications infrastructure company. So, everything is site-based and in those sites, you have a lot of different contracts and those contracts are broken up. You may have a master lease agreement, you have leases, you
[09:12] have you have amendments, you have all of that. That ontology that that metadata ontology is is key to everything because you can ask a question and it you have to have the full picture of all that. And that's one of the values that Genie has brought to us in Databricks as specifically because that was one of our
[09:28] biggest challenges that we've had. Awesome. So, what excites you most next about Genie? We're doing a ton of innovation in this space but you talked about ontology, that's clearly a really important aspect for SBA Communications. What else are you seeing and excited about? Well, what excites me the most,
[09:44] honestly, about Databricks is the answer is almost always, to date, has been yes. Can you do this? Yes. Can I add A and B plus three plus four? Yes. Can I now link my maps with my coverage
[10:00] and my customers and my competitors and can I get all of that in there? Sure. How long's it going to take? Couple of days. Give me a few months. Hold on. How does this look? Wow. So, that's kind of the responses we've been getting and that keeps me excited in this. That's incredible. Well, Felix, thank
[10:15] you for sharing your story. I really appreciate you coming all the way from Florida. I know we were talking a little bit before this. Yeah. Hopefully, you can enjoy the rest of the show and I learned so much from your story here. Oh, well, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. And thank you for this opportunity. Absolutely. Thank you, Felix. you. Well, we had an opportunity earlier to
[10:31] talk with one more organization, TK Elevator. You're going to hear from them next. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate it. Welcome to the Summit Live studio here at Data and AI Summit 2026. I'm incredibly thrilled to be back. I was here last year. I'm Adam Crown. I lead
[10:47] industry marketing for healthcare and life sciences here at Databricks. I've got responsibility for our overall industry and solutions experience. And what I'm incredibly excited about for this year, we're bringing back the Summit Live industry segment where we've got incredible customers talking about
[11:02] some of the great work that they're doing with Data and AI across every single industry. So, when I think about this show, we're incredibly fortunate to have organizations that are using Data and AI to drive transformation in their business. And we think that every single
[11:18] attendee here at Data and AI Summit comes from an industry. So, we brought 12 focused industries and solutions to the show. We have a program from Tuesday to Thursday. Whether you want to talk with our teams around Genie and conversational AI, dive deeper into the
[11:33] solution, come check out our expo hall. Also, we've got forums running Tuesday and Wednesday. So many different ways to be able to get engaged, but why we're here today, I'm incredibly excited to introduce Christian Jung. He's the head of global digital, data and AI
[11:49] foundation at TK Elevator. So Christian, welcome to the segment. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate it. Tell us more about who you are, your role, and a little bit more about your organization. So I'm with TK Elevator or short TKE now for about 10 years.
[12:04] Um TK Elevator, we see ourselves as a vertical mobility um provider. Um we and service elevators. We move around uh 1.5 billion billion people per day um and manage around 1.4 million
[12:21] elevators worldwide through 400 branches. So that's what we do. It's incredible. So tremendous amount of scope and scale. In fact, like a building like Moscone here, there's so many floors to get to. Everybody uses an elevator, but you don't quite think about all of the things that go into
[12:37] what it means to keep it up and running. And when we think about data and AI, it probably plays such a central role in helping that. So you've spent a decade in this industry. You've seen a tremendous amount of digital transformation. Tell us a little bit about the digital journey at TK Elevator and how that's evolved over the last 10
[12:52] years. So as you said, it started about 10 years ago where we connected elevators to the cloud and through that collected telemetry data and use that for predictive maintenance to guide our service technicians to do better maintenance and keep the equipment running. So that's that's essentially
[13:08] what it is. We then started to use Data Bricks as of like 2018 and then evolved with Data Bricks. So with every new challenge that we had doing data and later on AI, actually Data Data Bricks features
[13:23] helped us to to counter these challenges. So you've been customer of Databricks for a long time. You've seen the transformation. You've seen the journey. This is one of the biggest data and AI summits that we've had in history. I think you had mentioned this is your first time coming here to the show.
[13:39] First time here, yes. What do you think so far? Well, it's it has been really great. As I said, we we started and we we leverage things from it started really with Spark. And as Ali said today here as well, Spark was the first thing, but it didn't stop there. Then you added things like Unity Catalog, understanding your data estate, and later on now it all
[13:57] goes towards the Gen AI and it's all about semantics. These were also the challenges that we had, making making this work for for our people. So, it's it's exactly addressing what we need. And also in particular the the the new announcements that that have been made
[14:13] really go in that direction. So, ontologies, that was a part that that what we have been missing, but it's now being addressed and we're super excited about that. And the other thing is conversational agents, right? So, we really looked at our business and looked at, okay, what has been missing up until
[14:29] like two or three years ago and then looked at how can Gen AI and other things help to add complimentary things there. And and there's two things that I would name. And it's one, it's document intelligence and the other thing is conversational agents that our people can interact
[14:45] with. And that's exactly where Databricks is also headed and that that's what we're super excited about. That's incredible. Well, we really appreciate you be being here at Data and AI Summit this year for this segment. It was great talking to you and learning a little bit more about what you all are doing with Data and AI, and hopefully you'll be able to take advantage of the
[15:01] rest of the week and all the exciting announcements that we've got going on. Looking forward to it. Thanks. Thank you. Really appreciate it, Christian. Thank you.

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