Facilitating access to data for better use: ENGIE X Dataiku @ Viva Technology 2022

Can you introduce Dataiku in a few words?

Dataiku is a French software publisher that allows all profiles, regardless of their skills or their role in the company, to very easily use all of their data to start or accelerate data projects. This solution quickly integrates into all technological environments and allows to keep control of what is done on the platform by establishing governance rules in compliance with GDPR regulations.

The platform makes it possible to take advantage of the data generated in the company, from its collection to the creation of dashboards or the operational monitoring of machine learning models.

We have 500 customers all over the world, including very large groups in France such as Orange, CMA CGM or Schlumberger, meaning hundreds of thousands of Dataiku users, with profiles ranging from data scientist to no-code business analyst! It is therefore an opportunity for businesses to take part in data projects, to provide their inputs and knowledge without having to code.

Created in 2013, Dataiku now has 1,200 employees spread all over the world. Although Dataiku's headquarters are now in New York, its DNA and R&D are purely French!

What are you going to show at Viva Technology?

At Vivatech, where we are lucky enough to be hosted on the ENGIE stand, we will show how Dataiku can be used by a very wide range of people for very different use cases.

We will also present the use cases developed with ENGIE, which are excellent testimony to the value that can be generated thanks to Dataiku. These examples illustrate how, on a daily basis and within the company, extremely varied profiles can be acculturated to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

How is your solution innovative?

We live surrounded by ever more algorithms and AI, and it is for us an important social issue to be able to integrate and use them in a professional setting with a lot of transparency and support for the tool on the understanding of these algorithms.

Our tool is suitable for all profiles and allows hundreds of people to be acculturated to the use of data and AI on a daily basis. This approach is innovative because it takes the opposite view of the idea that data science is reserved for data scientists.

The founders of Dataiku wanted to create a solution that allows business, data scientists and IT to work together on projects. Businesses generally know their data very well but are not used to processing it other than through Excel tables. At the same time, data scientists sometimes have to perform unrewarding tasks like cleaning data or unifying date formats.

Finally, involving IT teams from the start of projects makes it possible to secure the impact of data projects in the organization, when 85% of data projects are not put into production. Dataiku provides an environment joined to that of Design which makes it possible to find all the components necessary for monitoring projects while avoiding complexity. In short, it means offering all talents the opportunity to carry out, contribute to and benefit from data projects.

It is essential for us to keep the human being at the center of our tool: we do not want to be a black box, we allow to know who does what in the platform, how such a decision was taken, to have an exhaustive understanding of the data. We are working a lot on the explainability of AI. AI must be an asset that can be trusted over time.

What do you expect from Vivatech?

I would say that we expect a lot of meetings! Whether they work in the data sector or not, we want to better understand all industries, their daily challenges, what data they would like to use, their successes or failures.

Dataiku enjoys a good reputation in France, but of course we want to develop this visibility and always make the company better known all over the world. We plan to build on what we have been doing with ENGIE for 3 years now to show how we allow teams to save time, money and reduce their risks.

And of course, we are open to the whole data ecosystem with which we are used to working.

How do you see the company in 10 years?

Our ambition is of course for Dataiku to be a leader in the democratization of access to data. That each employee who uses data can use our tool to make decisions more quickly and better exploit their data.

We want to ensure that in 10 years, data will no longer be reserved for experts.