Danone, a leading global food and beverage company, has adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to serve as its core data intelligence foundation for analytics and AI, democratising data access for all employees while ensuring high data quality and governance.
The global food and beverage company serves millions of customers daily with products sold in over 120 markets and across three key categories - essential dairy & plant-based products, waters and specialised nutrition. Prior to working with Databricks, Danone already had a global data platform in place. However, the company saw opportunities to improve data efficiency, optimise platform costs, integrate systems and enhance standardisation.
Building a future-ready Data and AI platform on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
Danone will modernise its data infrastructure by leveraging the full capabilities of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform alongside its partner ecosystem, to create a new scalable and future-ready foundation for data and AI-driven services called ‘OneSource 2.0’.
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform democratises access to analytics and intelligent applications by marrying customers’ data with powerful AI models tuned to the unique characteristics of their business. The Data Intelligence Platform is built on a lakehouse foundation of open data formats and open governance to ensure that all data is completely within the customers’ control.
“Global businesses like Danone are looking for smarter, faster, more reliable ways to translate their data into strategic advantage. We are thrilled that Danone has adopted the full capabilities of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to overcome a number of the challenges facing many large businesses today - how to gain true value from data and AI, scale it across the organisation and ensure that governance is embedded into everything that they do. This is what will enable organisations such as Danone to stay agile and competitive in today’s fast-moving AI market,” said Samuel Bonamigo, SVP and GM, EMEA, Databricks.
Enhanced productivity, user experience and robust data governance underpinned by data intelligence
OneSource 2.0 will empower Danone employees with central and local insights and is expected to reduce ‘data-to-decision’ time (the time it takes to analyse data to make tangible business decisions) by up to 30% - helping the company react faster to market changes.
The other expected benefits of OneSource 2.0, built by Danone’s global data and analytics team on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, include:
Enhanced productivity and cost savings: Less time is expected to be spent on debugging and fixing data issues, alongside an anticipated reduction in running costs. Furthermore, its data ingestion pipeline delivery times are expected to decrease from around 2 weeks to 1 day.
Innovation and superior user experience: By leveraging Unity Catalog, the industry’s only unified and open governance solution for data and AI, and AI/BI Genie, a feature within Databricks that leverages generative AI to help business teams interact with their data using natural language, a ‘Talk to Your Data’ chatbot is being built for streamlined data discovery and analysis which is expected to see reduced reliance on the IT teams for non-technical users.
An ‘AI-ready’ platform to get AI prototypes validated and into production: ‘Out of the box’ AI capabilities for rapid experimentation with high-quality governed data will be created.
Robust data governance: With Unity Catalog, valuable insights will be shared across the company safely and securely. Automated data validation and cleansing to improve data accuracy is expected to increase by potentially 95% with traceable, error-free data.
“Tools such as Unity Catalog are game-changing for us as robust data governance becomes more paramount. It will provide our global data and analytics team with the ability to seamlessly govern both structured and unstructured data in any format, as well as govern documents and monitor quality” said Jean Calvin Kuemkong, Global Data & Analytics Platform Operations Director, Danone. “Access to high-quality, governed data will ensure agility and drive greater efficiencies for our team.”
“At Danone, we understand the importance of data and AI and its potential to transform multiple areas of the company” said Dee Fitzgerald, Vice President, Data and Analytics, Danone. “That is why we are embarking on this exciting new chapter with Databricks to unlock fresh opportunities with our data platform. We are excited to leverage the great capabilities of the Databricks nce Platform for future growth and innovation.”
