Each LLM has unique strengths and weaknesses, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Companies strive to balance cost reduction with maximizing the value of their use cases by considering various factors such as latency, multi-modality, API costs, user need, and prompt complexity. Model routing helps in optimizing performance and cost along with enhanced scalability and user satisfaction. Overview of cost-effective models training using AI gateway logs, user feedback, prompt, and model features to design an intelligent model-routing AI agent. Covers different strategies for model routing, deployment in Mosaic AI, re-training, and evaluation through A/B testing and end-to-end Databricks workflows. Additionally, it will delve into the details of training data collection, feature engineering, prompt formatting, custom loss functions, architectural modifications, addressing cold-start problems, query embedding generation and clustering through VectorDB, and RL policy-based exploration.

Your model is trained. Your pilot is live. Your data looks AI-ready. But for most teams, the toughest part of building successful AI starts after deployment. In this talk, Shane Murray and Ethan Post share lessons from the development of Monte Carlo’s Troubleshooting Agent – an AI assistant that helps users diagnose and fix data issues in production. They’ll unpack what it really takes to build and operate trustworthy AI systems in the real world, including: The Illusion of Done – Why deployment is just the beginning, and what breaks in production; Lessons from the Field – A behind-the-scenes look at the architecture, integration, and user experience of Monte Carlo’s agent; Operationalizing Reliability – How to evaluate AI performance, build the right team, and close the loop between users and model. Whether you're scaling RAG pipelines or running LLMs in production, you’ll leave with a playbook for building data and AI systems you—and your users—can trust.

Databricks announced two new features in 2024: AI/BI Dashboards and AI/BI Genie. Dashboards is a redesigned dashboarding experience for your regular reporting needs, while Genie provides a natural language experience for your last-mile analytics. In this session, Databricks Solutions Architect and content creator Youssef Mrini will present alongside Databricks MVP and content creator Josue A. Bogran on how you can get the most value from these tools for your organization. Content covered includes: Setup necessary, including Unity Catalog, permissions and compute Building out a dashboard with AI/BI Dashboards Creating and training an AI/BI Genie workspace to reliably deliver answers When to use Dashboards, Genie, and when to use other tools such as PBI, Tableau, Sigma, ChatGPT, etc. Fluff-free, full of practical tips, and geared to help you deliver immediate impact with these new Databricks capabilities.

This session is repeated. One of the biggest promises for LLM agents is automating all knowledge work over unstructured data — we call these "knowledge agents". To date, while there are fragmented tools around data connectors, storage and agent orchestration, AI engineers have trouble building and shipping production-grade agents beyond basic chatbots. In this session, we first outline the highest-value knowledge agent use cases we see being built and deployed at various enterprises. These are: Multi-step document research, Automated document extraction Report generation We then define the core architectural components around knowledge management and agent orchestration required to build these use cases. By the end you'll not only have an understanding of the core technical concepts, but also an appreciation of the ROI you can generate for end-users by shipping these use cases to production.

This session is repeated. For most companies, building compound AI systems remains aspirational. LLMs are powerful, but imperfect, and their non-deterministic nature makes steering them to high accuracy a challenge. In this session, we’ll demonstrate how to build compound AI systems using SLMs and highly accurate mini-agents that can be integrated into agentic workflows. You'll learn about breakthrough techniques, including: memory RAG, an embedding algorithm that reduces hallucinations using embed-time compute to generate contextual embeddings, improving indexing and retrieval, and memory tuning, a finetuning algorithm that reduces hallucinations using a Mixture of Memory Experts (MoME) to specialize models with proprietary data. We’ll also share real-world examples (text-to-SQL, factual reasoning, function calling, code analysis and more) across various industries. With these building blocks, we’ll demonstrate how to create high accuracy mini-agents that can be composed into larger AI systems.

The last year has seen the rapid progress of Open Source GenAI models and frameworks. This talk covers best practices for custom training and OSS GenAI finetuning on Databricks, powered by the newly announced Serverless GPU Compute. We’ll cover how to use Serverless GPU compute to power AI training/GenAI finetuning workloads and framework support for libraries like LLM Foundry, Composer, HuggingFace, and more. Lastly, we’ll cover how to leverage MLFlow and the Databricks Lakehouse to streamline the end to end development of these models. Key takeaways include: How Serverless GPU compute saves customers valuable developer time and overhead when dealing with GPU infrastructure Best practices for training custom deep learning models (forecasting, recommendation, personalization) and finetuning OSS GenAI Models on GPUs across the Databricks stack Leveraging distributed GPU training frameworks (e.g. Pytorch, Huggingface) on Databricks Streamlining the path to production for these models Join us to learn about the newly announced Serverless GPU Compute and the latest updates to GPU training and finetuning on Databricks!

This session is repeated. Measuring the effectiveness of domain-specific AI agents requires specialized evaluation frameworks that go beyond standard LLM benchmarks. This session explores methodologies for assessing agent quality across specialized knowledge domains, tailored workflows, and task-specific objectives. We'll demonstrate practical approaches to designing robust LLM judges that align with your business goals and provide meaningful insights into agent capabilities and limitations. Key session takeaways include: Tools for creating domain-relevant evaluation datasets and benchmarks that accurately reflect real-world use cases Approach for creating LLM judges to measure domain-specific metrics Strategies for interpreting those results to drive iterative improvement in agent performance Join us to learn how proper evaluation methodologies can transform your domain-specific agents from experimental tools to trusted enterprise solutions with measurable business value.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at understanding messy, real-world data, but integrating them into production systems remains challenging. Prompts can be unruly to write, vary by model and can be difficult to manage in the large context of a pipeline. In this session, we'll demonstrate incorporating LLMs into a geospatial conflation pipeline, using DSPy. We'll discuss how DSPy works under the covers and highlight the benefits it provides pipeline creators and managers.

We partnered with Databricks to pioneer a new standard in financial sector's enterprise AI, balancing rapid AI democratization with strict regulatory and security requirements. At the core is our Responsible AI Gateway, enforcing jailbreak prevention and compliance on every LLM query. Real-time observability, powered by Databricks, calculates risk and accuracy metrics, detecting issues before escalation. Leveraging Databricks' model hosting ensures scalable LLM access, fortifying security and efficiency. We built frameworks to democratize AI without compromising guardrails. Operating in a regulated environment, we showcase how Databricks enables democratization and responsible AI at scale, offering best practices for financial organizations to harness AI safely and efficiently.

A big challenge in LLM development and synthetic data generation is ensuring data quality and diversity. While data incorporating varied perspectives and reasoning traces consistently improves model performance, procuring such data remains impossible for most enterprises. Human-annotated data struggles to scale, while purely LLM-based generation often suffers from distribution clipping and low entropy. In a novel compound AI approach, we combine LLMs with probabilistic graphical models and other tools to generate synthetic personas grounded in real demographic statistics. The approach allows us to address major limitations in bias, licensing, and persona skew of existing methods. We release the first open-source dataset aligned with real-world distributions and show how enterprises can leverage it with Gretel Data Designer (now part of NVIDIA) to bring diversity and quality to model training on the Databricks platform, all while addressing model collapse and data provenance concerns head-on.

Explore how to build use case-specific data products designed to power everything from traditional BI dashboards to machine learning and LLM-enabled applications. Gain an understanding of what data products are and why they are essential for delivering AI-ready data that is integrated, timely, high-quality, secure, contextual, and easily consumable. Discover strategies for unlocking business data from source systems to enable analytics and AI use cases, with a deep dive into the three-tiered data product architecture: the Data Product Engineering Plane (where data engineers ingest, integrate, and transform data), the Data Product Management Plane (where teams manage the full lifecycle of data products), and the Data Product Marketplace Plane (where consumers search for and use data products). Discover how a flexible, composable data architecture can support organizations at any stage of their data journey and drive impactful business outcomes.

As data engineering continues to evolve the shift from batch-oriented to streaming-first has become standard across the enterprise. The reality is these changes have been taking shape for the past decade — we just now also happen to be standing on the precipice of true disruption through automation, the likes of which we could only dream about before. Yes, AI Agents and LLMs are already a large part of our daily lives, but we (as data engineers) are ultimately on the frontlines ensuring that the future of AI is powered by consistent, just-in-time data — and Delta Lake is critical to help us get there. This session will provide you with best practices learned the hard way by one of the authors of The Delta Lake Definitive Guide including: Guide to writing generic applications as components Workflow automation tips and tricks Tips and tricks for Delta clustering (liquid, z-order, and classic) Future facing: Leveraging metadata for agentic pipelines and workflow automation

This course provides participants with information and practical experience in building advanced LLM (Large Language Model) applications using multi-stage reasoning LLM chains and agents. In the initial section, participants will learn how to decompose a problem into its components and select the most suitable model for each step to enhance business use cases. Following this, participants will construct a multi-stage reasoning chain utilizing LangChain and HuggingFace transformers. Finally, participants will be introduced to agents and will design an autonomous agent using generative models on Databricks. Pre-requisites: Solid understanding of natural language processing (NLP) concepts, familiarity with prompt engineering and prompt engineering best practices, experience with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques including data preparation, building RAG architectures, and concepts like embeddings, vectors, and vector databases Labs: Yes Certification Path: Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate