Send us a text Data’s everywhere, but so often it feels… stuck. Joining us today is Jure Leskovec, Chief Scientist at Kumo and a Stanford Professor who's fundamentally reshaped how we understand networks—from Pinterest's recommendations to tracking the spread of disease. We’ll unpack why structured data is lagging behind the AI revolution, exploring how techniques like Graph Neural Networks are finally unlocking its potential, and how this all plays out in real-world applications

00:57 Meet Jure Leskovec02:31 Knowing When to Move On04:01 Academia versus Industry07:30 Learnings from Pinterest10:28 The Kumo Pitch17:57 The Secret Sauce25:51 Monetization27:12 Only the Enterprise?29:49 The Sandbox to Try Before Buy31:42 The Best Use Cases35:00 Summarizing37:38 Predicting AI40:15 What's True and No One Agrees41:19 Learning

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leskovec/ Website: https://kumo.ai/ Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

The structured data that powers business decisions is more complex than the sequences processed by traditional AI models. Enterprise databases with their interconnected tables of customers, products, and transactions form intricate graphs that contain valuable predictive signals. But how can we effectively extract insights from these complex relationships without extensive manual feature engineering? Graph transformers are revolutionizing this space by treating databases as networks and learning directly from raw data. What if you could build models in hours instead of months while achieving better accuracy? How might this technology change the role of data scientists, allowing them to focus on business impact rather than data preparation? Could this be the missing piece that brings the AI revolution to predictive modeling? Jure Leskovec is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Stanford AI Lab, the Machine Learning Group, and the Center for Research on Foundation Models. Previously, he served as Chief Scientist at Pinterest and held a research role at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. He is also a co-founder of Kumo.AI, a machine learning startup. Leskovec has contributed significantly to the development of Graph Neural Networks and co-authored PyG, a widely-used library in the field. Research from his lab has supported public health efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic and informed product development at companies including Facebook, Pinterest, Uber, YouTube, and Amazon. His work has received several recognitions, including the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2011), the Okawa Research Award (2012), the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2012), the Lagrange Prize (2015), and the ICDM Research Contributions Award (2019). His research spans social networks, machine learning, data mining, and computational biomedicine, with a focus on drug discovery. He has received 12 best paper awards and five 10-year Test of Time awards at leading academic conferences. In the episode, Richie and Jure explore the need for a foundation model for enterprise data, the limitations of current AI models in predictive tasks, the potential of graph transformers for business data, and the transformative impact of relational foundation models on machine learning workflows, and much more. Links Mentioned in the Show: Jure’s PublicationsKumo AIConnect with JureCourse - Transformer Models with PyTorchRelated Episode: High Performance Generative AI Applications with Ram Sriharsha, CTO at PineconeRewatch RADAR AI  New to DataCamp? Learn on the go using the DataCamp mobile appEmpower your business with world-class data and AI skills with DataCamp for business