Episode

Ari Kaplan on Why AI Won't Save You But Data Intelligence Will

Ari Kaplan—Global Head of Evangelism at Databricks and a pioneer in sports analytics—explains why businesses fixated on AI often overlook the real advantage: making better decisions with their own data. He shares lessons from his work building analytics teams for Major League Baseball, advising McLaren’s F1 strategy, and helping companies apply AI where it actually works—without falling into hype-driven traps.

February 12, 2025

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Guest

Ari Kaplan

Databricks

Ari is Databrick's Global Head of Evangelism, and a leading influencer in data and AI. “The Real Moneyball guy”, he innovated Major League Baseball while creating the Cubs, Dodgers, and Orioles analytics departments. He is coauthor of “The Data Intelligence Platform for Dummies”, a DataIQ “Top 20 Influencer in AI” 2024, co-host of the popular “Live from the Lakehouse” show, and was President of the worldwide Oracle users group (22,000 members) when Oracle acquired MySQL, Java, and Peoplesoft. Before Databricks, he traveled the world with McLaren Formula 1, assisting the racing strategy team to bring AI models to production. He is also President of the Independent Investigation into the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg, Sweden's humanitarian hero, leveraging data analytics to find missing prisoners. He co-authored "Data Intelligence Platform for Dummies" book, and Caltech awarded him as an "Alumni of the Decade", DataIQ as "Top 20 AI Influencer 2024" and IBM as "Data Science Celebrity".

HOST

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Delphina

Hugo Bowne-Anderson is an independent data and AI consultant with extensive experience in the tech industry. He is the host of the industry podcast Vanishing Gradients, a podcast exploring developments in data science and AI. Previously, Hugo served as Head of Developer Relations at Outerbounds and held roles at Coiled and DataCamp, where his work in data science education reached over 3 million learners. He has taught at Yale University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and conferences like SciPy and PyCon, and is a passionate advocate for democratizing data skills and open-source tools.

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Key Quotes

Key Takeaways

1. Baseball Changed Its Rules Because of Data—Most Businesses Still Ignore It
Defensive shifts in MLB went from 3% to over 50% of plays, forcing the league to ban the strategy entirely. The Cubs didn’t get better players—they just used better data. This kind of shift is possible in every industry, but most companies still aren’t taking full advantage of their own data.

2. AI Models Are a Commodity—Your Data Pipeline Isn’t
Every company has access to the same foundation models, yet many believe AI will give them a unique edge. The real differentiator is how well companies organize and extract insights from their own data. Instead of chasing the latest GPT model, the real investment should be in data intelligence and infrastructure.

3. Most AI Teams Waste Time Chasing Models Instead of Fixing Data Retrieval
Businesses obsess over model upgrades, but Kaplan has seen companies get bigger performance gains from improving OCR, chunking strategies, and retrieval pipelines. AI success isn’t about having the best model—it’s about feeding models structured, high-signal data.

4. 2025 Won’t Be the Year of AI Agents—It’ll Be the Year We Watch Them Fail
Everyone is hyping up agentic AI systems, but most companies will struggle with failure modes, debugging, and business logic. Expect more hard lessons about why agents break than success stories. The real winners will be those who focus on reliability over raw automation.

5. Data Intelligence Will Automate Decision-Making—But You Still Need Humans to Stop Bad Calls
Kaplan worked on sports analytics systems that recommended lineup changes, but coaches still had to decide when to override the data. The same is true for AI in business—automation helps, but blindly trusting models leads to bad decisions. Keeping humans in the loop is essential for catching edge cases and strategic missteps.

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You can read the full transcript here.

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00:00 The Impact of Data on Baseball Strategy

00:45 Introduction to Ari Kaplan and His Work

01:10 Exploring AI vs. Data Intelligence

01:33 Sponsorship and Podcast Information

01:50 Ari Kaplan's Role at Databricks

02:56 The Evolution of Data and AI at Databricks

03:41 The Importance of Data Intelligence

06:37 Challenges and Metrics in AI and Data Science

15:15 Automation in Data Science and Machine Learning