Financial Services Industry Award: Barclays
Barclays has won the Data Intelligence Financial Services Industry Award, which recognizes organizations that leverage Databricks to drive transformative change within their industry.
Barclays, the global diversified bank, won for its adoption of a scalable and unified data platform that supports global trade analytics, complex data warehousing use cases and real-time insights. This platform delivers real-time streaming capabilities, native machine learning, generative AI capabilities and comprehensive governance. Databricks is a vital partner of Barclays on its mission to be as data-driven as possible.
Communications, Media, and Entertainment Industry Award: Frontier Communications
Frontier Communications has transformed from a legacy telephone company into the largest pure-play fiber internet provider in the country. At the start of its transformation, Frontier introduced a simple strategy: build fiber, sell fiber, improve customer service and streamline operations. In support of its strategy, Frontier adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to move faster, work smarter, and fuel innovation. With Databricks, Frontier centralized its data in a single, unified platform—known as a lakehouse—and enabled real-time insights across its business using AI, including generative AI. This work has driven impressive results:
Frontier streamlined pricing calculations for fiber installations from weeks to seconds. Frontier’s Business team now uses AI-driven prospect prioritization, resulting in a 20% increase in new logo sales and reduced onboarding time for account executives. Near real-time dashboards provide instant access to sales metrics and commissions data, accelerating revenue generation. In Wholesale, GenAI analyzes over 40,000 contracts to identify untapped revenue opportunities. Frontier’s Network and Customer Operations teams also use real-time performance data to improve service quality, driving higher NPS and reducing churn.
Frontier is committed to advancing its purpose of Building Gigabit America—connecting more people to its fiber technology and all the opportunities it offers. By modernizing its data infrastructure and empowering team members to make quick decisions with AI, Frontier is well-positioned to continue leading in fiber connectivity.
Health and Life Sciences Industry Award: Novo Nordisk
Novo Nordisk has developed FounData, a clinical data platform built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, to unlock the secondary use of data from its extensive portfolio of clinical trials. FounData democratizes access to billions of clinical data points, enabling scientists, medical experts, and analysts to efficiently explore, analyze, and collaborate on research. This environment supports faster identification of suitable patient populations for future trials, deeper insights into disease patterns, and more informed decision-making across the organization.
While FounData focuses on post-trial analysis, Novo Nordisk’s DataCore platform manages data during clinical trials, maintaining rigorous GxP compliance for data quality and security. Once trials conclude, data transitions seamlessly to FounData for further exploration and innovation. Integrating AI Agent Systems—specialized AI agents working together as “Co-Scientists”—enhances Novo Nordisk’s research by analyzing clinical data, consulting external resources, and providing comprehensive insights, all while keeping human expertise central.
By consolidating data and AI workflows on Databricks, Novo Nordisk has broken down silos and enabled secure, governed data sharing across business units and cloud environments. This ensures that the value generated in FounData and DataCore is not limited to development but can also be leveraged in Research and across the broader value chain. This unified approach accelerates the discovery of life-saving treatments, enhances collaboration, and advances Novo Nordisk’s mission to improve patient outcomes through data-driven innovation.
Manufacturing and Automotive Industry Award: The Friedkin Group
The Friedkin Group is a privately held consortium of leading companies operating across the automotive, hospitality, entertainment, sports, and adventure industries. Its portfolio includes Gulf States Toyota, Auberge Resorts Collection, AS Roma, and other best-in-class brands, all unified by a mission to deliver exceptional experiences and drive innovation.
The Friedkin Group launched Project Trailblazer, a bold AI transformation initiative designed to accelerate innovation across its portfolio. At its core is DelphAI, a scalable, cutting-edge Data + AI platform built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, enabling rapid deployment of data products and cross-business innovation. Trailblazer is already delivering measurable impact—from route optimization and automated claims processing to streamlined supply chain operations. DelphAI balances centralized governance with the flexibility for business units to innovate independently.
With Trailblazer, The Friedkin Group is redefining what’s possible in automotive and manufacturing—transforming operations, empowering teams, and unlocking enduring value through technology.
Retail & CPG Industry Award: 7-Eleven
7-Eleven, a pioneer in convenience retail, has reimagined its enterprise data platform (EDP) to position data as a strategic asset driving business innovation and value. The EDP team is implementing a federated hub-and-spoke architecture powered by the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. This approach is centralizing governance through Unity Catalog while empowering business stakeholders with greater control over their data, enabling faster innovation across the organization.
At the end of 2024, the EDP team had earned trust across key departments, notably marketing, which reduced audience segment creation time from over a week to just a few hours using a composable CDP built on Databricks and HighTouch. Notably, the marketing team recognized the EDP team as its internal partner of the year. 7-Eleven is leveraging Databricks’ AI/BI Genie API to develop an internal chatbot pilot for quick data access via Microsoft Teams.
These advancements are streamlining operations, reducing technical debt, and positioning 7-Eleven as a leader in data-driven retail innovation. With executive alignment and a clear strategic roadmap, 7-Eleven continues to leverage cutting-edge technologies to enhance customer experiences and drive operational excellence in its 13,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada.
Energy and Utilities Industry Award: Westinghouse Electric Company
Westinghouse Electric Company is an American nuclear power company formed in 1999. Westinghouse partnered with Databricks to transform their data infrastructure from an on-premises system to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, implementing key technologies including Unity Catalog for governance, Auto Loader, Photon engine, Lakeflow Jobs, and Lakehouse Monitoring. This partnership enabled Westinghouse to launch its HiVE™ AI system and bertha™ generative AI model in September 2024, while meeting strict nuclear industry regulations.
The implementation has yielded significant results: they’ve developed AI solutions processing data from over 200 nuclear facilities, created real-time video processing AI for reactor inspections (achieving 90% better detection rates with 25% cost savings), accelerated licensing documentation generation, and delivered four proofs of concept in December 2024, followed by two production-grade systems in Q1 2025 and 45 innovation ideas in early 2025. The migration to Databricks has saved hundreds of hours annually for their Digital Optimization Services unit and established a foundation for continued AI innovation in the nuclear sector, utilizing tools like the Mosaic AI Agent Framework and MLflow for experimentation tracking.
Enterprise Technology Industry Award: Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks, the global leader in cybersecurity, leveraged the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to enhance scalability, governance, and innovation. By centralizing data workflows and dismantling silos, Palo Alto Networks achieved faster iterations on AI/ML features and reduced engineering development time by 40%. Operational costs dropped by 20%, while teams scaled their security capabilities.
Key advancements include the integration of Unity Catalog for centralized governance, Delta Lake is used for real-time data handling, and DLT is used for automated pipeline management. These tools enabled Palo Alto to maintain up-to-date digital twins of customer environments, streamline threat detection, and deliver real-time security recommendations. Databricks SQL further refines analytics workflows, supporting high-performance queries for dashboards and reports.
Palo Alto Networks continues to accelerate innovation at scale, transforming complex data challenges into actionable insights that empower businesses to confront cyber threats effectively.
Public Sector Industry Award: World Bank
World Bank is an international financial institution dedicated to ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in developing countries. Their data landscape was fragmented and inefficient, spread across over 100 different silos, which hampered their ability to generate the timely insights necessary to tackle complex global challenges. Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allowed World Bank to consolidate all the data into one secure platform. This transformation has enabled real-time analytics, accelerated project timelines by two to three times, and opened new possibilities for AI-driven innovations.
Through partnerships with governments worldwide, the organization collects performance metrics to assess the effectiveness of its development initiatives, ensuring accountability and measurable impact. They have harnessed lakehouse architecture as a performance measurement tool that overviews the institution’s key initiatives, operations, and impact across various sectors.
The bank uses Databricks’ unified data platform to centralize and analyze global metrics, enabling the publication of dashboards that provide transparent insights into development outcomes. This includes importing data from external sources, centralizing it using Unity Catalog, and enabling advanced analytics and machine learning. This streamlined approach supports data-driven decision-making while enhancing collaboration across teams and stakeholders.
Emerging Tech Industry Award: Twilio
Twilio is a leading cloud communications company that empowers businesses to build personalized customer engagement across channels like SMS, voice, video, and email using flexible APIs. Twilio successfully migrated its Profiles data lake (PDL) to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, achieving significant improvements in performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. This migration optimized ingestion pipelines, backfill operations, and query performance on critical datasets, resulting in a threefold increase in ingestion rates and overall job efficiency. Performance tuning efforts further enhanced workflows, reducing storage and compute costs and delivering savings in infrastructure expenses. The streamlined architecture now supports Twilio’s growing data processing and analytics needs with greater reliability and speed.
By leveraging the Databricks Platform, Twilio has established a cost-effective and scalable data architecture that drives operational excellence across the organization. This initiative reflects Twilio’s commitment to innovation in data management, enabling faster insights and more efficient analytics to support its mission of empowering businesses to deliver personalization at scale.