CNME Editor Mark Forker is reporting from Day 2 of .conf25 in Boston, where Kamal Hathi, SVP and General Manager of Splunk, has declared that we are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI, and doubled-down on his view that the community of Splunk users will be the key drivers in the new AI era.
Hathi started his keynote by acknowledging that the evolution of AI has increased complexity across the board.
“Look there is no doubt that all the complexity that comes with AI is making our jobs a lot harder, but it is helping us to do much more, and in all reality, we are only scratching the surface of the problems that AI can help us to solve. At Splunk, we want our community of users to be at the forefront of the AI revolution. Everything in the world is changing, and I mean everything, and we as a company are transforming for you,” said Hathi.
Hathi joined Splunk in October 2024, and said that he loves going to the office everyday because of the excitement of AI has reenergised the entire team.
“Every single day that I go into work, I can feel this energy and buzz. Those that have been at Splunk from the beginning said this is exactly what it was like at the beginning, and when there was that seismic shift to the cloud. They are feeling this energy and drive again in this new AI evolution,” said Hathi.
Hathi described AI has a wildfire, but stressed how Splunk were empowering their users with tools and products to fight fire with fire.
He also said that the .conf user community would drive the new AI era.
“At the end of the day, the people in this room know how to unlock machine data, it is what you do. I’ll sheepishly admit that I’m a big superhero fan, and I’m a romantic, so anytime time there is a profound technological shift, I believe a superhero will step in. The shift to the cloud wouldn’t have happened without the Splunk community, and you will do the same for the AI era,” said Hathi.
Hathi reemphasised how Splunk is trying to unleash the power of AI for its customers, and acknowledged that in the current climate the data being generated is now on a ludicrous scale.
“Slunk has always been a Big Data Company, but the data being generated now, is no longer big, it’s on a ludicrous scale. But this is what we are great at. We can provide our users with the tools they need to deal with the data, regardless of the complexity or the scale, we bring it all together for you. We want to unleash the power of AI to make sense out of these massive amounts of data, and ultimately there is no one size fits all approach to AI. There is no magic box of AI, you need AI that works for you,” said Hathi.
He was then joined on stage by Tom Gillis, SVP and General Manager of Infrastructure and Security at Cisco.
He highlighted how their Cisco Data Fabric solution will be able to ingest those ludicrous amounts of data that are being generated.
“The AI revolution is not hype. Our world is fundamentally changing. If you try to ingest ludicrous amounts of data into a single data repository then it’s not going to work. The idea behind Cisco Data Fabric is to take that Data Lake and break it into Data Ponds and then Data Puddles. It’s a new architecture and we are putting intelligence into the fabric of the network,” said Gillis.
