Serhii is introducing Tower at AI Launchpad

AI Launchpad and the takeaways from the 2025 Data Council

May 11, 2025

A few weeks ago, we demoed Tower.dev at the AI Launchpad stage of the Data Council. Several dozen prospect conversations later, I finally had the time to post some pictures and the most memorable moments from that week.

Brad is demoing Tower.

When talking to data leaders, it becomes clear that their challenges are organizational. For example, a large German multinational engineering and technology company (its name starts with a B) is an agglomeration of many small companies that don’t have a common data language. Data tooling is the least of their problems.

The best data leaders worry about the problems that their users have. Over drinks, a data engineering manager from the oil and gas industry shared with me that his most significant need was to find a KPI monitoring tool for his geologists, HR, and legal users. The biggest need a Head of Data Platform for a VC Fund sees is a great UI for his investor users (the associates, principals, and partners who make investment decisions).

An underserved group of data engineering leaders works in academic institutions and city governments, and still has a large on-premises footprint. Although they have some cloud services, Dell servers are a popular infrastructure choice. It’s worth keeping this in mind when designing new cloud-only services.

A great conversation with a data scientist over lunch opened my eyes to the fact that data scientists are hired on a pitch that they will help the company predict the future. Still, they often end up doing data analysis and explaining the past. Building tools that help data scientists do the work they want to do is not a solved problem.

A pair of great speakers, Colleen Tartow from Capital One and Lindsay Murphy from Hiive, laid out the truth about organizational maturity stages for AI projects. Their advice: Get your data house in order first.