It may have been a rainy day in August, but that didn't dampen spirits as the Monda team gathered with customers, partners, and friends at MAAYA's poolside venue in Berlin-Friedrichshain for the first Monda Data & AI Summit.
Guests came from far and wide: some from Poland, others from Thailand. We had people from companies including Deloitte, Parloa, IBM, and Silencio in attendance. All were there to enjoy an evening of lightning talks on the future of data & AI, make new friends from across the industry, and celebrate Monda turning one year old.
Monda's founders Richard Hoffmann and Thani Shamsi kicked off the Summit with a warm welcome and introduced Monda's mission: to create a global data sharing ecosystem to fuel the AI revolution and accelerate human progress. We learnt that hosting its first Monda Data & AI Summit was a crucial milestone in this mission as the event would bring together folks to exchange ideas and build the very ecosystem envisioned.
The founders then handed over to the evening's MC, Lucy Kelly, who explained that guests would now enjoy short bursts of insight on the future of data & AI from experts in four lightning talks.
Our first lightning talk came from Stefan Ostwald, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Parloa, Berlin's most recently-minted unicorn which is revolutionizing customer experiences with agentic AI.
We learnt that agentic AI such as the kind that Parloa is developing is shifting CX from being reactive, generic, and manual interactions to proactive, hyperpersonalized, and autonomous. Stefan sketched out a scenario where a person is travelling by plane and has their travel plans disrupted unavoidably. He explained how customer support fueled by AI agents could turn this experience from a frustrating one to a delightful one - the airline company could automatically book the passenger onto a new flight, adjust their connection transport, and make recommendations based on the traveler's previous journeys. Overall, we learnt that AI is revolutionizing how companies handle customer issues and paving the way for scalable, personalized interactions.
The next lightning talk came from Philipp Müller-Peltzer, Partner and Lawyer at Schürmann Rosenthal Dreyer, law firm specializing in digital and data regulation. Philipp's talk dispelled many of the myths around AI regulation in the EU.
The main takeaway was that EU regulation is designed so as to protect the privacy and rights of its citizens without hindering technological advancement. Philipp explained how law firms like his work to ensure the best outcomes for clients whether they're corporate or individuals, always taking into consideration the AI use case and potential risks in a holistic assessment.
Michal Bil, CTO and Co-Founder of The Swarm, delivered the next lightning talk. The Swarm provides data on professional and their netwrosk so that comapnies and investors can make informed decsions on strategic outreach, hiring, and fundraising.
In his talk, Michal explained that the huge surge in demand for AI-ready data showed The Swarm team that they needed to build an model context protocol (MCP) server to ensure that their data products were ready to be consumed by AI tools. He explained the complexity of building such an MCP and the challenges which The Swarm's product & tech team encountered as they developed it. Ultimately, Michal's talk showed us that the way data end-users consume data is changing due to AI and that forward-thinking data providers need to lean into this shift to ensure their products are viable in the AI world.
Our final lightning talk came from Monda's founders, Thani and Richard. They introduced Databricks' Medallion architecture, a scale measuring data quality.
They explained that the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity has meant that there's a new layer which we can add to this architecture: 'platinum' data, or data products which are AI-ready. AI-ready data products are annotated, vectorized, permissioned, labelled, translated, and tailored in such a way that they're ready to be consumed by AI tools.
The final part of Richard and Thani's talk unveiled Monda's entirely new product: Monda Share, the AI-ready data product sharing platform.
With that, we marked Monda turning one with a huge product milestone and concluded the evening's lightning talks.
The weather had finally improved and Summit guests could enjoy their BBQ and Monda Spritzes with a little sunshine.
The braver amongst the guests even took a plunge in MAAYA's not-so-heated pool.
The Monda Data & AI Summit 2025 was an awesome event. It was future-thinking, centered around what's next for data & AI. It was friends-first, with great food, drinks, and the chance to forge new relationships outside of just business-talk. It was a real taste of Berlin culture, complete with music and late-night dancing. We hope our guests thought so, too. Until next year's Summit! 🌇
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