Retaining customers is more important for survival than ever. For businesses that rely on very high user volume, like mobile apps, video streaming, social media, e-commerce and gaming, fighting churn is an existential challenge. Data scientists are leading the fight to convert and retain high LTV (lifetime value) users.

With the complexity of data growing across the enterprise and emerging approaches to machine learning and AI use cases, data scientists and machine learning engineers have needed more versatile and efficient ways of enabling data access, faster processing, and better, more customizable resource management across their machine learning projects.

We launched BigQuery ML, an integrated part of Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse, in 2018 as a SQL interface for training and using linear models. Many customers with a large amount of data in BigQuery started using BigQuery ML to remove the need for data ETL, since it brought ML directly to their stored data. Due to ease of explainability, linear models worked quite well for many of our customers.

The success and growth of companies can be determined by the technologies they rely on in their tech stack. To deploy AI enabled applications to production, companies have discovered that they’ll need an army of developers, data engineers, DevOps practitioners and data scientists to manage Kubeflow — but do they really? Much of the complexity involved in delivering data intensive products to production comes from the workflow between different organizational and technology silos.