DataTune wrapped up last Saturday and it was a fantastic conference! After taking 2025 off, it was great to have this local Nashville conference back for it’s second year.
I had the honor of presenting my DAX 101 talk and had a blast! I’m grateful to the folks who chose the session amongst some other really great presenters and topics. The slide deck is below.
My intent was to post this soon after the conference ended to share my learnings from the day, but I needed some extra time to process. Really, there was one main takeaway:
People > AI
Writing that, People > AI, seems so obvious. Of course people are of greater value than a machine. This isn’t a new revelation for me. But in a weekend packed with sessions about AI, conversations about AI over lunch, hallway chats with people who are all looking to leverage AI in their work, the conversations kept turning back around to people. “I did this cool thing with AI, and the solution really helped this group of people.” “I love AI, I use it all the time. But when I get stuck at work and need expertise, I call this person, or I text this person.”
These comments were coming from some really smart people. People who I view as experts in the field. Experts in their practice. My time at DataTune 2026 solidified that the relationships that I build with people are so much more valuable than any ridiculously cool thing that I will ever accomplish with AI. No matter what an LLM or a machine will ever be able to accomplish, it isn’t going to be greater than what I can learn or what I can share with another person. AI is going to make us more efficient and help us accomplish things that we didn’t imagine were possible. But AI is a tool. AI can’t replace genuine community.