New York City energy meets IBM insight. TheCUBE sits down with Marcela Vairo, vice president of data and artificial intelligence for the Americas at IBM, as analyst Dave Vellante explores how hybrid and multi-cloud strategies meet the AI era at Cloudera EVOLVE25. Hear why “there is no AI without data,” and how IBM and Cloudera bring AI to where mission-critical data already runs.

Vairo details a maturing enterprise playbook. Only 1% of enterprise data fuels AI today, while more than 90% is unstructured and growing faster. Governance and data quality move pilots into production, she explains. Learn how IBM’s Watsonx AI integrates with Cloudera to fine-tune models and enforce policy with Watsonx.gov. The discussion also covers agentic AI, bringing natural language to hardened on-prem workloads, and the need for automation to scale.

The conversation highlights contemporary customer patterns across financial services and healthcare, focusing on customer care and fraud detection. IBM shares its own results, including an eye-popping $3.5B in free cash flow impact attributed to AI-driven operational changes.

The vision for “AI Anywhere” takes center stage in this keynote analysis from Cloudera EVOLVE25 in New York City. TheCUBE analyst Dave Vellante sits down with Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo and former Gartner analyst, to break down the company’s strategy, momentum and market positioning. Together they revisit the history of Hadoop and Cloudera’s evolution, then explore how acquisitions, hybrid deployments and AI-in-a-box solutions are reshaping Cloudera’s stack.

Mohan highlights why hybrid and multi-cloud matter as AI workloads grow, and explains how enterprises can bring intelligence directly to their data: on-prem, in the cloud or at the edge. Real-world customer stories, including AbbVie’s billion-dollar ROI potential, illustrate the transformative power of governed, private AI at scale.

The discussion digs deeper into broader ecosystem shifts, from semantic layer competition to the future of agentic AI. This includes exactly how Cloudera is positioning itself alongside hyperscalers, Snowflake, Databricks and others. Mohan emphasizes that conviction, vertical solutions and go-to-market execution are the keys to reclaiming leadership in the modern data stack.

TheCUBE analyst Dave Vellante unpacks private AI and “cloud anywhere” with David Dichmann, vice president of product marketing at Cloudera, as Cloudera EVOLVE25 remains in full swing. Hear how Cloudera brings public-cloud speed into the data center while keeping data, prompts and answers under enterprise control, according to Dichmann. The discussion explores AI Workbench and Inference Service, Agent Studio for “low-to-no-code” acceleration and Dell ObjectScale for S3-compatible storage that sits close to compute for lower latency. Regulated sectors and edge-heavy environments are leading adoption on these fronts as sovereignty and time value of data drives decisions, he suggests.

The conversation tackles stall points like skills gaps and governance, with a focus on measurable ROI and avoiding “pilotitis”. A new enterprise AI survey finding that 96% have integrated AI into core processes signals a shift from toy to mandate. MIT research currently shows most cloud experiments fail, which is fine for learning but not for production. The prescription is outcome alignment and a short list of high-impact use cases that move to production quickly, says Dichmann.

TheCUBE meets with Cloudera CTO Sergio Gago in Hell’s Kitchen as analyst Dave Vellante digs into AI’s “era of convergence”. Gago shares why he joined Cloudera, how open-source leadership still underpins secure enterprise AI and exactly why convergence matters now more than ever.

Gago outlines progress from recent moves: Verta for private AI inference and Octopai for lineage, he says. He adds how Taikun enables side-by-side deployments to OCP and EKS in minutes. The conversation covers Apache Iceberg as a common layer for an open data lakehouse. It also tackles cost control, governance, and human-in-the-loop agents that respect policy. They close on impact: only 9% report full data access, so unifying access is key to ROI in 2025.

In this exclusive interview for Cloudera EVOLVE25, theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante speaks with Jason Mills, senior vice president of solutions engineering at Cloudera, about the company’s push to redefine enterprise AI. Mills draws on his experience at Citi, J.P. Morgan, Google Cloud and Snowflake to highlight why a strong data foundation is essential to any AI strategy. Cloudera is simplifying open-source capabilities into one governed platform that supports on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments, he explains.

The conversation unpacks economics, interoperability and production scale. Mills outlines how Cloudera helps customers avoid “pilotitis” by aligning accuracy, cost control and governance. He points to enterprise risk management use cases such as fraud detection and document automation, and details how the Tycoon Kubernetes engine is strengthening multicloud deployments. Above all, natural language querying is opening access to AI for business analysts and data scientists alike, according to Mills.

In this exclusive interview for Cloudera EVOLVE25, theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante speaks with Jide Adeoye, director of business intelligence of goeasy Ltd., to explore how the company is helping Canadians in the non-prime finance space rebuild credit while driving growth. Adeoye outlines how goeasy’s graduation program and Credit Optimizer service guide customers toward healthier credit scores and lasting loyalty.

He shares how Octopai’s lineage and catalog tools cut root-cause analysis from weeks to hours and enabled a master KPI standardization effort that delivered a single source of truth. Protecting PII, managing right-to-be-forgotten requests and ensuring consistent KPI definitions are top priorities, he notes. Adeoye also discusses goeasy’s next-gen data architecture project built on Azure Data Factory, Databricks and Synapse, with MicroStrategy powering BI.

But goeasy is not stopping there - they’re currently testing a Strategy AI chatbot to automate returned-payment workflows and building a Customer360 model to unify data across Easy Financial, Easy Home and LendCare. Adeoye stresses that AI enhances, rather than replaces, human judgment - and that structured, trusted data is the foundation for real business insight.

At Cloudera EVOLVE25 in New York City, theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante speaks with Manasi Vartak, chief artificial intelligence architect of Cloudera, about the realities of “AI anywhere.” Vartak shares her journey from founding MIT spinout Verta to leading Cloudera’s AI strategy, and how MLOps foundations now support larger generative models. Enterprises want to keep models close to regional data for sovereignty and performance, she explains.

The conversation explores blending predictive and generative AI in real use cases, how governance mitigates hallucinations and why secure data access is vital for AI agents. Vartak also reviews survey insights showing only 9% of enterprises have full data access, while more than half prioritize integrated MLOps and AI tooling. She outlines Cloudera’s open and extensible roadmap, discusses the benefits of open-weight models and when cost pressures drive AI operations back on-prem.

Cloudera EVOLVE25 continues to tackle big issues, as theCUBE analyst Dave Vellante meets with Brian Martin, senior research fellow at AbbVie Inc., and Richard Wendell, founder and chief executive officer of tellic LLC, to unpack the mission of Rare Hopes, a self-funded nonprofit. Built on tellic’s extensive knowledge graph and AbbVie’s applied research, Rare Hopes identifies hidden links across decades of scientific literature. One such connection tied 15 papers over 40 years to a potential therapy for Carney complex, a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors and hormonal issues, offering new hope for patients and doctors alike.

The discussion highlights harmonized data, ontology-driven context and domain specificity for secure, scalable AI, especially for use in the biopharma industry. Martin explains why dashboards are fading as conversational knowledge systems rise. But LLMs still need precise, curated data to avoid errors, at scale, according to Wendell. You will also hear how TXI Digital is shaping the patient and doctor experience, with Cloudera committed to support.

TheCUBE analyst Dave Vellante sits down with Leo Brunnick, chief product officer at Cloudera, after a high-energy day in New York for Cloudera EVOLVE25 that isn't slowing down just yet. Private equity backing is accelerating product bets and “data anywhere powers AI everywhere,” according to Brunnick says. He breaks down Data Services 2.0 and a usability-first push, tying recent moves like Octopai and Taikun to a cloud-like experience on-prem or across hyperscalers with the same code.

The conversation highlights how enterprises are navigating hybrid data realities to make AI practical. An oil and gas company combines edge processing with centralized analytics to predict equipment failures, saving billions, Brunnick notes. Pharmaceutical firms are also accelerating discovery by applying governed data patterns. Cloudera’s latest survey shows 52% of enterprises report measurable AI value, while McKinsey estimates about 30% of inference will remain on-prem. Edge-to-AI momentum is also growing through technologies like NiFi and Flink, alongside early experiments with small models at the edge. The goal is to enable faster partnering and “yes-and” integrations that balance innovation, control and cost, Brunnick emphasizes.