Join us for an evening of practical, in-the-trenches talks from teams building modern energy data platforms. We’ll explore how OT data from SCADA, OSI PI, and PLCs is streamed into the lakehouse and turned into AI-powered, self-service analytics for a mission-critical NSW electricity distributor. **Who should attend?** Data engineers, architects, analysts, and ML practitioners working in or alongside the energy and utilities sector - including generation, networks, retail, regulatory, and OT engineering. Curious newcomers are very welcome. Both sessions are highly practical, focused on real systems, trade-offs, and lessons learned. **Talk 1: From Dashboards to Dialogue - Taking AI/BI Genie to Production** **Speaker**: [Rajat Naik](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajat-naik-4535855b/), Essential Energy With 60 active report requests, 4–6 week BI delivery cycles, and strict regulatory timelines, the traditional reporting model couldn’t keep up with the speed of transformation Essential Energy is going through. Their solution: deploying Databricks AI/BI Genie as a production-grade interface for 50+ stakeholders across finance, operations, compliance, and program leadership. Under the hood: * Unity Catalog–governed semantic layer with 8 domain models and 120+ validated metrics * Sub-second query performance over 1.4 TB of data * Near real-time data sharing between AWS and Azure using Delta Sharing What you’ll learn: * A reference architecture for governed self-service analytics in regulated environments * How to enforce row-level security, column masking, and lineage for natural language queries * Why they didn’t wait for a “perfect” dimensional model - and what they shipped instead **Talk 2: The OT Data Ingestion Stack - Streaming Sensor Data into the Lakehouse** **Speaker**: [Pravin Varma](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pravin-varma/), Databricks Getting OT data into the lakehouse often means building and maintaining complex Kafka pipelines. This talk introduces three open-source connectors that simplify the process: * Ignition Zerobus Connector - real-time streaming of tag changes * OSI PI Lakeflow Connector - pull-based sync of high-value PI tables (a licensing alternative to AVEVA Connect) * Unified OT Client - Docker-based edge gateway with ISA-95 normalization and store-and-forward buffering Bonus: an OT Data Simulator spanning 16 industries, 7 PLC vendors, and 379 physics-based sensors - ideal for testing when live data isn’t available. **Event Details** Date: 27 May Time: 5:30 PM Location: NCS Sydney Office, Level 4, 10 Shelley St, Barangaroo Huge thanks to NCS for hosting!