Scale By The Bay 2020: Jennifer Prendki, When the Only Way to Scale up, is to Scale Down

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Big Data has long been hailed as the ultimate path to a glorious AI future, and getting more data has now been the one answer given for almost a decade by virtually all data scientists asked how they planned to improve their model's performance. Yet, with always larger datasets to work with, we might reach a point where building better models might call for a total change in paradigm. Even though data storage and compute have been cheap and easily accessible, are we geared towards a world where this is not true anymore? And what happens to Machine Learning then? Once we acknowledge that more and more companies are seeing their AI ROI melt away year after year because of the humongous associated operational and technological costs, this might not sound like Science Fiction anymore... Jennifer Prendki Alectio Founder & CEO Santa Clara, CA Jennifer is the founder and CEO of Alectio, the first startup focused on automated data curation and data collection optimization. She and her team are on a mission to help ML teams build models with less data. Prior to Alectio, Jennifer was the VP of Machine Learning at Figure Eight; she also led ML and Data Science at Atlassian and on the Search team at Walmart Labs. She is an accomplished speaker who enjoys addressing both technical and non technical audiences.