2026 Dataiku Frontrunner Awards: architecting the reasoning enterprise

Inspiration from our 2025 Frontrunners

Need a benchmark? Last year’s winners didn't just deploy models; they reshaped their operations.

• SoftBank Corp. (Best Agentic AI Use Case): Scaled an AI agent-powered sales operating model that turns meeting momentum into intelligent action.
• Roche (Best Agentic AI Use Case): Enhanced patent work with Dataiku, using GenAI and the agentic AI interface Lex to unify tools, reduce costs, and boost efficiency for attorneys and paralegals.
• European Air Transport (Best Agentic AI Use Case – Agents for Every Employee): Automated document processing to achieve near real-time reporting that informs planning and critical decision-making.
• ZS Associates (AI for Healthcare & Life Sciences): Deployed AI agents in Dataiku to speed patient-journey insights, automate root cause analysis, and keep 100+ ML models running reliably — reducing delays, operational risk, and manual effort at scale.

New business outcome-focused categories

For 2026, we’ve streamlined our awards into five core categories that reflect the strategic reality of the modern enterprise.

• The Reasoning Enterprise Award — This award honors organizations at the frontier of enterprise AI agents. We are looking for the most sophisticated, most domain-specific agent deployments: systems that interpret complex business rules, navigate multi-step workflows, and act autonomously on behalf of the enterprise. Candidates are measured on agent sophistication, domain specificity, and real operational impact.
• The Bottom Line Award — Proof of concept is easy. Moving the balance sheet is not. This award goes to the team with the largest measurable return on AI investment. We're looking for hard numbers: cost reduction, revenue growth, risk mitigation — quantified and tied to AI systems running in production. Real numbers, real reward.
• The Domain Expert Award — The most valuable knowledge lives with the people closest to the work. This award recognizes domain experts who are solving their own problems with AI. Supply chain planners, risk analysts, process engineers, and operations leads who are building and refining AI within their area of expertise without depending on a data science team. We're looking for practitioners driving outcomes on their own terms.
• The Governance by Design Award — Most organizations treat AI governance as a gate that slows them down. This award goes to the team that has proven the opposite. We're looking for governance that accelerates: oversight, compliance, and risk management woven into the AI lifecycle so tightly that the organization deploys more AI to more teams with more confidence.
• The AI Success Award — This is the big one — not a single use case, but an enterprise story. We're looking for the organization where AI has become an institutional capability: dozens of use cases across multiple business units, unified governance, technical and non-technical teams building within a shared system. This award honors the full picture of how an organization is transforming through AI at scale.

Ready to share your success?

We’ve made the submission process even more supportive this year. To help you tell your best story, we will be hosting two submission coaching webinars to help you refine your narrative and quantify your impact.

Webinar date/time/time zone:

• Apr 15, 2026 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT - Registration is live!
• Jun 3, 2026 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Key submission and announcement dates to remember:

• Submissions open NOW!: March 26, 2026
• Submissions close: June 15, 2026
• Winners confirmed: End of July/Early August, 2026
• Live celebration: September 24, 2026, featuring on-stage acknowledgments in NYC.

Don’t let your team's hard work go unnoticed. Whether you are scaling AI Ops, enabling business users, or pioneering the use of agents, there is a place for your story in this year’s awards.