On the heels of our participation in NODES, Neo4j’s annual developer conference, we’re excited to share a recent interview with Emil Eifrem, CEO & Founder, Neo4j. In this brief interview, he speaks to the AI market opportunity and what’s next for the graph database leader.

Watch the video recording here or read the conversation transcript below (edited for clarity).

Emil Eifrem, CEO & Founder, Neo4j

Meet Neo4j

Emil Eifrem, CEO & Founder — At the highest level we’re a database company — specifically what is called a graph database. What graph databases do is help the world make sense of data, which is our mission.

Graph databases do this by analyzing how relationships fit into data and through that you can figure out cause and effect.

So, what happens if something changes over here, what are the downstream implications? For example, if you’re a big Telco and the cell tower blows over, what happens to your Telco network? If a supply chain gets jammed up, how will that cascade across my retail stores across Europe or North America? If a butterfly flaps its wings in Latin America, how will that cascade across the world?

We make sense of all of that through the ability to manage connected data.

The market opportunity

Emil Eifrem, CEO & Founder — We’re in this massive transformation right now where we’re just at the tail end of the cloud transformation that the software industry has been a decade plus investing in and transitioning the software.

Now we’re at the cusp of the AI transformation, and graph databases have a fantastic role to play in that. This is because it turns out that a big part of figuring out how to actually put AI into practical use is getting clarity, not just on what decisions these AI systems make autonomously, but why they make those decisions.

In addition to that, graph databases can also help reduce hallucinations. And so, we believe that graph databases and Neo4j will be a standard component in any future software system that is using AI.

What’s next?

Emil Eifrem, CEO & Founder — It is probably the most exciting time ever for Neo4j and a lot of it is thanks to the rise of AI and the opportunity we have to really participate in that ecosystem. It’s been an amazing previous decade or so but the next ten years I’m even more enthusiastic about.

Learn more about Neo4j and continue to follow their incredible growth trajectory.