2023 in Review

At Unit8, our mission is to help non-digital native companies reach new heights with the help of data, analytics, and AI.

Year 2023 has been both challenging and rewording at the same time. It is impressive how much a motivated team can accomplish in a year. Please see key highlights below.

I would also like to thank our customers, partners, and team members, as none of the below could have been made without you. Kudos!

What happened at Unit8 in 2023:

We delivered over 50 high impact data projects, hired 17 new data experts, and started a collaboration with several new customers from the banking, financial services, pharma & healthcare, energy and manufacturing sectors,
- among which we can officially name SwissRe, Julius Baer, Helvetia, Tecan, Selexis, Medgate while more of them stay under NDAs
Unit8 has successfully guided 15+ of our customers on GenAI journey and we packaged our learnings into GenAI use case ideation, GenAI roadmap creation methodologies and GenAI Accelerator – an Azure OpenAI infrastructure which acts as a foundation
We have ended the year by launching our Data & AI Technology Radar – a comprehensive guide that empowers businesses to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of technology. The Radar is a culmination of the collective experience of our engineering team, drawing from hundreds of projects and collaborations with our customers each year.
Due to our ongoing development and continued growth, Unit8 was once again recognised by the Financial Times under the 1000 Europe’s fastest-growing companies and one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Switzerland. Thank you for that!
In 2023, Unit8 was nominated as a finalist in the “Services” category of The Swiss Economic Award. We find this recognition to be a testimonial of our team’s hard work, dedication, and innovative solutions that we have provided to the Swiss economy. Thank you to our customers, partners and Unit8 team for your support!
Unit8 continues to strengthen the relationships with our strategic technology partners and obtained Microsoft’s Data & AI Solution Partner designation.
After 6 years of accelerated growth within the Swiss market, we set our first steps in Germany, with the first Unit8-er employed in Frankfurt!

What we shared back with the community last year:

In 2023 we shared over 150 pages of knowledge in form of articles, whitepapers and dedicated case studies on analytics, data, and AI.

We published 137 posts to over 16k followers on our LinkedIn profile. Thank you for being with us!
The Unit8 Team has taken part in 20+ industry events, in Switzerland and internationally
We have hosted our own events as well. This year the team organised four of our flagship Data Connect events and many partners’ events including the Palantir Foundry Developer Meetup.
We are also excited to see that our open-source timeseries library Darts keeps on attracting the attention of the community – thank you for over 6k stars on GitHub; we’re thrilled to see darts becoming the forecasting engine of other tools.
Seeing the advancements that Generative AI made just in a year, we have created Generative AI Accelerator, to help companies set the right foundation for generative AI use cases quickly and efficiently providing full control within their Azure subscription.
Charitable actions are one of the key aspects of our culture. This time 1% of the company’s EBIDT was transferred to charities in the form of donations, with the recipients decided by the whole Unit8 team.:
- DPD (Dzielo Pomocy Dzieciom) – Foster Home
- Doctors Without Borders – Working onsite in the Palestine & Ukraine
- Foundation – “Time to Help/Zdazyc z pomoca” – Children with disabilities help
Dedicated Unit8ers ran 45km for a good cause in the 12th edition of the Poland Business Run. Together with other participants, the Charity collected funds to help 137 beneficiaries in 2023.
Our employees are also giving back to the community on their own, as volunteer firefighters. That’s why Unit8 has been designated as an “Employeur Partenaire des Sapeurs-Pompiers” (Partner Employer of Firefighters) in Switzerland. We are proud to be one of the first companies in Canton of Vaud to receive this designation.
I was nominated by EY as a finalist of their Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 award. This award is highly respected globally as a program and even more importantly, mindset. This last factor, in particular, is portrayed in the Unit8 Team’s commitment to innovation, growth, and positive change with the help of data and AI.

Darts, our open source library for forecasting reached new heights with over 6k stars on GitHub:

What our community liked the most:

Resources:

The first place was obviously taken by our Darts article, where Aron Horvath (kudos!) explains anomaly detection in healthcare.
There is a substantial gap in the understanding of what AI actually is between technical and non-technical profiles. That’s why we shared and demystified the top 5 Misconceptions about Generative AI.
Lastly, our community entered a new era of AI with article by Bernard Maccari, Gael Grosh and Yassir Benkhedda, giving practical guidelines to Large Landuage Models.
As mentioned, the dedicated Unit8 team, led by Bernard Maccari and Michał Rachtan, created our own Data & AI Technology Radar. It serves as a strategic compass, providing insights into emerging technology trends, platforms, tools, languages, and frameworks.
- The radar categorizes key technological trends and tools into four main quadrants: Infrastructure & xOps, Data & Analytics Platforms, ML & Data Science, and Apps & Visualisation. Additionally, we have ranked these trends and tool by how confidently we would recommend them to our customers.

YouTube Shorts:

We have tried and tested a new format with YouTube Shorts on our channel and you loved it! Our experst started with the new Palantir Foundry Dev Tips series, but this is not the end. Stay tuned for more quick and knolwedge-packed video content to come!

Conclusion:

In 2023, we made one more step to further accelerate our customers’ data and AI journeys and help them transform data into value.

In 2024…

…we will continue to engage with the community and share our passion in data & AI – last year’s events were just a preview of our plans to engage, inspire and share our knowledge with the community.
… we will not stop sharing our knowledge and expertise with the community, navigating through the complexities and capabilities of data and (generative) AI.
…and last but certainly not least, we will continue to help our customers turn data into value at scale

Do you like what you read? Contact me for data advisory or consult our careers to join us.