Looker Community Event #6 - Thursday, February 6th at Coolblue, Rotterdam

📢 Get set for the 6th Looker Community Event! 🚀

📅 Date: Thursday, February 6th
⏰ Time: 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM
📍 Location: Coolblue, Weena 664, 3012 CN, Rotterdam

The 6th Looker Community Event comes with a special twist: for the first time, we’re bringing the event to Rotterdam, hosted at the offices of Coolblue. The venue can accommodate around 100 people, so we recommend signing up quickly to secure your spot!

This session we have 3 very interesting speakers lined up: Analytics Engineer at Xebia Sebastian Atkinson, Senior Data Engineer at Bynder Nicholas Ando & Data Engineer Louis Speelman and Data Analytics Specialist Janno Mostert from Devoteam. See the program below:

Sebastian Atkinson, Xebia – Looker Explore Assistant: Talking to your data in natural language
Large Language Models can be used in a wide range of applications and data analytics is one of them. They can make generating insights from data accessible to a significantly wider audience including non-technical consumers by enabling them to query their data with natural language prompts. The Looker Explore Assistant adds this capability to Looker which enhances the already added value of self-serve analytics that the platform provides.
In this talk Sebastian will share his experiences in setting up and using the Looker Explore Assistant for a PoC. It will include some additional tips & tricks to complement the existing documentation and an impression of how the assistant works in practice.

About the speaker
Sebastian is an Analytics Engineer at Xebia Data, a Data and AI consultancy based in Amsterdam where he helps clients build on their platforms, onboard business use cases and upskill internal employee's data literacy.

Nicholas Ando, Bynder - From UI Clicks to Git Commits: Bynder's Developer-Driven BI Journey
Moving from a manual, unstructured BI setup to a developer-driven architecture presents unique challenges in a multi-regional, multi-tenant environment. This talk walks through Bynder's migration to Looker, demonstrating how implementing infrastructure as code, version control, and automated deployments transformed their BI workflow.

Learn how separating ETL from BI, implementing dynamic connections, and establishing robust deployment pipelines helped solve complex regional requirements while maintaining data security and reducing operational overhead.

About the speaker
Nicholas Ando is a Senior Data Engineer at Bynder, a Dutch Digital Asset Management company. With a unique background bridging History and Computer Science, he brings a distinctive perspective to data engineering. Having worked across roles as a DBA, Scala developer, and now data engineer, Nicholas specialises in BI tooling while championing engineering best practices for Analytics and Insights teams.

Janno & Louis, Devoteam - Looker AI Summariser Action - Automated Reporting with Looker and Google Cloud
Within Devoteam we have been trying to scale up data driven decision making at clients for the last couple of years. Leveraging the power of Looker has made a big impact for our clients by giving people access to real time dashboards and giving them the ability to slice and dice data to answer any question there is.
But we noticed that there is something missing. The delivery of dashboards and insights to people empowers users but is not scalable. If you have to monitor a lot of dashboards daily how effective are you in finding the key information that moves your business forward?

Introducing the Looker AI Summariser Action. A Looker action that is straightforward to set up, making it much easier to go over each dashboard by letting an AI agent handle it. This agent will analyse the dashboards and provide the information you need to focus on.

About the speakers
Janno is a Data Analytics specialist with over 6 years of experience delivering end-to-end BI solutions for some of the world’s leading companies. As a Looker expert with a strong background in tools like Power BI and Tableau, he offers a unique and valuable perspective into Looker and the future of AI within Business Intelligence.

Louis Speelman is a Data Engineer at Devoteam, where he leverages his unique background in Natural Language Processing and software development to streamline and enhance Looker's capabilities. He's passionate about automating complex tasks and finding innovative ways to push the boundaries of what's possible with Looker.

Agenda

• 15:45-16:15: Walk-in
• 16:15-16:45: Sebastian Atkinson - Looker Explore Assistant: Talking to your data in natural language
• 16:45-17:15: Nicholas Ando - From UI Clicks to Git Commits: Bynder's Developer-Driven BI Journey
• 17:15-17:30: Short Break
• 17:30-18:00: Janno Mostert & Louis Speelman - Looker AI Summariser Action: Automated Reporting with Looker and Google Cloud
• 18:00: Drinks & Social

We can't wait to see you there!

PS: If you have experience in Looker and want to share your expertise and insights during one of our coming sessions, we welcome you to join us as a guest speaker. Send an email to [mark@onesecondbefore.com](http://mailto:mark@onesecondbefore.com/) and let us know how you'd like to contribute to our community of Looker enthusiasts!