By Belle Lin
Databricks is releasing AI agents that help professionals get answers from their business data, aiming to expand beyond its core data offerings and showcase its staying power in the artificial-intelligence world.
The San Francisco-based company, which is valued at $134 billion, calls its new offering Genie One, or an "agentic co-worker" that helps business teams -- from finance to marketing and sales -- get answers and make decisions based on their corporate data.
The move comes as data companies, including Databricks rival Snowflake, start to cement their place as providers of enterprise AI. In late May, Snowflake's stock shot up following strong earnings and increased demand for its AI tools.
Like Snowflake, Databricks provides the underlying layer for storing and organizing data in the cloud. Databricks was established in 2013, eons before the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT. But since the start of the AI boom, data companies have said they can help businesses make use of AI by providing the data context the technology needs.
When Databricks launched its natural language interface, Genie Spaces, a few years ago, the idea was that data scientists could more easily extract insights from their data without writing complex queries, said co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi. But the company quickly discovered that customers were sharing this capability with their marketing departments and with finance and senior executives.
"They really pushed us and said, 'Hey, this is really magical, but Databricks is not built for these departments. Can you build something that's completely simpler?'" Ghodsi said.
That led to the creation of the new Genie agents, which aim to solve that customer need.
Now, there are signs the data and AI message is sticking.
The company is generating an over $1.7 billion revenue run rate from its AI products, Ghodsi said. That is an increase from the over $1 billion revenue run rate the company said it was generating from its AI products last September.
Ghodsi said the "secret sauce" behind its new AI agents is a data context layer called Genie Ontology -- essentially a graph of all knowledge in an organization, including data, content, apps, documents and people that is updated in real-time. Having that context leads to more accurate and faster responses from AI, as well as lower token costs, Ghodsi said.
Also on Tuesday, Databricks is announcing Genie Agents and Genie App Builder, products targeted at business users who want to vibe-code their own AI agents and applications. The company has a separate AI agent for developers called Genie Code.
With these releases, Databricks enters a crowded space of providers offering coding agents and general AI agents for knowledge work. Ghodsi said the Databricks agents are meant to be used alongside agents like Anthropic's Claude Code, though he expects all agents to eventually be tailored for specific areas of work.
"I actually think we're going to see specialization," Ghodsi said. "This is the specialization that we are good at: data. So we're just focused on that."
Albertsons and Rivian have been early users of Databricks' new AI agents.
Karthik Iyer, a group vice president and head of merchandising transformation and AI at Albertsons, said the grocery store operator is using the tech to help answer questions based on company data.
"A merchant is now able to ask questions like, 'If I promote Sargento cheese, what will it do to my own brands, and how much shelf space do I need to allocate to my own brands to compensate for the promotions that I'm running with Sargento cheese?'" Iyer said.
Romit Jadhwani, a senior director of enterprise AI, data and productivity at Rivian, said the electric-vehicle startup uses Databricks' agents as a way to "get value from your data" without needing to write programming queries.
Leaders at Rivian are using the agents to help understand demand forecasts, how the company is performing in production operations and reviewing financial metrics, Jadhwani added.
Long considered one of the most highly anticipated potential initial public offerings in the startup market, Ghodsi said Databricks is excited to watch the year's blockbuster IPOs, but will likely not IPO this year.
Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 16, 2026 13:06 ET (17:06 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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