Databricks’ new AI agent tells CEO Ali Ghodsi the unvarnished truth

Databricks on Wednesday unveiled an updated version of its AI agent Genie, which can now perform multi-step jobs that take extended work to finish. It does this through an ontology that Databricks built to give Genie the context it needs from the information that customers store on the Databricks platform.

Corporate leaders can now assign the agent a wide range of tasks, and it will complete them unsupervised, the company says. To prove the point, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi showed me how he uses it internally. Instead of a product demo, he fired up his actual agent and walked me through his most recent chats and charts.

He showed me how it analyzed the parts of an employee satisfaction survey where the company didn’t score well, and how it helped him rate (and discard) fixes for those low scores that some executives suggested. He showed me how it summarized a big sales pitch to a prospect that went poorly — including the features the prospect said it needed before buying.

It also prepped him for a podcast interview by reviewing his previous appearances and developing likely questions. While we talked, he even had it tell him what he should say to me. (And its advice on that wasn’t bad.)