Databricks Launches New Always-on Genie: Autonomous AI for Complex Enterprise Work
SAN FRANCISCO — Databricks today announced the second generation of Genie, which changes how people get work done: Genie is now an always-on, autonomous agent for enterprise work. Employees can give Genie a goal and trust it to keep work moving. Genie takes ownership of the work, delegates to subagents when needed, tracks progress, follows up on missing inputs, and reaches out when a person needs to make a decision. A new inbox highlights what needs attention, and Genie emails users when they are away.
The data and AI platform for the lakehouse
Data & AI Platform Compare pricing & 5 other Data & AI Platform →Work is moving faster, and enterprises now expect AI to take real tasks off their plates. But much of what it takes to do complex projects well lives across multiple platforms and even in people’s heads: which accounts need attention, what triggers an escalation, who approves a change. An enterprise assistant can only take that on if it knows the business, can reach the systems teams already use, and follows correct permissions and access controls.
Genie is built for how companies actually work. Every action is grounded in Genie Ontology, an agentic ontology which captures a company’s horizontal context, from definitions and metrics to the people and processes behind them, and keeps it current as the business changes. Genie proactively works across all data, structured or unstructured, analytical or operational, inside or outside Databricks to recommend the next best action. Since it runs within a company’s existing Databricks environment, Genie is governed by Unity Catalog and Unity Gateway, so every action stays within the controls companies already have in place.
“Genie has made me a 10x more productive CEO, and now it doesn’t wait for me to ask,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “Every day, Genie keeps up with my inbox, preps me for meetings, and runs in the background, coming back only when it needs a decision. It can do that because it knows how our company works: what we mean by revenue, which numbers are official, and who can see what. That’s the power of horizontal context, and Genie delivers it.”
Genie: Always-On Jobs, Proactive Work and Governed Actions
Genie now operates in autonomous mode, running in the background using its own compute. This means Genie can help with daily personal tasks like staying on top of email or Slack and prepping for meetings, or it can take on bigger responsibilities like keeping a quarterly forecast on track. Users share a goal and clear boundaries, and Genie will manage the task and proactively reach out when it needs their input. Marketers can ask Genie to monitor GEO performance and suggest relevant content. Customer success teams can ask Genie to monitor customer usage patterns and notify the account team of meaningful shifts. Executives can ask Genie to track revenue trends and top customer feature requests and deliver a weekly brief on what’s changing and why. Key features include:
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Sub-agents: Genie delegates tasks to multiple sub-agents to manage work in parallel.
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Priority inbox: Genie now opens to an inbox of items that need attention, so users can easily see what needs a decision instead of digging through past conversations.
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Email alerts: Each new alert from Genie arrives as its own unread email. Updates on that alert go to the same thread, so the inbox doesn’t fill up, and each email links back into the Genie app.
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Governed by default: Every action stays within Unity Catalog permissions and Unity Gateway approval rules and budgets, and is fully auditable.
Genie Search: Enterprise Search Built for AI
Genie Search gives people and agents one governed way to find information across the lakehouse and the documents, tickets, and chats in business apps. Because it works through Genie Ontology, it doesn’t just locate a document; it computes and interprets it within business context, within existing permissions, and with sources that teams can inspect. Key features include:
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Search knowledge where it lives: Index content in the tools teams already use like Google Drive, Jira, and Confluence, without moving or copying it. Ingest it through Lakeflow Connect or query applications live through MCP. Databricks now offers 100+ connectors that support a variety of data connection strategies for key business apps: ingest data into the lakehouse, index it in place, or federate queries to it via MCP.
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Built for agents: Agents can find information across structured and unstructured data and applications in a single search instead of checking each app separately, which cuts unnecessary tool calls and token use, making agents faster and cheaper to run.
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Connect once, govern everywhere: Genie Search runs within companies’ existing Databricks environments, so there’s no separate search infrastructure to manage, and follows access rules already set in Unity Catalog.
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Open ecosystem: Leverage Genie MCP to enable AI tools and agents to use Genie Ontology and Genie Search to find and access enterprise knowledge.
Additional New Genie Capabilities
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Ontology Manager: A new experience allows teams to manage and govern business context, with recommendations that flag frequently asked concepts that require refinement.
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Expanded Genie Ontology sources: Business logic from external BI tools allows Genie Ontology to extend its understanding of analytical data, while a new organizational structure connector provides both context and an experience for understanding people and reporting relationships.
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Live, governed artifacts: Genie can now generate dynamic, data-driven slides, dashboards, and interactive reports that are grounded in governed data and stay current as that data changes.
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Expanded Genie Agents: Agents can now work across PDFs, contracts, and slides in Unity Catalog Volumes alongside governed tables, with no separate vector index. New MCP connectors such as Atlassian, Google Drive and GitHub, along with OpenSharing for Genie Agents, allow teams to collaborate with partners without exposing underlying data.
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Genie everywhere: Teams can interact with Genie wherever they work, whether that is on a web browser, mobile app, email, and collaboration and AI tools, including ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot Cowork, and Grok Bot.
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