Executives of the Year: Naveen Zutshi

Databricks chief information officer Naveen Zutshi was named an Executive of the Year for deploying Genie, an AI agent that lets the company's roughly 11,000 employees query internal data, conduct research, automate tasks, and build applications. Zutshi said Genie functions as an "AI co-worker," and that Databricks serves as "customer zero" for its own products, with Novo Nordisk, Virgin Atlantic, and Unilever also using Genie to democratize data and AI access.

To create value for employees and customers, companies implementing AI must be able to access and interpret the scads of internal data needed to fuel it—but much of that data is sequestered in systems and formats that are unreachable to the teams that need it most. Databricks https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/time100-companies-software/ is in the business of unlocking that information, which makes chief information officer Naveen Zutshi https://www.linkedin.com/in/nzutshi something of a locksmith. “We have around 11,000 employees,” he says. “My focus has been: How do I enable all of them to be builders?” The answer, he believes, is Genie https://www.databricks.com/product/genie/one , an AI agent that employees can use to query company data quickly and easily, then act on it by conducting research, automating tasks, or even building applications. “Genie is essentially an AI co-worker," says Zutshi, whose work on Genie’s underlying data governance has enriched not only Databricks—“customer zero” for the company’s products, he adds—but also customers like Novo Nordisk https://time.com/collection/time100-most-influential-companies/2026/novo-nordisk/ , Virgin Atlantic, and Unilever https://time.com/collections/time100-companies/5950052/unilever/ , all of which are using Genie to enable what he calls the “democratization of data and AI.” Disclosure: Investors in Databricks include Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO.