Nearly all of the big tech and AI companies are racing to solve the problem of AI agents in the enterprise.
The Deep View has covered the latest attempts from Microsoft, Snowflake, AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, and others.
The reason they are all racing to play a role is that AI agents are creating a multitude of problems:
- Data leakage
- Compliance issues
- Privacy challenges
- Security vulnerabilities
- Inaccuracies
- Cost overruns
But most of all, agents aren't living up to the promise of automating workloads and creating enough value to justify the massive token costs that agents are running up in most businesses.
And now, the fact that all the vendors are offering their own agent solutions is starting to cause a new set of problems due to lock-in and a lack of cross-platform compatibility.
"The SaaS providers are now each providing you an agent that they want you to use," said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi on Tuesday at the keynote of Databricks Data + AI Summit. "They have agent builders that they want you to use. They have their own MCP servers… So it's kind of a quagmire. It's a complete mess."
Databricks' answer to the problem is, naturally, its own agent, called Genie. But the real answer is the principle that Databricks always seem to circle back to: open ecosystems.
In an interview with The Deep View, Databricks chief AI scientist Jonathan Frankle said, "The Databricks team has worked really hard over the past decade to make sure things are open. The way I frame it to customers is that I have to win your business every day, because if I don't win your business every day, you can leave… You can just take all this data straight out of Databricks. We don't really have much lock in, and that's kind of the point."
The full Genie ecosystem was announced at Data + AI Summit and includes Genie One for querying data and figuring out tasks, Genie Ontology to give your AI the business context to solve big problems, Genie App Builder for vibe coding business solutions, Genie Agent for reusable, templated agents, and Genie Code for more advanced engineering workflows.
Our Deeper View #
I have to hand it to Databricks for creating solutions that are very polished and easy-to-use while always leaning heavily on an open ecosystem foundation. But the enthusiasm of the community building around Databricks at the Data + AI Summit was what impressed me the most. The customers and partners I talked to loved that they aren't trapped or locked into the Databricks ecosystem. They also talked about Databricks as a partner and collaborator more than a technology vendor that has all the answers to their problems. That's not easy considering a lot of Databricks customers are businesses that have been around for decades and have a ton of legacy systems to manage.