In just over a year since the launch of Databricks AI/BI, adoption has skyrocketed as organizations transform their approach to data-driven decision making. Today, over 98% of Databricks SQL customers use AI/BI put intelligence in the hands of every employee.
To show what’s possible, we highlight a few customers who are using AI/BI to solve a classic analytics problem: finding a balance between flexible data access and robust management. Instead of relying on static dashboards based on outdated imports or dealing with scaling and shadowing CSV models, they enable true self-service on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform with one platform, one source of truth, and one management layer that adapts to demand.
Here are some examples of how they do it.
Acceleration of access to statistics
In industries where timing is critical, delays in decision-making result in missed opportunities.
The complexity of the ticket lifecycle at Virgin Atlantic meant that sales and finance teams often waited weeks for analysts to compile reports. By consolidating data in Databricks and providing access to conversational analytics through Genie, business users can now gain detailed insights in hours, not weeks. Teams can adjust pricing and capacity more quickly while still operating within a controlled framework.
Natural language querying through (Genie) has really helped speed up our business users. Some of this really in-depth information about what’s going on with our bookings with our tickets could take weeks, but now it’s down to days and hours. — Richard Masters, Vice President of Data and AI, Virgin Atlantic
Healthcare faces a similar challenge. Premier, which supports two-thirds of US hospitals, needed to provide providers with timely benchmarking and outcomes data without relying on manual SQL for every query. Analysts were tense and static reports often lagged behind evolving clinical questions.
Premier launched conversational analytics with Genie in just three days. Providers and operations leaders can now ask insightful questions like “How do our readmission rates compare this quarter?” and receive SQL-backed answers from verified analysts. Early reports showed that analysis was running 10 times faster than before, with analysts redirecting their time to improving models and refining metrics.
One platform for thousands of users
Scaling self-service requires a consistent foundation. When BI tools are separated from the data platform, organizations face data duplication, complex security management, and loss of the bottom line. Databricks AI/BI avoids this by running natively on the Databricks Platform.
At Rivian, telemetry from more than 70,000 vehicles generates terabytes of data per day. Previously, teams managed 30-50 clusters at a time, putting more effort into infrastructure than analytics. By unifying this data in Databricks, Rivian now enables more than 1,000 employees to work from a single source of truth. Engineers, reliability teams, and business leaders use dashboards and Genie to explore data, increase performance by up to 50 percent, and eliminate the overhead of managing a fragmented infrastructure.
Conversational interaction with dashboards and data is really exciting for us because it allows a broad user base to gain quick access, lowers the barrier to entry, and provides a natural and convenient way to deepen their exploration over time. — Mikey Flynn, Director of Core Data, Rivian
Meeting users where they work
True self-service means bringing insights directly into the applications people use every day. In addition to bringing users into Databricks, Genie can also provide trusted responses directly in collaboration environments like Microsoft Teams and Slack through its conversation APIs.
The Automobile Association (AA), the UK’s leading roadside assistance provider, integrated Genie into Microsoft Teams to solve a key bottleneck: data specialists were overwhelmed with ad hoc requests. Now business, product and acquisition colleagues can ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds. This change resulted in a 70% increase in efficiency in answering routine queries and allowed the data team to focus on predictive analytics.
AI/BI Genie now enables business, product and acquisition colleagues to access data in seconds instead of hours or days, enabling specialists to gain deeper insights and predictive outputs. — Matt Sanderson, Head of Channel Data Products, The Automobile Association
Brazilian retail giant Grupo Casas Bahia embedded Genie into Microsoft Teams to drive its data democratization strategy. Users at all levels, including C-level executives, can now work with data in their native language, Portuguese. This dramatically accelerated decision-making, reducing the time to analyze complex logistics and sales issues from 5-6 hours to just 2 minutes.
Reducing the burden on analysts
In many organizations, analysts are overwhelmed by repetitive requests from business users. AI/BI shifts this balance by providing trusted self-service access to business users, allowing analysts to focus on higher-value work.
At HP, business leaders once relied on analytics for routine reporting. By incorporating Genie directly into Microsoft Teams, HP has integrated analytics into the workflow. When Genie encounters unfamiliar business concepts, he doesn’t guess; new definitions can be learned, ensuring accurate and relevant answers while avoiding the hallucinations common with other tools. Analysts remain in control of management, but frontline users receive immediate results.
Webmotors, a Brazilian automotive marketplace, faced a similar obstacle. With AI/BI, they provided natural language access to their single source of truth at Lakehouse. Employees are now answering their own questions and BI support tickets are down 72 percent. Hundreds of analyst hours are saved each month, allowing sales teams to move forward without waiting in line.
Databricks AI/BI Genie has changed the way we deliver and consume data across Webmotors. What was once a bottleneck of manual ticket connections, slow SLAs and low data literacy has become a scalable, autonomous and monitored self-service ecosystem. —Vivaldo Neto, Head of Data, Webmotors
Scaling without compromise
At enterprise scale, traditional BI often forces a trade-off between speed and consistency. Each new tool or extract creates its own semantic layer, leading to drifting metrics and inconsistent decisions.
Databricks AI/BI avoids this problem by being an integral part of the platform itself, not a stand-alone system. All queries, whether from dashboards or Genie, run directly against the managed data in the Unity Catalog. This architecture ensures consistency in expanding adoption while eliminating unnecessary data movement and reducing infrastructure costs.
SEGA Europe, which captures trillions of gaming events, has experienced this challenge firsthand. Dashboards provided visibility, but executives and sales teams still didn’t have direct access. Marketing and finance executives have been waiting for curatorial news, slowing decision-making in a fast-moving industry. By embracing AI/BI, SEGA has given executives a conversational path to the same driven data used by analysts. With unified metrics on one platform, answers remain consistent for all users, avoiding the drift that often occurs when managing multiple BI environments.
Analytics that works for everyone
All of these examples point to the same shift: analytics that are faster because they are conversational, consistent because they run on controlled data, and more widely adopted because they appear in tools people already use. AI/BI provides every employee with trusted, instant insights, turning data from a bottleneck into a true business accelerator.
Getting started with AI/BI
Ready to deliver intelligent, self-service analytics to everyone in your organization? To see how Databricks AI/BI puts trusted conversational analytics in the hands of every user, explore the AI/BI website for product details and read more customer stories to see what’s possible.
The best way to understand the impact is to experience it yourself. We encourage you to start a free trial to see how AI/BI can change the way your teams work with data and AI.