AI/BI Genie is now Generally Available

Last June, we announced Databricks AI/BI, our entry into the Business Intelligence category, built around AI that deeply understands your data, semantics and usage patterns, and architected from the ground up to leverage the Data Intelligence Platform. AI/BI not only offers a conventional BI experience through Dashboards, it also features Genie, a conversational analytics experience that enables everyone to answer their own data questions through natural language. Today, we're thrilled to share that AI/BI Genie will now join AI/BI Dashboards as Generally Available on all clouds.

What is Genie?

At its core, AI/BI Genie allows users to ask questions in natural language and get instant insights from data. Business users can ask questions like "How is my sales pipeline?" and Genie will answer in a combination of text summaries, tabular data and visualizations. With every response, Genie also provides an explanation of how it arrived at the answer to give users confidence in that output.

Our goal with Genie is to deliver a conversational analytics experience that actually performs as advertised in the real world-trustworthy responses that are accurate and relevant within your organization's unique context. This is a challenge even for the latest and greatest LLMs, as they don't understand the unique context or semantics specific to each organization's data and business.

AI/BI Genie solves this problem by enabling analysts to package data (such as tables and views) along with semantics (like metric definitions, sample queries, text instructions, and certified assets) into a Genie space focused on a specific topic-for example, the sales pipeline.

The Genie space acts as a local knowledge store, marrying semantics extracted from existing assets on the Data Intelligence Platform with curation and feedback provided by expert analysts. In essence, this system enables data analysts to scale their impact by creating a knowledgeable agent that can answer data questions just as they would. It empowers business users to self-serve questions that aren't covered by existing dashboards and reports, freeing analysts to focus on higher-value work.

Updates since announcement

Since we announced AI/BI Genie last June, we've been working hard to introduce more capabilities, trustworthy answer quality and refined user experiences based on the feedback from our preview customers. Here are a few highlights:

• Best-in-class accuracy: Response quality is the top priority for the Genie product team, and our focus has been on addressing real-world issues surfaced by thousands of active customers. For example, we added the concept of value dictionaries, which-as shown in the example below-allows Genie to semantically match a request for "first level group" to the literal value "1st line support group" based on what is in the underlying data. Genie is also now able to handle much larger datasets (zero column count restrictions), complex instructions, and has gone through multiple cycles of model updates.

• Unity Catalog Metric Views:Genie is built natively on the Data Intelligence Platform, and we continue to expand on that foundation. For example, we've added support for Unity Catalog Metrics, allowing customers to use governed, trusted data models to ensure accuracy for critical use cases. With AI/BI Genie, Unity Catalog serves as the single source of truth for both data and semantics-eliminating the need for redundant modeling.
• Support for evaluation and benchmarks:Skilled engineers will tell you that any AI effort should start with an evaluation phase. Failure to do so means failure in production. Conversational analytics experiences are no different - when you create a new Genie space, you are really creating a new AI system for a specific domain. This is why we've added features such as Benchmarks and Ask for Review. Genie Benchmarks are curated test questions with expected SQL answers that allow authors to systematically evaluate and improve the accuracy of Genie's responses over time, while 'Ask for Review' enables end-users to flag specific responses for verification or correction by space admins, fostering trust and collaboration between business users and data teams.

• Ad-hoc analysis with Genie File Upload: One common analysis pattern that we discovered during the preview period was the need to blend a local spreadsheet (like a list of leads from a campaign) with a managed dataset in Unity Catalog (such as Salesforce accounts and contacts) to complete an ad-hoc task. With Genie File Upload, you can simply drag and drop Excel or CSV files into Genie and complete any comprehensive analysis through natural language.

• Genie everywhere: Dashboards and Genie work better together-which is why every AI/BI Dashboard includes an integrated Genie space. Dashboards show what data is available for exploration, while Genie lets users go beyond the limits of predefined slices, filters, and combinations-all within the same experience. Additionally, with the new Genie Conversation APIs, developers can similarly embed Genie into collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or custom internal applications. This opens up new ways for business users to access conversational analytics in the flow of work - without switching contexts or logging into a separate interface.

We have also delivered a range of other enhancements-from improved visualizations to a redesigned user interface to guide end users through their analysis. We plan to continue this high level of feature velocity post-GA; please check out the AI/BI release notesand stay tuned to for more blogs as we continue to add features over time.

Real-world success with Genie

We've been thrilled by the rapid adoption of Genie; over 4000 customers adopted AI/BI Genie during its previewto democratize data and to empower their non-technical users. Here's a sample of what some of our preview customers have shared with us about Genie:

We have many other customers who have seen tremendous success with Genie including Premier Inc, Magic Orange, The AA, and Casas Bahiato name a few. We're excited about enabling more organizations to join them by making Genie generally available.