Databricks’ new AI agent tells CEO Ali Ghodsi the unvarnished truth

ملخص مفصل

At 12,000 employees, AI Ghodsi is the first to admit that he can't know everyone and that they are unlikely to confess the things that go wrong to him. But he doesn't need them to. He uses Databricks' newly revised Genie agent for that.

Databricks on Wednesday unveiled an updated version of its AI agent Genie, which can now perform multi-step jobs that take extended work to finish. It does this through an ontology that Databricks built to give Genie the context it needs from the information that customers store on the Databricks platform.

Corporate leaders can now assign the agent a wide range of tasks, and it will complete them unsupervised, the company says. To prove the point, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi showed me how he uses it internally. Instead of a product demo, he fired up his actual agent and walked me through his most recent chats and charts.

He showed me how it analyzed the parts of an employee satisfaction survey where the company didn’t score well, and how it helped him rate (and discard) fixes for those low scores that some executives suggested. He showed me how it summarized a big sales pitch to a prospect that went poorly — including the features the prospect said it needed before buying.

It also prepped him for a podcast interview by reviewing his previous appearances and developing likely questions. While we talked, he even had it tell him what he should say to me. (And its advice on that wasn’t bad.)

The fascinating part was that Ghodsi was using Genie to find the stuff that he’s now unlikely to hear as the big boss. It was a source of unvarnished truth about what wasn’t going well that he needed to address.

“Have you heard of Dunbar’s number? The magic number is 150,” he said when I pointed this out. Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it’s theoretically the maximum number of people with whom humans can maintain stable relationships. In a small startup, a CEO knows everyone, has direct relationships with them, and they feel safe to tell him negative info straight up.

With 12,000 employees, Ghodsi is the first to admit he can’t know everyone. At that size, a salesperson isn’t likely to confess a disastrous sales call to the CEO.

“Anyone who has more than 150 employees, which…

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