“For a while, people were thinking, ‘Oh my God, agents and AI are going to replace all these services, and services businesses are all going to go out of business. Now it turns out it’s actually the other way around. We need them more because they need to help us change over our companies so that we are ready for AI,” says Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi.
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi sees a 10-year boom in IT services demand by organizations that will need the channel’s help in preparing data and responsibly establishing artificial intelligence technology stacks.
“For a while, people were thinking, ‘Oh my God, agents and AI are going to replace all these services, and services businesses are all going to go out of business,’” Ghodsi said in answer to a CRN question during a press conference Tuesday. “Now it turns out it’s actually the other way around. We need them more because they need to help us change over our companies so that we are ready for AI.”
The San Francisco-based data analytics platform vendor has been adding head count to its partner teams and seeing solution provider deals where the partner takes over entire departments as the importance of the channel grows in readying end customers for the AI revolution, the CEO told CRN during Databricks’ annual Data+AI Summit, running in the company’s hometown through Thursday.
“We want to partner with those [solution providers] very, very closely,” Ghodsi said. “That’s extremely important. The partners are extremely important.”
[RELATED: Databricks Expands Into Cybersecurity Arena With New Lakewatch Offering]
Databricks CEO: AI Drives IT Services Demand
Michael Patterson, vice president of Databricks solutions at St. Louis-based Perficient—No. 67 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that Perficient has seen a lot of work defining clients’ Databricks strategies and hardening the platform with improved governance. Plenty of client CIOs want to move beyond dashboards and traditional business intelligence to natural language queries and other possible actions in the AI era.
“It is changing fundamentally the operations model of how businesses work because of the data availability,” he said.
Databricks Data+AI Summit 2026: Key Product Announcements
Databricks used its Data+AI Summit to showcase a host of product advancements and even reveal a new acquisition—AI Security Operations Center platform provider Panther.
On the product innovation front, coming soon to Databricks Lakebase is Lake Transactional/Analytical Processing (LTAP), a data processing architecture bringing together online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) utilizing a single copy of data in a data lake.
LTAP promises to eliminate data extract, transform and load (ETL) processes, replication and pipelines by design—an important innovation as developers leverage AI to produce more applications than they could by themselves.
Lakebase serves thousands of customers and handles 12 million database launches per day across the platform, according to Databricks.
Available in beta now is Lakehouse//RT, a real-time version of the Databricks Lakehouse that allows analytics on governed Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg data without separate serving systems, reaching millisecond performance. Powered by the Reyden compute engine, Lakehouse//RT can deliver sub-100-millisecond latency at 12,000 queries per second and increase performance 16 times to that of existing specialized real-time serving data stacks, according to Databricks.
New advancements introduced into private preview include CustomerLake, Genie App Builder, Genie ZeroOps and tag propagation in Unity Catalog. CustomerLake takes Databricks into the marketing industry as an agentic customer data platform that promises unified customer data, AI models, agents, identity resolution, audience building and activation.
Genie App Builder, meanwhile, brings users a fully managed vibe-coding environment for uploading business context and generating live build plans and working app previews connected to real, governed enterprise data. Genie ZeroOps is a background agent in Databricks that autonomously monitors, investigates and proposes fixes for pipelines, jobs, tables, models and other data and AI assets.
And Unity Catalog tag propagation should allow users the ability to automatically carry governed tags from source tables and columns to downstream tables and views as data is transformed. In Unity Catalog, Databricks launched general availability for attribute-based access control policies for row filtering and column masking and said to expect previews “soon” for identity attributes and context attributes.
Databricks also moved Open Sharing SecureConnect into public preview for users looking for a Databricks-managed proxy that routes storage access.
Generally available from Databricks are Genie One, Genie Agents and Genie Code. The vendor also made Genie available as native iOS and Android applications.
The Genie One agentic co-worker aims to help users automate and orchestrate work across structured, unstructured, analytical and operational data inside or outside Databricks. Genie Agents inherit Genie conversations’ memory, sources, instructions and behavior to allow calls by other co-workers to repeat trusted workflows.
And the autonomous Genie Code agent promises to help data teams plan, build and run data engineering, machine learning and analytics workflows, with a dedicated workspace to track progress, review steps and switch between threads, according to Databricks.
Databricks Eyes Security Expansion With Panther Acquisition
As for the Panther acquisition, Databricks did not disclose an estimated closing date or financial details on the pending purchase but did say that Panther’s technology will help users unify data sources, detect threats and investigate alerts with agent swarms.
Panther has more than 100 prebuilt integrations across cloud infrastructure, identity providers, endpoints, networks and applications to avoid the more complex mapping of legacy security information and event management (SIEM).
Databricks is also looking to replace legacy SIEM through the capabilities Panther brings, operationalizing agentic detection and response on top of a unified security lakehouse, according to the vendor. Panther adds to Databricks’ other recent security acquisitions of Antimatter and SiftD.ai.
Founded in 2018, Panther offers a partner program for security consultancies, resellers, implementers and other types of partner businesses, according to the company’s website.
“We are thrilled to join Databricks and help accelerate the security lakehouse vision,” Panther founder and CEO Jack Naglieri said in a statement. “The SOC is at an inflection point: AI is changing how attacks are launched, and defenders can now finally keep pace with them. Together with Databricks, we can arm defenders with sophisticated agents that scale detection, investigation and response.”
