Databricks launches always-on AI agents, with Genie meant to shadow workers all day

Databricks, a privately held company based in San Francisco, on Wednesday launched agentic tools that it says continuously analyze and organize data scattered across a business. The updated Genie assistant is meant to run in the background and accompany employees throughout the day, Fortune reported.

What was announced

According to Fortune, the updated Genie runs in the background, tracks what an employee is doing, and uses that to offer suggestions and retrieve information. A separate Ontology feature searches an organization's data, including reporting relationships and the projects of individual departments. The idea is that users can find information or run analyses faster.

Ali Ghodsi, the company's CEO and co-founder, described the product to Fortune as agents that work constantly and are always on. He also said he uses the tool every day and that it has made him, in his words, a much better CEO. That is his own assessment and has not been independently verified.

The agents are running in the background all the time. So it’s always on. - Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, to Fortune

Genie One's June roots

Genie is not a new product. A June 2026 Databricks announcement describes Genie One as an agentic coworker for business teams, available on the web and in iOS and Android apps. The first generation of Genie was built for conversations with data stored in Databricks, while Genie One connects to a wider set of applications and can produce documents, reports, alerts and scheduled tasks.

In the same announcement, the company described Genie Ontology as a context layer meant to continuously extract knowledge about the business from data, AI tools and workplace apps. Genie treats governed data as the ground truth and queries it through SQL instead of relying on fragments of documents. These are the vendor's claims, and the announcement dates from June, not from this week.

Race for office workers

Fortune places the launch in a broader context. A day earlier Anthropic released its own tools for businesses: a spreadsheet app that competes with Excel and Google Sheets, and a feature that lets Claude join video calls and start working while people are still talking. According to the paper, Anthropic's stock market debut is expected next week.

Fortune notes that AI has become indispensable for programmers but remains experimental in other business functions, where the return on investment is less clear. Autonomous agents and advances in models have led part of the industry to believe the technology may be ready for a broader market. The paper presents this as a belief, not a certainty.

What it means for companies

For Polish companies that use Databricks, it is a sign that the vendor is moving from on-demand analytics toward an assistant that works without pause. The sources give no details on availability in Poland, pricing of the new version or rollout, so it is unclear when and on what terms it will reach customers in Europe.

Fortune also quotes Ghodsi on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose situation has raised concerns about the impact on the whole industry. Ghodsi said the AI revolution is too big to be shaken by the revelations. The remark has nothing to do with the product details, but it shows the mood around the sector just before Anthropic's debut.