In just over a year since launching Databricks AI/BI, adoption has soared as organizations transform their approach to making data-driven decisions. Today, more than 98% of Databricks SQL customers use AI/BI to put intelligence in every employee’s hands.

To show what’s possible, we’re highlighting a few customers who are leveraging AI/BI to address the classic analytics challenge: striking a balance between flexible data access and robust governance. Instead of relying on static dashboards based on stale imports or dealing with CSV sprawl and shadow models, they’re enabling true self-service on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform with one platform, one source of truth, and one governance layer that scales with demand.

Here are a few examples of how they’re doing it.

Accelerating Access to Insights

In industries where timing is crucial, delays in decision-making result in missed opportunities.

At Virgin Atlantic, the complexity of the airline ticket lifecycle meant commercial and finance teams often waited weeks for analysts to assemble reports. By consolidating data in Databricks and providing conversational analysis access through Genie, business users can now surface deep insights in hours, rather than weeks. Teams can adjust pricing and capacity more quickly, while still operating within a governed framework.

The natural language querying through [Genie] has really helped accelerate our business users. Some of that real deep insight around what’s going on with our bookings with our tickets can take weeks, but now this is reduced to days and hours. — Richard Masters, VP of Data and AI, Virgin Atlantic

Healthcare faces a similar challenge. Premier, which supports two-thirds of U.S. hospitals, needed to give providers timely benchmarking and outcomes data without relying on manual SQL for every query. Analysts were stretched thin, 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 plain-language questions like “How do our readmission rates compare this quarter?” and receive SQL-backed answers validated by analysts. Early reports showed that analysis was running 10 times faster than before, with analysts redirecting their time toward improving models and refining metrics.

One Platform for Thousands of Users

Scaling self-service requires a consistent foundation. When BI tools are separate from the data platform, organizations face data duplication, complex security management, and a loss of end-to-end lineage. 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 daily. Previously, teams managed 30-50 clusters at a time, spending more effort on infrastructure than analysis. By unifying this data in Databricks, Rivian now enables over 1,000 employees to work from a single source of truth. Engineers, reliability teams, and business leaders all use dashboards and Genie to explore data, improve performance by up to 50 percent, and eliminate the overhead of managing fragmented infrastructure.

The conversational engagement with dashboards and with data is really exciting for us because it empowers a broad user base to get quick access, lowers the barrier to entry, and provides a natural, comfortable 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 to Databricks, Genie can also deliver trusted answers directly within collaborative 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, colleagues in trading, product, and acquisition can ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds. The change delivered a 70% efficiency gain in answering routine queries and freed the data team to focus on predictive analytics.

AI/BI Genie now enables colleagues across trading, product, and acquisition to access data in seconds instead of hours or days, freeing specialists for deeper insights and predictive outputs. — Matt Sanderson, Head of Data Products for Channels, The Automobile Association

Brazilian retail giant Grupo Casas Bahia embedded Genie in Microsoft Teams to drive its data democratization strategy. Users at all levels, including C-level executives, can now interact with data in their native language, Portuguese. This has dramatically accelerated decision-making, cutting analysis time on complex logistics and sales questions from 5-6 hours down 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 giving business users trusted self-service access, freeing analysts to focus on higher-value work.

At HP, business leaders once relied on analysts for routine reporting. By embedding Genie directly into Microsoft Teams, HP integrated analytics into the workflow. When Genie encounters unfamiliar business concepts, it doesn’t guess; it can be taught new definitions, ensuring accurate and relevant answers while avoiding the hallucinations common in other tools. Analysts remain in control of governance, but frontline users get immediate results.

Webmotors, a Brazilian automotive marketplace, faced a similar bottleneck. With AI/BI, they provided natural-language access to their single source of truth in the lakehouse. Employees now answer their own questions, and BI support tickets dropped by 72 percent. Hundreds of analyst hours are saved each month, allowing business teams to move forward without waiting in line.

Databricks AI/BI Genie has transformed the way we deliver and consume data across Webmotors. What was once a bottleneck, reliant on manual tickets, slow SLAs, and low data literacy, has become a scalable, autonomous, and monitored self-service ecosystem. — Vivaldo Neto, Head of Data, Webmotors

Scaling Without Trade-Offs

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 metric drift and inconsistent decisions.

Databricks AI/BI avoids this issue because it is an integral part of the platform itself, not a separate system. All queries, whether from dashboards or Genie, run directly against governed data in Unity Catalog. This architecture ensures consistency as adoption expands, while eliminating unnecessary data movement and reducing infrastructure costs.

SEGA Europe, which captures trillions of gameplay events, experienced this challenge firsthand. Dashboards provided visibility, but executives and business teams still lacked direct access. Marketing and finance leaders waited for curated reports, which slowed decision-making in a fast-moving industry. By adopting AI/BI, SEGA gave executives a conversational path to the same governed data that analysts use. With metrics unified in a single platform, answers remain consistent for all users, thereby avoiding the drift that often occurs when managing multiple BI environments.

Analytics That Works for Everyone

These examples all point to the same shift: analytics that are faster because they’re conversational, consistent because they run on governed data, and more widely adopted because they show up in the tools people already use. AI/BI empowers 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 web page for product details and read more customer stories to see what’s possible.

The best way to understand the impact is to experience it firsthand. We encourage you to start a free trial and see how AI/BI can change the way your teams work with data and AI.