Databricks AI/BI Genie

Databricks AI/BI Genie

by Databricks

Conversational analytics: ask questions of your data in plain English and get SQL, tables, and charts back.

See https://www.databricks.com/product/genie/agents

AI/BI Genie became generally available on 2025-06-12 (Databricks blog). Genie is Databricks’ conversational interface for data, governed by Unity Catalog. In 2026 the docs present a “Genie” family of three products: Genie One (single place for business users to ask data questions, explore dashboards and run Databricks Apps), Genie Agents (the domain-specific, curated environments that earlier docs and this note call Genie Spaces; the docs do not state the rename explicitly) and Genie Code (AI coding and data assistant for developers).

Features

• Genie Spaces — domain-specific chat interfaces (e.g. “sales pipeline”) that analysts curate with Unity Catalog tables/views, example SQL queries, metric definitions, and text instructions in the organization’s terminology
• Text-to-SQL with conversational memory — follow-ups like “now show that by month” build on previous turns
• Trusted assets — certified example queries and SQL expressions that anchor answers to vetted business logic
• Genie Benchmarks — curated test questions with expected SQL answers to systematically evaluate and improve a space’s accuracy over time
• Agent mode — multi-step reasoning for complex exploratory questions: creates research plans, runs multiple SQL queries, iterates, and delivers a comprehensive report
• Conversation APIs — embed Genie in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or custom apps
• Dashboard integration — every AI/BI Dashboard includes an embedded Genie space for ad-hoc exploration beyond predefined filters
• Result summaries — auto-generated natural-language summaries of SQL execution results
• Governance built in — generated SQL runs with the asking user’s Unity Catalog permissions; row-level security and column masking apply, so Genie can’t surface data the user isn’t entitled to see

Superpowers

Genie’s differentiator versus generic text-to-SQL tools is the curation layer: analysts package semantics (metrics, certified queries, instructions) into scoped spaces, and benchmarks make accuracy measurable rather than anecdotal. Because it sits on Unity Catalog, governance is inherited rather than bolted on. Best fit: organizations already on Databricks that want to give business users self-serve analytics without opening raw warehouse access — and reduce the ad-hoc query backlog on data teams.

Status of individual features (docs, 2026-10-02)

• Agent mode: generally available per the Databricks AI/BI and Genie One release notes (2026; the Genie Agent mode APIs are also GA). An earlier version of this note, checked 2026-10-02, said Public Preview; corrected 2026-10-05 from search results over docs.databricks.com/aws/en/ai-bi/release-notes/2026. Regional availability (cross-Geo processing outside the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) was not re-checked. Can also analyse unstructured files in Unity Catalog volumes.

Plans and billing (Databricks docs)

• Genie Code: billed pay-as-you-go from 2026-07-08 00:00 UTC, with a per-user monthly free allowance of 150 DBUs of LLM usage. Service principals get no free allowance.
• Genie One and Genie Agents: usage by users is free through 2027-01-31; service principals are billed. This corrects the earlier draft, which said all Genie products became pay-as-you-go on July 6.
• The free allowance covers LLM usage only; SQL warehouse compute that runs the generated queries is billed separately at standard DBU rates. Budgets and cost controls: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/genie/budgets.
• Not verified: the per-question/session estimates (80-100 questions, 20-30 Code sessions) and the serverless rate from the earlier draft; they were removed.

Related

inference-and-serving

Sources

• https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/genie/ (accessed 2026-10-02)
• https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/genie-code (billing section, accessed 2026-10-02)
• https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/genie/agent-mode (accessed 2026-10-02)
• https://www.databricks.com/product/genie/agents (accessed 2026-10-02)
• https://www.databricks.com/blog/aibi-genie-now-generally-available (GA 2025-06-12, via search result, accessed 2026-10-02)