Databricks' Data + AI Summit 2025 was a landmark event. With over 22,000 data professionals gathered in San Francisco, and heavyweights like Jamie Dimon and Satya Nadella sharing the stage, it was clear we’re entering a bold new era for Data and AI. For us at Origin Digital, it was incredibly motivating to be part of it.
The message was loud and clear: Databricks isn’t slowing down. They’re doubling down on their mission to democratize data and AI for every enterprise, not just through vision, but through relentless product innovation. While most tech conferences announce one or two key features, Databricks dropped more than ten major product updates, several of which we’re particularly excited about.
As a company focused on helping enterprises build Data + AI apps on Data being stored in Databricks, below are a few of the updates we’re most excited about.
Lakebase: Operational + Analytical in One Unified Engine
Announced on Day 1’s keynote and born from Databricks’ acquisition of Neon, Lakebase merges low-latency transactional (OLTP) and analytical workloads on the Databricks Lakehouse platform. It enables companies to build intelligent, AI-powered apps without needing custom ETL pipelines.
Highlights include:
- Separation of Compute + Storage for cost efficiency and scalability
- Database Branching for Git-style testing and development
- AI-Native Architecture, including support for online feature stores and agent readiness
- Serverless and Cloud-Native with reduced operational overhead
Lakebase positions Databricks to power modern, intelligent applications with the same simplicity and scale as cloud-native transactional databases, while staying rooted in open standards.
Agent Bricks: Enterprise-Grade AI Agents
Another blockbuster announcement was Agent Bricks, Databricks’ platform for building, optimizing, and deploying enterprise AI agents. Developed from their 2024 MosaicAI acquisition, Agent Bricks is designed to eliminate the friction and guesswork of building AI agents and assistants.
Key capabilities:
- End-to-End Agent Creation – Define the task, connect enterprise data, select or fine-tune models
- Synthetic Data & Task-Specific Benchmarks for rapid agent optimization
- Background Evaluation & Continuous Tuning
- Built-in Governance via Unity Catalog, MLflow 3.0, and Databricks' security stack
Example use cases span document extraction, enterprise knowledge assistants, summarization, and multi-agent orchestration, accelerating real-world deployments across industries
Unity Catalog: A Business Intelligence Powerhouse
Databricks continues to expand Unity Catalog as the industry’s only unified governance layer across clouds, formats, and compute engines. This year’s updates focus heavily on empowering both technical and business users.
Notable additions:
- Support for Apache Iceberg, unifying governance across Delta and Iceberg
- First-Class Business Metrics that integrate across BI, SQL, and notebooks
- Discover: An AI-powered internal data marketplace organized by business domains
- Intelligent Signals that surface data quality, usage, and certification insights
- Natural Language Integration via Databricks Assistant
Unity Catalog’s evolution is turning it from a data governance tool into a foundation for business self-service and trusted insights at scale.
AI/BI Suite: From Dashboards to Conversations
Databricks also continues to blur the line between BI and GenAI with its expanding AI/BI Suite, highlighted by the general availability of Genie, their conversational analytics tool.
New features include:
- Ask Genie: Natural language Q&A across dashboards
- Genie File Uploads: Import CSV/Excel files directly for instant analysis
- Custom Dashboards: More flexibility with calculations, scheduling, and multi-view layouts
- Databricks One: A no-code, unified interface for business users to interact with data apps, dashboards, and AI, all in one place
Together, these updates represent a big step toward making intelligent analytics accessible to every knowledge worker, not just analysts and engineers.
A Clear Vision, Backed by Action
Databricks has spent the last decade helping companies modernize their data platforms. But in 2025, they made it clear they’re focused on enabling business outcomes, whether through intelligent data apps, AI agents, or real-time insights.
This aligns directly with our mission at Origin Digital: helping companies activate their data to drive business impact. Whether it’s building GenAI solutions, visualizations, or modern data products, we’re excited to guide our clients through this next chapter.
And beyond the tech, we appreciated the grounded wisdom shared by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon:
- “See your customers and colleagues in person, progress happens face to face.”
- “Have grit. Business is hard, but easier when you’re surrounded by a good team.”
At Origin, we couldn’t agree more.
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