Automation and integration were key themes at Databricks’ annual customer conference, as it showed off new generative and agentic AI features coming to its cloud data lakehouse platform.
At Databricks’ Data + AI Summit 2025 last week, the company showcased a variety of generative and agentic AI improvements it is adding to its cloud-based data lakehouse platform — much as its rival Snowflake did the previous week.
With the two competitors’ events so close together, there’s little time for their product engineering teams to react to one another’s announcements. But that also means they’re under pressure to announce products that are far from ready for market, so as to avoid being scooped, perhaps explaining the plethora of features still in beta-testing or “preview.”
Here are some of the key new products and features announced at the conference that developers and data professionals may, one day, get to try for themselves:
It’s automation all the way down
Many enterprises are turning to AI agents to automate some of their processes. Databricks’ answer to that is Agent Bricks, a tool for automating the process of building agents.
It’s an integral part of the company’s Data Intelligence platform, and Databricks s pitching it as a way to take the complexity out of the process of building agents, as most enterprises don’t have either the time or the talent to go through an iterative process of building and matching an agent to a use case. It’s an area that, analysts say, has been ignored by rival vendors.
Another way that Databricks is setting its agent-building tools apart from those of rival vendors is that it is managing the agent lifecycle differently — not from within the builder interface but via Unity Catalog and MLflow 3.0.
