Hello Genie Community 👋
Nearly 1,400 of you have joined this community since we launched it just before the Data + AI Summit — and on July 29 we ran our very first virtual Genie Community Session, co-hosted with Advancing Analytics, a Databricks Gold consulting partner and one of the UK's most recognised Databricks practices.
An enormous thank you to Terry McCann, Ashley Warren and Adam Jackson at Advancing Analytics, to Felix Baker at SEGA and Mehul Bhuva at Corteva Agriscience, and our very own Harshit Rai for sharing their success stories with Genie. Another huge thanks to the rest of the all-star Databricks team who supported in the chat and Q&A throughout: Thor List, Youssef Mrini, Lingeshwaran Kanniappan, Christophe Chieu, Valeria Kozel, Victoria Koval and Mandy Ross.
▶️ Watch the recording: If you registered for the session, you can access the recording link but you will need to sign into Zoom with the email you registered with. If you have trouble accessing the recording please get in touch with samantha.menot@databricks.com
Genie Community Session #1 — full recording
Passcode: 6s$P*irL
What we covered
Kickoff & introductions — Terry McCann, CEO & Co-Founder, Advancing Analytics and Thor List, Director of Partner Alliances, Databricks, on the partnership and why Genie matters: LLMs are only as useful as their access to your data. Point Claude at three terabytes and you'll wait hours; Genie already knows the data, the metadata, and how your company uses it.
The Genie Community purpose & Genie enablement updates — Samantha Menot, Staff Customer Enablement Architect, Databricks. Why we built this: a practitioner-led, community-driven space for technical and non-technical Genie users to share expertise, ask the questions they're stuck on, and teach each other. Plus the Databricks-funded enablement on offer — details further down this post.
Getting started with Genie governance — Ashley Warren, Senior Analytics Consultant, Advancing Analytics. A brilliant reframe: the hardest part of Genie isn't the tech, it's people and process. Ashley covered where Genie Ontology fits — a pre-computed knowledge graph across your Databricks estate and connected apps (Slack, Teams, SharePoint, Google Drive), governed in Unity Catalog rather than tied to a single workspace — why a well-governed estate produces better answers, and the three questions every Genie implementation must be able to answer: accountability, responsibility, enablement. If your users can't answer those three, they won't trust Genie. And if they don't trust it, they won't use it.
How SEGA does Genie — Felix Baker, Head of Data Services, SEGA. Consolidating game analytics from 140+ SEGA titles, cross-platform commercial data (Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo), player accounts, sentiment, wishlist data and 20 years of product metadata onto one global Databricks platform — replacing a pre-Genie world of BigQuery, Redshift, SQL Server, Power BI, Tableau and a lot of Excel. Six purpose-built Genie agents now serve the business (gameplay KPIs, revenue, sentiment, marketing, ownership), answering in English or Japanese with no analyst bottleneck. Felix also braved a live demo — a question spanning two Genie spaces, and topic-modelled player review analysis straight from a dashboard visual. Work that used to be a full-time job for someone reading 600 reviews, done in seconds.
Automated Genie Spaces & Dashboards — Mehul Bhuva, Data & AI Platform Engineer, Corteva Agriscience. What happens when adoption goes really well: a "Genie space explosion," duplicates everywhere, no inventory, no promotion path, engineering as the bottleneck. Mehul showed the metadata-driven framework Corteva built — business users author in dev via a Databricks App, requests route through a governance approval workflow, and a deployer job promotes Genie spaces and dashboards across dev/test/staging/prod with automatic catalog and parameter substitution. No Git, no PRs, no drift. Days down to minutes — and it proved itself during a full tenant migration.
Genie 1 Scheduled Tasks — Harshit Rai, Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer, Databricks. Born from a real gap spotted at a customer leadership hackathon: if you ask the same question every week, you shouldn't have to open Databricks to get the answer. Harshit demoed turning repeatable questions into scheduled prompts that run on a cadence and land in your inbox — with a link into a Genie 1 chat thread that already holds the full context for follow-ups.
Q&A and Kahoot quiz — hosted by Adam Jackson, Advancing Analytics.
The discussion was the best part
The Q&A was genuinely excellent — thank you to everyone who unmuted. Threads worth rewatching:
How do you move a business off Power BI and build trust in Genie? Don't big-bang it. Train, inspire, move piece by piece, lean on champions, and demo in small groups of 5–10 rather than 40 or 100. Treat Genie a bit like a colleague who occasionally needs coaching to reach the right answer — and show people how you fix it when it doesn't. Trust takes a long time to build and moments to lose.
Can you restrict context without opening up all the data? Yes — scoped Genie agents per domain, room-level access control, user permissions and masking respected exactly as if they'd written the SQL themselves, instructions that say "I don't have access to that" instead of hallucinating, and a supervisor layer (Genie 1 or Agent Bricks) routing questions to the right agent.
How is Genie Ontology kept up to date? Designed to be largely automated and self-updating, lives in Unity Catalog across your estate rather than one workspace — and you can still interact with it to correct anything that looks wrong.
What happens when someone hits an access wall? Instructions can point them to the right request path rather than leaving them stuck.
Congratulations to our quiz podium winners — NW (first place), Swapi and Sandeep B — and to runners-up EP and Mel. Please contact samantha.menot@databricks.com and adam.jackson@advancinganalytics.co.uk for your prizes including a sweet swag goodie box, public training vouchers and 30-day Databricks Academy Labs licences. 🏆
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🧠 New: the Genie Hub is live
If you want somewhere to keep learning between sessions, the Genie Hub on Databricks Community is now open — published technical articles, blogs, practical guides, best practices and real-world use cases from the Databricks team, MVPs and community experts.
Inside you'll find:
✨ Real-world use cases and customer stories
🧰 Tips, tricks and best practices
🙋 A place to ask questions and get answers
🚀 Inspiration from what others are building with Genie
👉 Visit the Genie Hub · Read the launch announcement
Whether you're just getting started or already building, it's the place to ask questions, share ideas and discover what's working for other teams. The best ideas are built together — if you've solved a Genie challenge, written something up, or have a question to ask, we'd love to hear from you there. Congratulations to Tushar Parekar, Amanda Ross and team on the launch! 🎉
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📅 Product Roadmap session — 20 August
Our next Databricks Product Roadmap session is on 20 August, and it includes Genie updates. If you want to hear what's coming — including where Genie Ontology and Genie 1 are heading — this is the one to join.
👉 Register for the Product Roadmap session
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🎓 Free, Databricks-funded hands-on training — 11–13 August
The AI/BI + Genie Launchpad is a three-day hands-on learning series, 100% Databricks-funded, no cost to attend. Join one day or all three:
Day 1 — [AI/BI for Data Analysts](https://www.databricks.com/training/catalog/aibi-for-data-analysts-3643)
How to use AI/BI in everyday workflows.
Aug 11, 09:00–13:00 BST → Register (EMEA / APJ)
Aug 11, 09:00–13:00 ET → Register (AMER)
Day 2 — [Building Reliable Conversational Agents with Genie](https://www.databricks.com/training/catalog/building-reliable-conversational-agents-with-genie-5217)
How to build trusted conversational agents with Genie.
Aug 12, 09:00–13:00 BST → Register (EMEA / APJ)
Aug 12, 09:00–13:00 ET → Register (AMER)
Day 3 — [Business Impact Accelerator: Answering Business Questions with Genie](https://www.databricks.com/training/catalog/business-impact-accelerator-answering-business-questions-with-genie-5361)
Turn AI capabilities into measurable business outcomes.
Aug 13, 09:00–12:00 BST → Register (EMEA / UK)
Aug 13, 09:00–12:00 ET → Register (AMER East)
💡 Running it for your whole team? Databricks can deliver any of these classes as a dedicated private cohort for your company, fully funded, with a minimum of 100 participants. Further cohorts are also running September through early November across EMEA, AMER and APJ time zones. Reach out if you'd like to explore either.
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📋 One ask: please complete the survey
This was our first community session and we're building the next ones around what you tell us. It takes just a couple of minutes:
👉 https://surveys.training.databricks.com/jfe/form/SV_7TBA6d13mMIBBTE
Tell us what worked, what didn't, and — most useful of all — what you want to see next. More live demos? Deeper governance? Ontology? A hackathon?
Thank you to everyone for being part of our first Genie Community session!
Keep the conversation going — post your Genie wins, your blockers and your questions here or over in the Genie Hub. Office hours and more community sessions are coming.
Share the Genie goodness and let us know if you’d like to present next 🙂 🧞