My Favorite Announcements from the Data + AI Summit 2026

I decided to put together my subjective list of the biggest announcements from Databricks and what they mean. I likely missed a dozen others, but let’s focus on what stood out to me.

Databricks is moving super-fast

Seven seconds to read from cloud storage; it was an impressive demo. I think it will leave the competition speechless, though, for now that capability is limited to select customers in private preview. What it signals is a clear objective: to deliver ultra-fast reads so that open formats can be used to serve end users directly through an application. It is an important step toward building a hybrid database.

Databricks goes full-stack

Fast reads and fast writes, thanks to Lakebase, including writes to open formats. It creates a unified platform both for analytics and operational use cases.

With fast reads and writes, apps are next

With new scaling and micro apps, you can now build customer-facing applications. Thanks to App Builder, which is comparable to Lovable, even complex customer-facing applications become achievable. Once your apps are hosted in Databricks, you need one more element…

Customer data lake

If you need to run campaigns and maintain master records, a customer data lake becomes essential as it allows you to build your own solution (the premise: SaaS is dead) with all the tools to support it.

Genie Ontology

Once you have that single platform holding all your company data, you need a knowledge graph, ideally created automatically, to build a context layer on top of it.

Reverse ETL

As the Lakehouse becomes your primary data and application platform and everything is consolidated there, you will occasionally need to push that data outwards. For example, to run a marketing campaign in Google Ads.

Resilience

None of the above matters if your platform goes down when a region or cloud has an outage. Cross-region and cross-cloud recovery is non-negotiable. This is key for any platform hosting applications, as it enables the components mentioned above to be 100% available.

AI (and why I barely mentioned it)

Every one of the above solutions is powered by AI (master record creation, App Builder, etc.), yet I never once used the word “AI” to describe them. Maybe that is the next stage of the AI Agent ecosystem maturing. There is, of course, plenty of exciting AI news, like open-source Omnigent, but in my view, these things will become table stakes in the near future, far less exotic than they are today. That is precisely why I find the ”non-AI” announcements more significant: they would not have been possible without AI quietly accelerating innovation to a pace we have never seen before.

Ok, my favorite AI Agent update

There is one purely AI announcement that I love. It is an agent that monitors whether everything within your platform is working properly: ZeroOps.

And lastly, not everything is in the cloud

It’s great to see that we have ZeroBus, which can push events from on-premise to the cloud. Now it's joined by on-premises OpenSharing. This is optimal for organizations that can't move everything to the cloud or simply don't want to. Databricks meets you where your data actually lives.