Databricks Targets Business Users With Databricks One, Lakeflow Designer Offerings

Databricks, which has traditionally appealed to coding-savvy data scientists and data engineers, is making a play to broaden its base of users with new products unveiled this week at the company’s Data + AI Summit.

Databricks has long served data development teams, including hard-core data engineers and data scientists, with its flagship Data Intelligence Platform and its myriad data management capabilities.

But Databricks, at its Data + AI Summit in San Francisco this week, is making a bid to provide data management and analysis tools that will allow nontechnical business analysts and business users to make more productive use of the company’s platform.

On stage Thursday, company executives demonstrated Databricks One, a new front-end interface that will provide business users with easier access to a number of Databricks data and AI capabilities, including AI/BI dashboards and the Genie natural language data query tool, as well as access to applications built using Databricks Apps development tools.

They also demonstrated Lakeflow Designer, a no-code tool that data analysts can use to easily build reliable data pipelines without the assistance of data engineers.

Both products were officially unveiled Wednesday but were introduced and demonstrated on stage Thursday.

“Databricks One is a brand-new Databricks experience designed for business users,” Ken Wong, Databricks senior director of product management, said during the keynote presentation. “We want it to be the one place they go to get data and AI.”

“This is a complete reimaging of what Databricks can be for business users in your organization,” said Miranda Luna, Databricks director of product management, while demonstrating Databricks One’s capabilities.

Along with business users and business analysts, Databricks One—currently in private preview—also targets executive teams in finance, sales and marketing.

A key component of Databricks One is AI/BI Dashboards that allow business users to perform advanced analytics, such as forecasting and key driver analysis, and generate visualizations of analytical results. Databricks One also features AI/BI Genie, a conversational assistant that Databricks says provides deep, contextual insight on demand by allowing users to ask questions in plain language and get instant, accurate visual answers backed by data.

Databricks One also provides business users with secure access to Databricks Apps, the company’s development capabilities for natively building and deploying data-intensive analytical and AI applications directly on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Databricks Apps, launched in October 2024, provides a way to package up complex workflows that combine analytics, AI and transactional processing within custom applications for specific use cases.

“Our mission at Databricks is to democratize data + AI,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO, in the Databricks One announcement. "Every person of every skill level should have equal access to work with data and use AI. With Databricks One, we want to make our experience for nontechnical users as amazing as our experience for technical users. This is our first step of making this true so that everyone across the organization can unlock the full value of their data and drive innovation."

Lakeflow Designer Applauded

Data + AI attendees applauded loudly when Databricks managers demonstrated Lakeflow Designer during the keynote. The new software provides nontechnical data analysts with a no-code data ETL (extract, transform and load) approach to building reliable, production-grade data pipelines, according to Databricks.

Data pipelines are traditionally built by data engineering teams. But with such projects often facing backlogs, data analysts sometimes take on the job themselves using low-code/no-code tools that Databricks says can sacrifice data governance, and system reliability and scalability.

Lakeflow Designer, which will be in preview mode later this summer, uses a visual drag-and-drop user interface and a natural language generative AI assistant to create data pipelines with the same scalability, governance and maintainability as pipelines built by code-first data engineers using more sophisticated tools, according to Databricks.

While targeted toward nontechnical users, Lakeflow Designer is backed by Databricks Lakeflow, the company’s data pipeline development platform for technical data engineering teams that was unveiled in June 2024. This week Databricks announced that Lakeflow is now generally available.

Data Warehouse Migration

At the Data + AI Summit, Databricks also introduced Lakebridge, a free, AI-powered data migration tool to help customers move off legacy data warehouse systems to Databricks SQL, the company’s data analytics software within the Databricks Lakehouse platform.

Lakebridge is based on technology Databricks acquired in February when it bought BladeBridge, a developer of AI-powered enterprise data warehouse migration software. Databricks said Lakebridge can automate up to 80 percent of a migration project, including data profiling, SQL conversion, validation and reconciliation tasks.

Meanwhile, Databricks and Google Cloud unveiled a strategic AI partnership through which Google Cloud’s Gemini models will run natively on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

And Databricks and Microsoft unveiled a multiyear extension of their strategic partnership that covers Azure Databricks, a joint offering from the two companies that integrates Databricks’ data, analytics and AI capabilities into the Azure cloud ecosystem with connectivity to Microsoft’s Power BI, Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Purview.