(2026-02-23) Databricks Ceo Just Dropped The Most Honest Advice About The Future Of Ai

Joe Procopio: Databricks CEO Just Dropped The Most Honest Advice About The Future Of AI. Here’s a little secret for you. The next wave of GenAI success is going to be completely dependent on structured data.

is the reason why you get a certain sense of calm when the CEOs of these massive data companies talk about the future of AI. They’re confident, but thoughtful. Open-minded, but not susceptible to hyperbole, histrionics, and hand-waving

Instead, the data CEOs say common sense things like ““Why would you move your system of record? You know, it’s hard to move it.’”

Earlier this week, data giant Databricks “announced it reached a $5.4 billion revenue run rate, growing 65% year-over-year, of which more than $1.4 billion was from its AI products.”

Now, I said that SaaS was dying a long time ago

What I’m talking about is that the usefulness of the SaaS business model is waning, based on its intractable UX problem — “SaaS companies,” for over a decade, have existed to throw crunched numbers back at sometimes-certified superusers to analyze. At the same time, AI is, theoretically anyway, offering executives and leaders actionable insights, options, and answers. (see (2024-05-21) Procopio OpenAI Is Building 'Her' And Big Tech Is Still Defending SaaS Canned Reports)

My guy Ali Ghodsi from Databricks is taking a different approach but saying essentially the same thing.

knows how well-positioned data companies are for what’s coming in AI.

we are eye-to-freaking-eye when I read passages like:
“…the threat to SaaS businesses, Ghodsi says, is that people no longer spend their careers becoming masters of a particular product: Salesforce.com specialists, or ServiceNow, or SAP. ‘Millions of people around the world got trained on those user interfaces. And so that was the biggest moat that those businesses have,’ Ghodsi warned.”

The SaaS model moat is evaporating at AI scale. Tech has a long and nasty history of creating then replacing its superusers. I know it. You know it. He knows it. He just also knows that a new superuser will be created once everyone realizes that proprietary data and actionable analytics are going to be the bridge to the next wave of “AI magic.”

AI is motion, while data is experience

AI is magnitude, while data is direction. And after the chaos of the “chatbot and porn” stage of generative AI, we’re all realizing that going really fast in the wrong direction isn’t winning.

It’s going to take pragmatic, honest, see-through-the magic guidance as to when and how these SaaS-model companies move forward and survive the next five years.