The AI industry’s battle for the knowledge worker is heating up.
On Wednesday, San Francisco startup Databricks launched a new set of agentic AI tools that continuously analyze and organize the reams of data scattered throughout a business—a capability Databricks says will transform the way office workers do their jobs.
“The agents are running in the background all the time. So it’s always on,” Databricks CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi told Fortune ahead of the announcement. “I personally use it every day. Every hour of the day. It’s basically made me a 10x better CEO than I was a year ago,” Ghodsi said.
The product introduction comes a day after Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, released its own set of AI productivity tools aimed at corporate users. Those tools include a new AI-powered spreadsheet application that competes with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, as well as a feature that lets Claude join video calls, allowing the AI to listen to the conversation and “start on the work while people are still talking.”
Databricks’ updated version of its Genie assistant, launched Wednesday, also operates in the background, shadowing an office worker throughout the day, proactively making suggestions and retrieving information based on whatever is happening. A separate “Ontology” feature essentially scans all the data within an organization—from management reporting lines to projects in various departments—so that an individual can quickly access information or run analyses.
“Lots of companies, both big and small, will use this,” said Ghodsi.
The AI industry is stepping up efforts to make inroads into corporations and to broaden the base of paying customers. While AI has transformed the way that software programmers do their jobs, becoming an indispensable tool in the profession, the technology is still in the experimental phase for other business functions where the return on investment is not as clear-cut.
With the advent of AI agents that autonomously perform tasks on a user’s behalf, as well as recent advances in AI model capabilities, some believe the technology may be ready to capture a broader swath of the market.
“We believe the work that knowledge workers perform represented more than $40 trillion in economic value globally in 2025, and with frontier AI’s potential to make them meaningfully more productive, our near-term opportunity is to expand this value and accelerate economic growth,” Anthropic says in the prospectus for its initial public offering, expected next week.
The IPO, which could value Anthropic at $1.4 trillion, is being closely watched, with many in the industry hoping a strong debut on Wall Street will serve as a positive signal for the prospects of the broader AI industry. Databricks, which is still a privately held company, raised $5 billion at a $190 billion valuationin August.
The industry has also been shaken by the recent revelation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s extramarital affair with a woman that U.S. officials believe to be a spy for China. Given the importance of Nvidia’s chips, and its financing, across the AI industry, there are fears of a ripple effect if he is forced to step down.
Databricks’ Ghodsi brushed off the notion however. “I think that Jensen is an amazing CEO. He’s built that company for the last many decades. I think he should continue to be the CEO of that company,” he added.
“I think we will weather through this storm,” he added, noting that the AI revolution is too big to be impacted by the revelations of the Nvidia CEO’s affair.
The post A day after Anthropic’s office push, Databricks jumps in with AI agents that never sleep appeared first on Fortune.
