Databricks has attached the word Genie to at least five different products in fifteen months. If you have lost track, you are not alone. The short version: Genie One vs Genie Agents vs Genie Code comes down to three jobs.
Genie One is the chat app for business users, Genie Agents answer data questions with SQL, and Genie Code is the coding agent for developers. Ontology, ZeroOps, and App Builder are either infrastructure underneath those three, or newer products still finding their feet.
Key takeaways
- Genie One, Genie Agents, and Genie Code are three separate, currently GA products, not three names for one feature: a business chat app, a data-agent layer, and a developer coding agent.
- Genie One and Genie Agents are free for human users through January 31, 2027. Genie Code is not part of that promotion and bills past its 150 free monthly DBUs at a 25% discount through the same date.
- Genie Code is what used to be called Databricks Assistant, relaunched on March 11, 2026.
- Only three of the five Genie products are GA today. Genie ZeroOps is in private preview and Genie App Builder is still pre-launch as of September 2026.
- Genie Ontology, the knowledge graph behind Genie One and Genie Agents, is what Databricks credits for an 84.5% first-try accuracy rate on enterprise questions in its own internal benchmark, against 52.4% for competing coding agents.
Why Databricks has so many products named Genie
Databricks renames its consumer-facing products the way some people rearrange furniture: often, enthusiastically, without warning to the people already living there. Genie is the clearest example on the platform today.
The natural-language-to-SQL feature now folded into Genie Agents reached GA as AI/BI Genie on June 12, 2025, the same month Databricks One launched in Private Preview as a no-code home for dashboards, Genie, and Databricks Apps. From there, the names kept moving.
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| June 12, 2025 | AI/BI Genie (natural language to SQL) reaches GA |
| June 2025 | Databricks One launches in Private Preview |
| March 11, 2026 | Databricks Assistant relaunches as Genie Code |
| April 27, 2026 | Databricks One is renamed Genie |
| June 9, 2026 | Genie is renamed Genie One |
| June 16, 2026 | Genie Agents, Genie Ontology, Genie ZeroOps, and Genie App Builder are all announced together |
| July 9, 2026 | Genie Spaces is renamed Genie Agents |
Finding a 2025 post about "Genie Spaces" or a screenshot labeled "Databricks One" does not mean you were misinformed, just early. Treat every name and status here as accurate only as of publish date, and verify against the official release notes before repeating any of it in a board meeting. A company that renamed one product three times in a year probably is not finished.
Genie One vs Genie Agents vs Genie Code at a glance
Genie One, Genie Agents, and Genie Code split the work by audience, not feature depth: one app to ask and act, one layer to curate trustworthy answers, one agent to write and fix code.
| Genie One | Genie Agents | Genie Code | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | Business users: marketing, finance, sales, HR, leadership | Analysts who curate; business users who ask | Developers, data engineers, data scientists |
| What it does | Chats across your data and apps, writes docs, schedules tasks | Domain-scoped natural language to SQL: answers, queries, tables, charts | Generates and debugs code, builds pipelines and dashboards, plans multi-step fixes |
| Where it lives | Web, iOS and Android, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Excel and Google Sheets, a native macOS app | In Genie One, dashboards, an iframe, or called through an API | Notebooks, the SQL editor, jobs, AI/BI dashboards, the file editor, Lakeflow, MLflow |
| Status (Sept 2026) | GA | GA | GA |
| Price | Free for human users through Jan 31, 2027 | Free for human users through Jan 31, 2027 | 150 free DBUs per user per month, then billed at a 25% discount through Jan 31, 2027 |
Genie Ontology, Genie ZeroOps, and Genie App Builder are not alternatives to Genie One, Agents, or Code: infrastructure underneath them, or separate products still in preview, covered next.
Genie One: the AI coworker for business users
Genie One is, in Databricks' own words, "the simplified Databricks UI for business users, a single entry point for interacting with data and AI without navigating technical concepts like compute, queries, models, or notebooks."
It shows up everywhere your team works: a browser tab, a native macOS app in Beta since August 20, 2026, iOS and Android, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and inside Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets as native rows and columns. It picked up managed connectors for Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Microsoft 365, Atlassian, and GitHub on September 10, 2026, on top of the Jira, Confluence, and SharePoint links Databricks announced at launch.
Genuinely good: governed by default. Every answer is scoped to the asker's Unity Catalog permissions, and every query is audit-logged, a guarantee no general-purpose chatbot plugin offers.
Still rough: it is only as good as the Genie Agents feeding it. A polished coworker app sitting on top of a badly curated data agent just hallucinates with better formatting.
Gotcha: several Genie One features praised in 2026 coverage, chat memory, PowerPoint uploads, web search, are Beta or Public Preview, not GA. Check status before promising a business team a finished feature.
Genie Agents: domain-specific data agents, formerly Genie Spaces
A Genie Agent, per Databricks' documentation, is "a domain-specific natural-language chat interface in Databricks where users ask questions of their data and get back SQL queries, results tables, and visualizations." It was called a Genie Space until July 9, 2026.
Someone still has to build it: Databricks recommends a curator, typically a data analyst with SQL proficiency, who documents datasets, writes example queries, and defines the business's actual vocabulary before anyone can ask a question. Agent mode, GA since July 2, 2026, then runs multi-step reasoning and returns a cited report instead of a single query and a shrug.
Genuinely good: scoped beats sprawling. An agent built for marketing spend answers marketing questions well because it is not guessing about supply chain data.
Still rough: curation is ongoing work, not a checkbox. Consultants who deploy Genie report that answer quality tracks how clean the underlying Silver and Gold tables are almost as closely as it tracks the model itself; ambiguous joins and undefined metrics cause most wrong answers.
Gotcha: hiding a column from a Genie Agent hides it from the model's reasoning, not its SQL: a generated SELECT * can still pull a column you thought was blocked. Databricks Community members have documented this, plus a second gotcha: two curators editing the same agent at once can overwrite each other's changes with no warning.
Genie Code: the AI agent for developers, formerly Databricks Assistant
Genie Code is what Databricks Assistant became on March 11, 2026, a switch the Databricks Community corroborated, built for people who still write code for a living.
It handles autocomplete, natural-language data filtering, and error debugging through Diagnose Error and Quick Fix. Agent mode plans a solution, retrieves relevant tables or notebooks, runs the code, and fixes its own errors, across notebooks, the SQL editor, jobs, AI/BI dashboards, the file editor, Lakeflow, and MLflow. It can also import existing Power BI and Tableau reports, a capability that reached GA on August 20, 2026.
Genuinely good: Agent mode automates real multi-step grunt work, plan, retrieve, run, fix, repeat, without babysitting every step.
Still rough: it is the only Genie product outside the free-through-2027 promotion. Every other Genie product got a going-away-free party through January 2027; Genie Code got a 25% coupon. Review everything it generates before running it: like every coding agent in 2026, it can still be confidently wrong.
The rest of the family: Genie Ontology, Genie ZeroOps, and Genie App Builder
Genie Ontology (Public Preview) is the shared knowledge graph underneath Genie One and Genie Agents. It automatically extracts snippets from tables, queries, dashboards, pipelines, and connected apps, ranks them PageRank-style while enforcing permissions, and Databricks credits it with lifting first-try accuracy on enterprise questions to 84.5%, against 52.4% for competing coding agents, in its own internal benchmark. You do not pick Ontology; it already runs underneath both, enabled by default since August 6, 2026.
Genie ZeroOps (Private Preview) watches your production pipelines, jobs, tables, and ML models so you do not have to, at least not first: it detects silent failures via continuous monitoring, investigates root cause through Unity Catalog lineage, then tests a fix in a zero-copy shallow clone of production before a human approves it. Nothing ships without someone clicking approve, either reassuring or a small hint about how much Databricks trusts an unsupervised agent in production. There is no self-serve toggle; request early access through your account team.
Genie App Builder (pre-launch) lets you describe an app, or drop in a screenshot, and get back a development plan with a live preview, built on Databricks' AppKit SDK and grounded in your Unity Catalog semantics. Databricks announced it June 16, 2026 with private previews "coming soon." If you went looking and found nothing, that is not a bug: it has not shipped broadly yet.
What Databricks Genie costs right now
Every Genie product draws from the same pool: 150 free DBUs per user per month, reset on the first, except for service principals, billed from the first token regardless of product.
| Product | Free allowance | Beyond the allowance | Promo ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Genie One | Unlimited, human users | Not billed during the promo | January 31, 2027 |
| Genie Agents | Unlimited, human users | Not billed during the promo | January 31, 2027 |
| Genie Code | 150 DBUs/user/month | Billed, 25% discount | January 31, 2027 |
| Service principals (any product) | None | Billed from the first token | Not applicable |
Compute Genie triggers, like a SQL warehouse running the query it wrote, is billed separately at standard rates, promotion or not. As a concrete anchor, Databricks' pricing page lists 150 DBUs at $10.50 in US East, varying by region: roughly what your free ride is worth once the meter starts on February 1, 2027, assuming the deadline does not move again. Given the pattern so far, that is not a bet I would take either way.
How to reach Genie outside the Databricks UI
The Genie One MCP server exposes Chat in Genie One as an MCP tool, Beta, enabled by a workspace admin through the Managed MCP Servers preview. It ships five read-oriented tools, genie_ask, genie_poll_response, genie_get_query_result, genie_cancel_response, and view_ask, with Unity Catalog permissions enforced on every call, so you can wire Claude, Cursor, or any MCP agent to ask governed questions without handing it a database credential.
Genie Agents' Agent Mode APIs, GA since August 27, 2026, run the other direction: call them from your own Slack bot, customer portal, or scheduled report, and they run the same multi-step research loop Genie Agents uses internally, streaming back findings, visualizations, and citations. Since August 13, 2026, Genie Agents can also search files sitting in Unity Catalog volumes, currently Beta, alongside the governed tables it already reads.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Genie One, Genie Agents, and Genie Code?
Genie One is the chat app business users open to ask questions and get things done across their data and apps. Genie Agents are the curated, domain-scoped agents that answer those questions with SQL, tables, and charts. Genie Code is the coding agent built for developers working in notebooks, the SQL editor, and pipelines.
What was Genie called before its 2026 rename?
The business-user app was Databricks One, then briefly Genie, before becoming Genie One on June 9, 2026. The curated data agents were Genie Spaces until they became Genie Agents on July 9, 2026. The developer tool was Databricks Assistant until it relaunched as Genie Code on March 11, 2026.
Is Genie Code the same as Databricks Assistant?
Yes. Databricks relaunched Databricks Assistant as Genie Code on March 11, 2026, adding an agent mode that can plan, run, and fix multi-step coding tasks on its own.
How much does Databricks Genie cost right now?
Every user gets 150 free DBUs of Genie usage per month. Genie One and Genie Agents are fully free for human users through January 31, 2027, while Genie Code bills past that allowance at a 25% discount through the same date. Compute Genie triggers, like SQL warehouses, is billed separately.
What is Genie Ontology?
Genie Ontology is the shared knowledge graph behind Genie One and Genie Agents. It automatically pulls context from your tables, queries, dashboards, and pipelines, and Databricks credits it with an 84.5% first-try accuracy rate on enterprise data questions in its own internal benchmark.
Is Genie ZeroOps available yet?
Not generally. Genie ZeroOps is in private preview as of September 2026, and you request early access through your Databricks account team.
Start with one curated Genie Agent, not a company-wide Genie One launch
That is really the entire Genie One vs Genie Agents vs Genie Code decision: pick the product for the audience, not whichever one got the flashiest keynote demo. If you are rolling Genie out for the first time, curate one Genie Agent on your cleanest, most-asked-about domain, let an analyst who knows that data write the instructions and example queries, then hand it to Genie One so business users have something worth chatting with. Turning on Genie One company-wide before any Genie Agent is properly curated just means more people asking a bigger chatbot to guess.
Set a budget in the Account Console either way. The free ride ends eventually, and given this company's habits, do not be shocked if it has a new name by then.
Sources
- Genie overview: family, pricing
- Genie One overview: definition
- Genie Agents overview: ex-Genie Spaces
- Curate an effective Genie Agent: curator role
- Genie Code features and capabilities: features, surfaces
- Monitor and understand your Genie cost: free allowance, billing
- Genie pricing page: DBU-to-dollar anchor
- Genie One MCP server: MCP tools, status
- Use Genie One in Microsoft Excel: Excel, Sheets
- AI/BI and Genie One release notes 2026: rename dates
- AI/BI Genie is now Generally Available: original GA date
- Databricks Unveils Databricks One: launch
- Databricks Launches Genie Code: launch
- Databricks Launches Genie One: launch
- Introducing Genie One, Genie Agents, and Genie Ontology: Ontology benchmark
- Introducing Genie ZeroOps: ZeroOps
- Enabling Governed Vibe Coding for Enterprise Apps: App Builder
- Databricks Community: concurrent Genie space edits: gotchas
- Databricks Assistant is now Genie Code: rename
Names, statuses, and prices were checked against the Databricks documentation, release notes, blog, and pricing page on 13 September 2026. Databricks renames and re-gates these products often, so verify the current state before you rely on any of it. brickster.ai is an independent community project and is not affiliated with Databricks.
