From RAG to ontology: Databricks bets on context as the key to trusted AI agents
First came vector databases, then RAG. Now, the next frontier in enterprise AI is taking shape: context layers that give autonomous agents a shared understanding of the business, a vision Databricks is advancing with Genie Ontology. Currently in preview, Genie Ontology automatically extracts business context from enterprise data, dashboards, queries, pipelines, documents, and applications and organizes it into a living graph that AI agents can use to understand how an organization operates. Showcased at the company’s Data + AI Summit, Genie Ontology uses a ranking system inspired by Google’s PageRank to identify the most authoritative business definitions within an organization. Rather than treating all sources equally, it weighs factors including who created the information, how widely it is used, its links to certified datasets and assets, and how recently it was updated before determining which answer an AI agent should rely on, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said during his keynote late