Companies need flexibility, choice as AI becomes a geopolitical issue

With the governments getting more involved in how AI is being used, companies need flexibility and choice instead of being locked in and that is one of the key focus areas for Databricks, said Ali Ghodsi, CEO.

He was responding to ET’s queries on the rising involvement of government in AI during the press briefing at the sidelines of Databricks annual Data+AI Summit 2026 in San Francisco on June 16.

“Anthropic completely shut it (models) down and it is hard to know who is a foreign national and who is not. This is top of mind for everybody. What happens if there's a shutdown of the model? What happens if some model is not allowed to answer certain questions, and so on. So, people want choices. This is not just the Indian thing. It is a European thing, an Asian thing, and also an American thing,” Ghodsi said.


Indian market

India is one of the fastest growing markets for the company, and last year the firm announced a $250 million investment in India to ramp up research and development capabilities and expand the India market.

“It is a gigantic market, and the economy is booming and growing very fast. We are investing heavily in it. Reliance is one of our partners and the SME market is huge for us,” he said. However, he said that the Indian market is much more price sensitive, and the vast majority of the one and a half billion Indians can't afford the same prices that are more common in the US.

“It is very important for us to double down on open source, distilled small models, and regional models that are local and good at all the different dialects. India has over 200 languages and so being able to deal with all those different languages and making sure that the AI is accessible, is something that we're doing. We're partnering closely with Reliance and others in the industry locally there, so it's a super important bet for us,” he said.

The company is deepening the partnership with Indian companies such as Reliance and other companies to offer sovereign services including data, AI and infrastructure for companies, government and public sector, where sovereignty is key.

New launches

With tokenmaxxing in enterprises becoming a key issue, Databricks has introduced spend controls with its AI governance platform, Unity AI Gateway, which help companies keep track of its token spends.

“The CEOs of Fortune 500 (companies) are talking about LLM, token spend cost, and it's difficult for them because they're caught between a rock and a hard place,” Ghodsi said. He explained that they are caught between a rock and a hard place as they want to use AI to innovate, and stay ahead of the competition in the most cost-effective way, This is what Unity AI Gateway does, by cutting down the cost by using cheaper models for the simpler tasks, and the smartest models for the more difficult tasks, and giving cost visibility across these.

The firm has also launched Genie One, an agentic co-worker. Databricks is also making its foray in the marketing with the launch of agentic customer data platform CustomerLake, agentic customer data platform, which helps marketers analyse customer behaviour and personalise experiences.

(The reporter is at Databricks Data+AI Summit in San Francisco at the invitation of the company.)