Databricks CEO says AI will make SaaS irrelevant as natural language replaces user interfaces

Databricks CEO says SaaS isn't dead, but AI will soon make it irrelevant | TechCrunch

On Monday, 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. Founder CEO Ali Ghodsi wanted to share these growth numbers because there's so much talk about how AI is going to kill SaaS business, he told TechCrunch "Everybody's like, 'Oh, it's SaaS. What's going to happen to all these companies? What's AI going to do with all these companies? For us, it's just increasing the usage," he says. To be sure, he also wants to deflect the SaaS label from Databricks, priced as it is by the private markets as an AI company. Databricks on Monday also officially closed on its massive, previously announced $5 billion raise at a $134 billion valuation, and nabbed a $2 billion loan facility as well. But the company is straddling both worlds. Databricks is still best-known as a cloud data warehouse provider. A data warehouse is where enterprises store massive amounts of data to analyze for business insights. Ghodsi called out, in particular, one AI product that's driving usage of its data warehouse: its LLM user interface named Genie. Genie is an example of how a SaaS business may replace its user interface with natural language. For instance, he uses it to ask why warehouse usage and revenue spike on particular days. Just a few years ago, such a request required a specific query language, or maybe a special report would have been programmed. Today, any product with an LLM interface can be used by anyone, Ghodsi noted. Genie is one reason for usage growth numbers, he said. The threat of AI to SaaS isn't, as one AI VC jokingly tweeted, that enterprises will rip out their SaaS "systems of record" to replace them with a vibe-coded homegrown versions. Systems of record store critical business data, be it on sales, customer support, or finances. "Why would you move your system of record? You know, it's hard to move it," Ghodsi said. The model makers aren't offering databases to store that data and become systems of record anyway. Instead, they hope to replace the user interface with natural language for human use, or APIs or other plug-ins for agents. So the threat to SaaS businesses, Ghodsi says, is that people no longer spend their careers becoming masters of a particular product: Salesforce specialists, or ServiceNow, or SAP. Once the interface is just language, the products become invisible, like plumbing. "Millions of people around the world got trained on those user interfaces. And so that was the biggest moat that those businesses have," Ghodsi warns. SaaS companies that embrace the new LLM interface could grow, as Databricks is doing. But it also opens up possibilities for AI-native competitors to offer alternatives that work better with AI and agents. That's why Databricks created its Lakebase database designed for agents. He's seeing early traction. "In its eight months that we've had it in the market, it's done twice as much revenue as our data warehouse had when it was eight months old. Okay, obviously, that's like comparing toddlers," Ghodsi says. "But this is a toddler that's twice as big." Meanwhile, now that Databricks has closed on its massive funding round, Ghodsi tells us that the company is not immediately working on another raise, nor prepping for an IPO. "Now is not a great time to go public," Ghodsi said. "I just wanted to be really well capitalized," should the markets go "south" again as they did in the 2022 post-ZIRP crash. A thick bank account "protects us, gives us many, many years of runway," he added.

Under the hood of the AI economy with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi

Databricks just raised $7 billion in equity and debt at a $134 billion valuation. If your eyes glazed over, I don't blame you. This is the company's umpteenth mega-round, and at some point, another private company raising another pile of money stops being news. But here's why this one matters. As Databricks inches closer to an IPO, it's starting to act more like a public company. And the financials it's releasing tells us something more interesting than the size of the check. Of the databases on Databricks' platform, 80% are now being built by AI agents, not people. And these aren't all tech companies. Databricks has over 20,000 customers. It's the clearest evidence yet of something we've been debating since 2026 started: AI agents aren't just writing code, they're building real software inside the world's biggest companies. And that has major implications for the trade. We sat down with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi. He sits at the intersection of all of it -- the models, the data, the infrastructure and the 20,000 companies actually trying to put it all to work. He sees which AI models are winning, which ones enterprises are using and how fast agents are improving, and he has a front row seat to the question the entire software industry is grappling with right now: what happens when AI can build it for you?

Will SaaS Become Irrelevant? Databricks CEO Has a Strong Opinion

Ghodsi reportedly said specific SaaS specialists are under threat Just a week after the software and IT services-led market crash, Databrick CEO has reportedly offered insights into how artificial intelligence (AI) can shape the industry. Last week's stock sell-off occurred after Anthropic announced new built-in plug-ins for Claude Cowork, an AI-powered automation tool for enterprises. It was said that these plug-ins, which allowed the company's AI agent to handle software-as-a-service (SaaS) operations without human intervention, created a panic of AI replacing enterprise products among retail investors. The Databricks CEO has a different perspective on the matter. Not SaaS, But SaaS Specialists At Risk Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch in an interview that AI was not a direct threat to SaaS companies. The data and AI company announced its Q4 2025 earnings results on Tuesday, highlighting that it crossed the $5.4 billion (roughly Rs. 48,867 crore) revenue run-rate, noting a growth of 65 percent year-on-year (YoY). Ghodsi reportedly argued that despite the rise of AI, the company, which offers cloud warehouse for enterprises, did not notice a decline in usage. However, the Databricks CEO mentioned that AI is bound to bring a major shift to how SaaS products are used once natural language becomes the predominant interface. Breaking down his perspective, what Ghodsi means is that historically, retrieving specific insights from a database requires high technical proficiency. Since every SaaS product in itself is a database, retrieving information is bread and butter for tech-forward companies. However, this is where the challenge begins. To ask a database a question, one had to write precise code in Structured Query Language (SQL). Non-coders had to submit a request to a data analyst or developer to build a "special report" or dashboard, which could take up to weeks. However, with natural language becoming the interface, these complexities go away. Anyone with zero knowledge of these tools can now write a prompt about what they want, and the AI agents can handle the rest. Ghodsi told the publication that the real threat in SaaS is that those specialising in a specific company's tools, such as Salesforce and SAP, might become irrelevant as the process itself becomes less complicated. "Millions of people around the world got trained on those user interfaces. And so that was the biggest moat that those businesses have," Ghodsi was quoted as saying. However, he did acknowledge that AI-native companies were better positioned to bring SaaS products that are more compatible with AI agents, which subsequently could offer more value to enterprises than traditional SaaS tools.