Databricks and OpenAI Launch Groundbreaking Partnership to Bring Frontier Intelligence to Enterprises with Databricks Agent Bricks

$100 Million Partnership Brings OpenAI Models Natively to 20,000+ Customers on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 25, 2025 /CNW/ -- Databricks and OpenAI today announced a multi-year partnership to make OpenAI models natively available within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Databricks' flagship AI product Agent Bricks. OpenAI models will be available to all 20,000+ Databricks customers across clouds. This collaboration unites two of the world's most impactful technology companies, with a $100 million partnership, to deliver frontier AI for enterprises around the world. With Agent Bricks, organizations can build, evaluate and scale production-grade AI apps and agents on their governed enterprise data leveraging OpenAI latest models, including GPT-5, featuring state-of-the-art performance across coding, math, writing, and reasoning. Under this partnership, GPT-5 will be a flagship model for all Databricks customers.

Enterprise-Ready AI Apps and Agents
Businesses need AI agents that can analyze and act on their enterprise data, automate complex workflows and deliver reliable insights while meeting strict standards for accuracy, security and governance. Developing AI agents can often require copying data, juggling multiple tools, uncertain evaluation techniques or cost and quality trade-offs. Databricks customers now benefit from GPT-5 and OpenAI advanced natural language processing, reasoning and complex decision-making to build high-quality, governed AI agents using Databricks Agent Bricks. OpenAI models are readily available where enterprise data already lives, requiring no extra setup and no data movement and with guaranteed high-capacity processing.

Customers use the Data Intelligence Platform and Agent Bricks to find and treat diseases earlier, identify ways to become more energy efficient, detect financial fraud, accelerate application development, and much more.

Quotes:

• "We're seeing overwhelming demand from enterprise customers looking to build AI apps and agents on their data, tailored to their unique business needs," said Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. "This partnership makes it easier for enterprises to securely leverage their data and OpenAI models at scale with best-in-class governance and performance."
• "Enterprise demand for frontier AI is accelerating, and with Databricks, we're making its deployment even simpler without compromising the high bar for performance and production," said Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI. "Our partnership with Databricks brings our most advanced models to where secure enterprise data already lives, making it easier for businesses to experiment, deploy, and scale AI agents with real impact."
• "At Mastercard, we are focused on delivering AI solutions that make commerce safer, smarter, and more personalized. Agentic solutions also make our internal operations stronger by automating processes and optimizing performance across our systems," said Greg Ulrich, Chief AI and Data Officer at Mastercard. "For any use case, AI agents come down to three things: quality, scale, and trust. This partnership between Databricks and OpenAI enables us to build on the strong foundations we've established with each firm and provides us the opportunity to build trusted AI agents that harness the latest OpenAI models—delivered with the speed, security and scale of the Databricks platform."

Partnership Highlights:

• Frontier Models on Enterprise Data: Databricks customers can now bring OpenAI models directly to their enterprise data — accessible in SQL or via API — to run LLMs at scale, enrich their data and securely build high-quality custom agents.
• Dedicated High Capacity: Databricks customers benefit from access to high-capacity processing across the latest OpenAI models.
• Production-ready AI Agents with Agent Bricks: Agent Bricks builds production-ready AI agents by measuring the accuracy of models like GPT-5 and gpt-oss with task-specific evaluation and LLM judges. Agent Bricks then tunes and optimizes the model to deliver high-quality, domain-specific outputs.
• Unified Governance and Built-in Observability: Databricks Unity Catalog provides end-to-end governance and responsible AI controls, helping ensure compliance with security, access, and ethical standards — so teams can ship agents into production with confidence.
• Collaborative Innovation: Databricks and OpenAI technical teams will work closely together to continually improve and optimize OpenAI models for enterprise use cases, ensuring high performance and rapid iteration for AI workloads.

This partnership builds upon the companies' existing work together, where OpenAI leverages Databricks for the processing of AI data to help generate insights that enhance product quality and elevate the ChatGPT experience. Databricks was also one of the first to host gpt-oss, the OpenAI open weight model.

Join us on November 11 (AMER) and November 12 (APJ / EMEA) for The Future of AI: Build Agents That Work, a conversation with Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO at Databricks, and Sam Altman, Co-founder and CEO at OpenAI, on where AI is heading and how to build agents that deliver real results. Register here.

About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to take control of their data and put it to work with AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, MLflow, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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