OpenAI and Databricks Strike $100M Deal to Sell AI Agents (www.wsj.com)

OpenAI and Databricks signed a multiyear, $100 million partnership to market AI services that help large enterprises build agents that operate over customers’ own data. The deal is structured to simplify deploying AI-driven assistants and automation by pairing OpenAI’s models and agent tooling with Databricks’ enterprise data platform, making it easier for businesses to connect secure, governed datasets to conversational and decision-making agents. This collaboration is significant because it addresses two major enterprise hurdles: integrating large language models with proprietary data (often via retrieval-augmented workflows) and meeting requirements for security, governance and scale. For the AI/ML community, the pact signals faster commercialization of agent design patterns, more turnkey stacks for RAG and agent orchestration, and heightened competition among cloud and AI vendors. Practically, expect accelerated adoption of enterprise agents, tighter toolchains for data-to-model pipelines, and renewed focus on compliance, vector search, data pipelines, and monitoring as companies operationalize AI on sensitive, large-scale data.