Ben Horowitz: Databricks now gets more queries from AI agents than from people
What's the story? In a long essay published on 27 October 2026, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and Michael McGuiness argue that Databricks is turning into the system of record that AI agents need to do real work inside companies. The headline stat: three years ago every interaction on Databricks involved a human; today the company sees more queries from agents than from people, and more than 17 million databases are launched by agents every day.
The numbers: The authors say Databricks crossed a $7 billion revenue run rate in September, growing 80% year on year, at a $190 billion valuation. They trace four product waves: Spark, the Lakehouse, Lakebase (operational Postgres on lakehouse storage) and now agents, sold through products such as Agent Bricks, Unity Gateway and Genie Ontology.
The bigger argument: Agents need more than a model. They need shared state, an agreed meaning for the company's data, permissions and budgets, and a way to be graded on the company's own tests. Horowitz and McGuiness argue that firms which own that record can swap AI models without losing what they have learned, and that cheaper internal coordination will let small teams do what used to take thousands. Their prediction for work is less "everyone becomes an engineer" and more "everyone becomes a manager" who specifies, delegates and checks work.
Snowflake pushes back: A day later, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, quoting Horowitz's post, asked Databricks to "release all the numbers": does 80% growth become 65% without pass-through inference, what is left without AI-native customers, how much comes from one-time moves from software licences to services, and what are free cash flow, RPO and cRPO, GAAP and non-GAAP operating margins and dilution. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi replied that the two companies are complementary and suggested Snowflake buy its AI tokens through Databricks, which offers cheap open-source and frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok) through its Unity Gateway with smart routing, budgets and access controls. He said most Databricks customers had cut token spend by about 30% in recent months while token volumes rose, and closed with: "Quick POC?" Databricks is private and does not publish audited financials.
Worth knowing: a16z is a Databricks investor and Horowitz sits on its board; the company figures are self-reported.
Source: a16z.com, Ben Horowitz on X, Sridhar Ramaswamy on X, Ali Ghodsi on X
