WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Databases are critical in business and very useful, and AI agents are not only building them but building them so fast IT Ops can’t keep up – creating a new problem.
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Databases have long sat quietly beneath enterprise software stacks — essential, stable and largely invisible. They power everything, yet remain the most conservative layer in enterprise technology, carefully provisioned, slowly changed, and often firmly controlled by human operators. But Databricks argues that the era is ending, and collapsing faster than most enterprises realize.
According to the cloud-based data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) company’s newly released State of AI Agents report, AI agents now create 80% of databases and 97% of test and development environments on the platform. Just two years ago, agents barely registered in database activity, with human developers handling nearly all of that work. The shift signals that AI is no longer confined to copilots, dashboards, or analytics layers. Instead, AI agents are increasingly operating core infrastructure themselves, spinning up databases, branching environments, and managing data workflows at machine speed.
“For forty years, databases were designed under the assumption that a human administrator was in the loop. When AI agents become the primary operators, that “pet” model breaks immediately. Agents operate at a velocity and volume that humans simply can’t match,” said Reynold Xin, Chief Architect and co-founder of Databricks.
He said an AI agent working through a complex coding problem may need to spin up dozens of isolated database environments in parallel, test multiple hypotheses at once, evaluate the results, and then tear everything down – all within seconds. Traditional shared-nothing architectures, where compute and storage live on the same machine, were never designed to handle this volume.
“The provisioning times are too slow, and the storage costs of physically copying data for thousands of environments are prohibitive,” said Xin. That dynamic helps explain why Databricks has pushed aggressively into a new database category it calls “Lakebase.” With Databricks Lakebase now generally available, the company is placing a deliberate bet that databases must evolve beyond static systems built for predictable, human-driven workflows.
The company is recasting databases as an elastic, programmable infrastructure – something AI agents can create, branch, and manage at machine speed.
“We built the Lakebase with two distinct focuses to enable agentic coding. By completely decoupling the transactional engine (compute) from the data (storage residing in the lake), we allow agents to spin up stateless compute heads instantly while accessing the same underlying data without moving it,” explained Xin. “With the explosion of custom apps, IT teams are rightfully afraid of the ‘tsunami’ of maintenance that comes with thousands of new databases. Lakebase turns database management into a serverless, policy-driven experience, ensuring operational burden on IT remains flat.”
