To create value for employees and customers, companies implementing AI must be able to access and interpret the scads of internal data needed to fuel it—but much of that data is sequestered in systems and formats that are unreachable to the teams that need it most. Databricks is in the business of unlocking that information, which makes chief information officer Naveen Zutshi something of a locksmith. “We have around 11,000 employees,” he says. “My focus has been: How do I enable all of them to be builders?” 

The answer, he believes, is Genie, an AI agent that employees can use to query company data quickly and easily, then act on it by conducting research, automating tasks, or even building applications. “Genie is essentially an AI co-worker," says Zutshi, whose work on Genie’s underlying data governance has enriched not only Databricks—“customer zero” for the company’s products, he adds—but also customers like Novo Nordisk, Virgin Atlantic, and Unilever, all of which are using Genie to enable what he calls the “democratization of data and AI.”

Disclosure: Investors in Databricks include Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO.