Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi says most companies don’t need smarter AI models

Ali Ghodsi has a message for every CEO pouring money into the latest frontier AI model: your problem isn’t that the AI isn’t smart enough. It’s that you haven’t told it anything useful about your business. The Databricks co-founder and CEO made the case during a Bloomberg Tech appearance that the current generation of AI models already exceeds what most enterprises can actually use. The gap between what these models can do and what companies are getting out of them comes down to one thing: context. The 90% paradox Ghodsi pointed to a striking disconnect he’s observed while polling audiences across his 2026 speaking engagements. Only about 10% of respondents believe artificial general intelligence has arrived. But roughly 90% say the AI models they use daily are already smarter than most of their colleagues. “We don’t need AI to get smarter,” Ghodsi stated. “It just is lacking context.” The “context” he’s referring to is what he calls “enterprise context”: the proprietary data, institutional knowledge, decision-making workflows, and business logic that make a company’s operations unique. The data infrastructure argument Databricks makes its money helping enterprises organize, manage...