DATABRICKS
From factory floor to flight line The applications of Genie that Databricks is seeing in manufacturing and supply chain are among the most compelling.
In supply chain planning, Genie is being used to enable top-down scenario analysis— something Shiv says most supply chain tools have historically failed to support.
He expands:“ If you’ re a chip manufacturer and a major smartphone manufacturer reduces the forecast for the next phone, what is the impact? What am I selling less of? What does that mean for the capacity allocation I have at my fabrication facilities?
“ That kind of analysis has been missing from most supply chain tools because they all optimise for procurement, for bottom-up demand forecasting, for logistics – but nobody’ s optimising the whole.”
For companies operating physical assets, such as rigs and wind turbines, the shift is equally significant. Executives in these environments do not want sensor-level alerts. Instead, they want to know whether there is a material risk to their operation, whether financial or safety-related. Genie allows them to ask exactly that.
A striking example comes from Joby Aviation, an electric air taxi developer and Databricks customer. Engineers at Joby use the platform to rapidly analyse flight test logs after every test, a process that directly governs how quickly the company can move to its next test and ultimately meet its Federal Aviation Administration certification timeline.
“FOR BUSINESS USERS WHO DON’ T WRITE CODE, GENIE IS AN EXCEPTIONAL CAPABILITY”
Shiv Trisal Global Industrials GTM Lead Databricks
“ The ability for AI and humans to quickly go through these test logs and close that process with an effective plan has been extremely successful,” Shiv says.
The broader point concerns engineering productivity, with studies suggesting that engineers spend as little as 40 % of their time on active engineering work. The rest goes on searching for data, navigating inadequate tools and correcting errors caused by missing information.
Shiv says:“ How do we make these engineers – the most costly and most innovative resources inside these companies – more productive? That’ s an area I see a lot of promise in.”
70 June 2026