Databricks launches Predictive AI Functions in beta
Databricks announced that Predictive AI Functions are now in beta, offering SQL-native functions that let analysts and business users run forecasting, driver analysis and anomaly detection directly in SQL, dashboards and Genie without building or managing models. The launch adds four functions — ai_top_drivers, ai_detect_anomalies, ai_predict_value and ai_predict_class — and improves ai_forecast, which is powered by a pretrained transformer-based time-series foundation model and needs no tuning, with support for holidays and external covariates. Databricks says ai_forecast outperforms a leading cloud data warehouse's equivalent and its own previous version on the fev-bench benchmark, though the comparison vendor is not named; within Genie only ai_top_drivers is available today, with the others listed as coming soon.
It packages forecasting, driver analysis and anomaly detection as SQL functions, potentially easing data-science bottlenecks so business teams can get model-backed answers themselves.