Jun 24 2026
Artificial Intelligence

Databricks AI + Data: AI-Native Development Is Reshaping Software Creation

Founders from several AI startups explain how AI agents are accelerating engineering, boosting worker productivity and changing enterprise operations, but not replacing humans.

As generative AI continues to mature, one question looms large: If foundation models are becoming increasingly powerful, where will the next wave of value creation occur?

According to leaders from three rapidly growing AI startups, the answer lies not in the models themselves but in the application layer that sits above them.

During a panel discussion at Databricks Data + AI Summit, executives from Cognition, Glean and Decagon described a future in which natural language becomes the primary interface for building software, automating workflows and interacting with enterprise systems.

But despite the rapid advances in large language models, they argued that significant engineering challenges remain.

“A foundation model by itself doesn't provide many of the capabilities enterprises require,” said T.R. Vishwanath, co-founder and CTO of Glean. Organizations need systems that understand enterprise data, enforce governance policies and deliver information tailored to specific users and tasks, he said. Those requirements have helped fuel the growth of application-layer AI companies. Rather than simply passing prompts to foundation models, these platforms combine multiple models, enterprise data sources, security controls and orchestration layers to solve specific business problems.

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For Glean, an AI-powered work assistant that connects to organizations’ business applications, that means connecting to enterprise knowledge systems while preserving permissions and governance. For Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, it means creating infrastructure that allows agents to understand code bases, validate work and proactively assist development teams. For Decagon, which builds AI-powered customer service agents, the challenge is delivering accurate, low-latency interactions at enterprise scale.

“Even if you have 99% performance, that remaining 1% at enterprise scale is 10,000 times a day” that the AI may be hallucinating, said Ashwin Sreenivas, Decagon’s co-founder and president.

As a result, companies are investing heavily in safeguards, testing frameworks and specialized models designed for specific tasks, rather than relying solely on a single frontier model.

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Why AI Success Depends on More Than a Single Model

One recurring theme throughout the discussion was the growing importance of model orchestration.

Rather than standardizing on a single foundation model provider, panelists described environments where dozens of models may be used for different tasks, balancing performance, latency and cost.

Jeff Wang, president of new enterprise at Cognition, said his company evaluates models continuously and routes workloads based on performance and economics. Token costs, he noted, have become one of the most common topics in executive conversations.

Similarly, Glean supports multiple frontier and open-source models while automatically selecting the most appropriate option for a given task. Decagon takes an even more specialized approach, Sreenivas said, using teams of smaller models that each perform a specific function, such as gathering information, generating responses or detecting errors.

The result is an AI stack that increasingly resembles a coordinated system of agents rather than a single monolithic model.

That complexity extends beyond customer-facing products. Panelists said their own organizations are aggressively using AI internally and measuring usage patterns to identify high-value applications.

Sreenivas described how Decagon analyzes internal AI consumption and studies how top users are achieving productivity gains. In many cases, employees are using AI to create highly personalized customer briefings, automate administrative work and streamline customer engagement processes.

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AI Is Changing Workflows, Not Eliminating the Need for People

The conversation also addressed one of the most debated questions in AI: whether automation will replace workers or simply make them more productive.

The consensus among panelists leaned strongly toward augmentation.

Wang said many of the most successful use cases today involve work that is repetitive, tedious or frequently backlogged. Examples include software vulnerability remediation, bug replication and application modernization projects. Rather than reducing the need for engineers, he argued, AI often enables organizations to pursue larger ambitions.

“We are hiring more engineers because they're more productive, and they’re getting our roadmap ahead,” he said.

READ MORE: Federated machine learning gives enterprises a competitive AI advantage.

Vishwanath echoed that view, describing how AI allows employees to complete tasks in minutes that previously required hours. Product teams can analyze hundreds of customer calls, generate presentations and synthesize large volumes of information on a routine basis.

The technology is also reshaping how AI-native companies organize themselves. Several panelists described moving toward smaller, more autonomous teams supported by coding agents and automation tools. These teams can build and ship software more quickly, but they also require stronger testing, governance and coordination mechanisms.

Despite the rapid pace of change, the panelists rejected the notion that AI will eliminate the need for specialized software companies or human expertise. Instead, they argued that as models become more capable, opportunities for innovation will expand alongside them.

“The ceiling is so high,” Vishwanath said. “If the models do more, then we do more.”

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