Cofounder, Databricks
Search every verified Patrick Wendell interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Patrick Wendell, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Databricks, has recently appeared at several industry events discussing AI infrastructure and enterprise adoption. At Sierra Ventures' 21st Annual CXO Summit in October 2026, he and co-founder Ion Stoica argued that model intelligence is no longer the primary challenge, emphasizing instead that security, context, and cost discipline are what turn AI prototypes into business value. Wendell stated that at Databricks, which has about 10,000 employees, safety and governance are the biggest bottlenecks to internal AI consumption, and he described pure intelligence as having "almost saturated" for typical enterprise work. He also cautioned against the perception of linear success in startups, describing the company's trajectory as involving "up, down, sideways, hard times, near existential failure" and "lots of starts, stops, and resets." In other appearances, Wendell moderated a September 2026 panel on AI-native stacks with founders from Decagon and Glean, discussing topics such as token cost optimization and the "lump of labor fallacy" in customer interactions. He also participated in an October 2026 session on governing AI agents across multiple models, where he noted the rise of "personal software" and "ephemeral software" that users build quickly for themselves without maintaining for others. In an August 2026 conversation with Hex CEO Barry McCardel, Wendell discussed Databricks' origin story as a Berkeley research group and reflected on open-source models and the strategic importance of data catalogs, saying that customers should not have to worry about which catalog or table format they use.
At Sierra Ventures' 21st Annual CXO Summit, Ion Stoica, Co-Founder of Databricks and Anyscale and Professor at UC Berkeley, and Patrick Wendell, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Databricks, made a clear case: model intelligence is no longer the hard part. Security, context and cost discipline are what turn AI demos into business value. https://www.sierraventures.com/ascend...
How do you govern AI agents once they can act across multiple models, tools, and business systems? Watch the full session → https://www.databricks.com/resources/... Patrick Wendell (Databricks), Peter Steinberger (creator of OpenClaw, OpenAI), and Thibault Sottiaux (Head of Codex, OpenAI) break down what it takes to secure AI agents at scale — from gating agent access to business systems through a governed gateway, to OAuth-based read/write permissions, to why the only real way to govern intelligent systems is with another layer of intelligence watching them. They also cover Codex's sandbox v…
AI agents are application-layer products, not base-model outputs—and the value being captured in the AI era comes from companies that solve enterprise governance, latency, cost, and multi-model orchestration on top of foundation models. This panel brings together founders of leading AI-native companies to explain why a base model alone does not solve enterprise problems, and what it actually takes to ship agents into production. Patrick Wendell (Databricks co-founder) moderates a conversation with Ashwin Sreenivas (Decagon, AI agents for enterprise customer support), TR Vishwanath (Glean, ent…
Patrick Wendell, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, Databricks and Barry McCardel, CEO of Hex talk about the Databricks origin story, whether we've reached peak model saturation and what's actually worth competing on in the age of AI. Follow Patrick: -LinkedIn: / patrick-wendell -X/Twitter: https://x.com/pwendell Follow Databricks: -LinkedIn: / databricks -X/Twitter: https://x.com/databricks Follow Hex -LinkedIn: / hex-technologies -X/Twitter: https://x.com/_hex_tech
00:06:06 AI Viruses 00:12:53 OpenAI's Device Takes Shape 00:21:14 Meta Faces Major Child Safety Case 00:30:00 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 00:40:45 WSJ Mansion Section 00:48:16 Samir Kaul, a general partner at Khosla Ventures, discusses the firm’s investment in Jeff Dean’s Discovery Loop and its potential to apply AI to scientific research with tangible outcomes. He also shares his views on AI regulation, inflated private-market valuations, venture capital strategy, founder support, and the importance of taking bold risks to generate exceptional returns. 01:14:20 Patrick Wendell discusses his role as…
OpenAI CRO Denise Holland Dresser in conversation with Databricks Co-founder Patrick Wendell discussing the launch of ...
The real future of AI's trajectory is being shaped by players who can convert deep data, cloud-first design, and measurable gains ...
Join us for an insightful conversation with Patrick Wendell, Co-founder and Vice President of Engineering at Databricks.
Patrick Wendell talks with John Furrier at Databricks Data+AI Summit in San Francisco, CA. 00:00 - Intro 00:07 - Reunion and ...
Speakers: Patrick Wendell, Co-founder and VP of Engineering, Databricks Kasey Uhlenhuth, Staff Product Manager, Databricks At the Data and AI Summit, we announced several new capabilities that make Databricks Mosaic AI the best platform for building production-quality AI systems. These features are based on our experience working with thousands of companies to put AI-powered applications into production. Announcements include support for fine-tuning foundation models, an enterprise catalog for AI tools, a new SDK for building, deploying, and evaluating AI Agents, and a unified AI gateway for…
Data and AI Summit 2023 AI and Machine Learning keynote by Patrick Wendell Link to learn more https://www.databricks.com/product/ma...
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