OpenAI GPT-5.2 and Responses API on Databricks: Build Trusted, Data-Aware Agentic Systems

OpenAI GPT-5.2 is now available on Databricks, giving teams day one access to OpenAI’s latest model inside the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. This release also adds native support for the Responses API, which unlocks the full set of OpenAI model capabilities, allowing developers to build agent systems more quickly and with far less custom integration work.

When combined with Databricks Agent Bricks, developers can securely connect the model to governed data, evaluate every response with custom metrics, and deploy and monitor agents reliably at scale. Together, these capabilities provide a foundation for building AI agents that can reason accurately and act safely on your enterprise data and processes.

GPT-5.2 Features and Benefits

GPT-5.2 improves directly on GPT-5.1 in the areas that matter most for enterprise and agentic workflows: higher accuracy and better token efficiency on medium-to-complex tasks, stronger instruction following with cleaner formatting, more deliberate scaffolded reasoning, and lower verbosity with more task-focused responses. It also shows a more conservative grounding bias, favoring clearer, evidence-based reasoning and reducing drift when inputs are ambiguous or underspecified.

These improvements directly benefit use cases that depend on accuracy and structured execution:

• Structured extraction and document/PDF analysis, where stronger grounding and cleaner formatting reduce drift and missing fields.
• Coding and agentic workflows, where improved instruction adherence and tool grounding enable more reliable multi-step execution.
• Finance and multimodal tasks, where clearer reasoning and reduced ambiguity improve consistency and correctness.

To understand how these improvements translate to real enterprise workloads, we evaluated GPT-5.2 on OfficeQA,  Databricks’ benchmark designed to test the types of document-heavy, multi-step analytical tasks customers perform every day. OfficeQA, built from 89,000 pages of U.S. Treasury Bulletins, measures a model’s ability to retrieve information across documents, interpret complex tables, and perform precise calculations grounded in real enterprise data.

Across both the full benchmark and the hardest subset, GPT-5.2 achieves the strongest OpenAI performance to date, improving over GPT-5.1 in both agent settings and oracle page baselines. These gains highlight GPT-5.2’s stronger grounding, more stable reasoning, and improved reliability on document-heavy workloads.

"OpenAI GPT-5.2 was designed to excel at agentic tasks in the enterprise, delivering higher accuracy and better token efficiency on medium-to-complex workloads. We are excited to have GPT-5.2 available in Databricks Agent Bricks on day one, giving customers a strong foundation to build and deploy AI agents that reason accurately and safely across enterprise use cases.” — Nikunj Handa, API Product Lead, OpenAI

Introducing the Responses API on Databricks

The Responses API is now available on Databricks, giving developers a single interface for building agents that can use tools, process files, retrieve across documents, and generate structured outputs. It enables a model to invoke MCP tools, perform computer-use actions, or generate images within a single request, eliminating the need for manual orchestration layers. Responses are returned as typed and ordered items, which makes integration, validation, and debugging far more reliable than working with free-form messages. Because the API handles text, images, and tool calls in one consistent flow, multimodal and tool-driven workloads become significantly easier to implement. And soon, the Responses API will be available as a unified interface across all Foundation Models on Databricks, making multimodal and tool-driven workloads even easier to build and scale.

Build Trusted AI Agents with Responses API and Agent Bricks

Now that GPT-5.2 and the Responses API are available on Databricks and integrated with Agent Bricks, teams can build governed, data-aware agents that take real actions with full traceability. GPT-5.2 and the Responses API build on a Databricks–OpenAI partnership that’s already accelerating how customers develop and deploy AI.

“The Databricks and OpenAI partnership has been phenomenal for us. We’re using the OpenAI SDK and APIs, and all the Databricks components. We can create and deploy apps in Databricks within days, sometimes even during workshops, to build MVPs and POCs that help teams see how they can consume insights, take action, and rethink applications and solutions with the tools we have today.” — Richard Masters , Vice President, Data & AI, Virgin Atlantic

Add Data Intelligence with MCP Tools

Agents need access to internal data and services, but doing this in a controlled and auditable way is difficult. The Responses API allows GPT-5.2 to call MCP tools directly as part of its reasoning, enabling the agent to query Delta tables, fetch features, or trigger internal APIs without leaving the platform. Agent Bricks defines which tools the agent is permitted to use through the MCP Catalog, and MLflow records traces and evaluations so developers can inspect how each tool was invoked. This creates a governed and observable path for agents that use your proprietary data to make informed decisions.

Build Multimodal AI Agents with a Unified API

Multimodal workflows often require multiple endpoints, custom routing, and brittle preprocessing. The Responses API removes this complexity by treating text, images, and files like PDFs as native inputs in a single reasoning step. GPT-5.2 can summarize documents, extract information from charts, analyze scanned pages, or generate new visuals without switching interfaces. Because everything runs on Databricks, the data stays governed and lineage is preserved.

Evaluate and Deploy Reliable AI Agents with Agent Bricks

Once an AI agent is connected to data and tools, the next step is ensuring reliable behavior across real workloads. Agent Bricks captures detailed traces of each run with MLflow, enables evaluations to catch regressions, and tracks versions as you refine logic. This provides a repeatable, enterprise-grade workflow for testing changes, comparing outputs, and promoting high-performing agent versions into production.

Next Steps

Start in the Databricks AI Playground with GPT-5.2 and try out prompts, tool calls, and multimodal inputs in seconds. Once comfortable, use Agent Bricks to register an MCP tool connected to your Lakehouse, build a small data-aware agent, and iterate with tracing and evaluation until the agent behaves reliably. When it performs consistently on your data, promote it to production.