Driving enterprise productivity with AI-powered agents

Addressing data complexities to optimize AI workflows

You.com’s AI agents help businesses become more productive by providing accurate answers to complex questions and automating workflows. As more enterprises adopted You.com’s solutions, the company needed to scale their data infrastructure efficiently while maintaining fast, trustworthy responses for users.

Specifically, You.com needed to manage growing volumes of event data generated from user interactions, along with integrating proprietary data for personalized intelligence. Managing this complexity required specialized resources to oversee cluster setups, scale model deployments and maintain efficient workflows. As Bryan McCann, You.com’s CTO, explained, “We had multiple layers built on top of our Hive tables, which made it difficult for us to scale efficiently and handle new queries and analytical needs.” Resource constraints diverted focus from core product development and highlighted the need for a more streamlined approach.

Performance lags and slow query processing also posed significant barriers, affecting not only the user experience but also the team’s ability to make timely, data-driven decisions. Delays in dashboard loading and inefficient data processing made it challenging for You.com to access critical insights, such as user interaction data, model performance metrics and real-time analytics, needed to refine and optimize their generative AI models. These operational inefficiencies directly impacted the development and deployment of the company’s AI-driven solutions, underscoring the necessity for improvements that could enhance data handling and support the continuous evolution of You.com’s platform, ensuring the trust and satisfaction of their users.

Prioritizing experimentation to drive greater innovation

To address their complex data management challenges, You.com implemented Delta Lake, an open source, optimized storage layer that provided the foundation for tables in a lakehouse architecture. By centralizing the company’s data infrastructure, You.com integrated public and proprietary information to streamline the ingestion, storage and organization of diverse datasets. This reliable data foundation better served You.com’s goal of delivering trustworthy, citation-backed responses within their search and productivity platform. Ultimately, Delta Lake enhanced You.com’s data handling capabilities, eliminating key operational bottlenecks and improving data consistency and accessibility — critical for the ongoing refinement of AI models.

Next, You.com turned to Databricks SQL to tackle performance lags and slow query processing. Databricks SQL optimized business intelligence efforts, enabling You.com to swiftly analyze user interaction data and citation-backed sources to refine their AI models and deliver more precise responses. Databricks SQL–powered dashboards also provided critical performance metrics, driving continuous model enhancements.

Additionally, Databricks Notebooks offered a collaborative space for You.com’s data scientists to develop and experiment with their machine learning models. Notebooks helped the teams build, test and refine models iteratively, making it easier to move quickly from data analysis via SQL to model deployment. This streamlined process enhanced productivity and fostered innovation, paving the way for You.com to continually improve their AI capabilities.

The deployment and lifecycle management of machine learning models were further optimized with MLflow, an open source platform that managed the entire machine learning process, from model training to deployment. Paired with Mosaic AI Model Serving, You.com could host and scale models without complex infrastructure oversight, streamlining the deployment pipeline. By offloading infrastructure burdens to Databricks, You.com redirected focus toward core product development, resulting in improved operational efficiency, faster innovation cycles and a stronger competitive stance in the market.

Accelerating productivity, performance and scalability

The integration of Databricks into You.com’s operations led to a transformative increase in efficiency by reducing the time and resources required for data and AI infrastructure management. Databricks’ automated approach eliminated the need for extensive manual oversight of cluster setup and maintenance, allowing You.com’s team to redirect their focus to innovation. McCann noted, “Databricks has done a lot of the heavy lifting for us on tasks that aren’t essential for our product and differentiation, allowing us to grow and adapt to new AI technologies quickly.”

Databricks’ scalable model management capabilities enable You.com to seamlessly adapt their machine learning model deployments to meet evolving business needs. The platform’s flexibility helps You.com rapidly fine-tune, deploy and adjust models, facilitating a more agile response to market demands. Enhanced analytics and business intelligence tools, particularly through Databricks SQL and dashboarding capabilities, empower You.com to continuously monitor performance metrics, refine AI models based on real-time data and optimize the accuracy of their responses. This adaptability reduces time to market for new features, allowing the company to remain customer-focused and forward-thinking.

In addition to infrastructure and model management improvements, You.com benefits from Databricks’ ability to streamline experimentation and collaboration through Notebooks. This enables data scientists to expedite the model-building lifecycle, while MLflow further reduces complexities in deployment and other AI workflows. The combined impact of these tools improves You.com’s operational focus, helping the company achieve their mission of delivering AI-driven, productivity-enhancing solutions to the market.