DIRECTV, a video and entertainment provider, built Newton, a centralized dataset with over 1,200 customer-level attributes, to unify data across customer engagement, content consumption, subscriptions and billing. However, with thousands of columns and billions of records, analysts needed significant time to understand the schema, and business users without SQL expertise depended entirely on technical teams. To address this, DIRECTV adopted Databricks’ Genie as the primary interface to its data. Instead of navigating schemas or writing SQL, users can now ask questions in plain language and receive answers instantly. Genie translates those questions into optimized queries, retrieves relevant data, and returns results as tables, charts and natural language summaries. Users can refine results through follow-up questions. “At the core, we want users just to ask the question, and Genie figures out the right way to answer it,” said Malav Shah, Director, Data Science at DIRECTV.