On Wednesday, Databricks launched always-on AI agents for enterprise work, intensifying a corporate software race that Anthropic entered with productivity tools one day earlier.

The San Francisco startup says its new agentic tools continuously analyze and organize the data scattered through a business, with the stated aim of changing how office workers do their jobs. The central proposition is sustained operation rather than a request-response session.

Databricks CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi told Fortune: “The agents are running in the background all the time. So it’s always on.” He added: “I personally use it every day. Every hour of the day. It’s basically made me a 10x better CEO than I was a year ago.”

What can the new agents do?

Databricks highlighted two components on Wednesday:

• Genie: The updated assistant operates in the background, shadows an office worker throughout the day, makes proactive suggestions and retrieves information based on current activity.
• Ontology: The feature essentially scans an organization’s data, from management reporting lines to projects in different departments, so users can retrieve information or run analyses quickly.

The launch came one day after Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI models, released its own corporate productivity tools. The offering included an AI-powered spreadsheet application that competes with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

Anthropic also added a feature that lets Claude join video calls, listen to conversations and “start on the work while people are still talking.” The two releases put autonomous and embedded assistants into the same enterprise sales conversation within 24 hours.

Why does the market matter beyond programmers?

AI has transformed how software programmers work and become indispensable in that profession. In many other business functions, it remains experimental, and the return on investment is less clear. Autonomous agents that perform tasks for users, alongside recent advances in model capabilities, could open a broader market.

The industry-wide push to win corporate users also seeks to broaden the base of paying customers. Ghodsi expects broad uptake: “Lots of companies, both big and small, will use this.”

What does Anthropic’s IPO put on the table?

Anthropic says in its initial public offering prospectus: “We believe the work that knowledge workers perform represented more than $40 trillion in economic value globally in 2025, and with frontier AI’s potential to make them meaningfully more productive, our near-term opportunity is to expand this value and accelerate economic growth.”

The IPO is expected next week and could value Anthropic at $1.4 trillion. Many in the industry hope a strong debut on Wall Street will send a positive signal about prospects for the broader AI industry.

Databricks remains privately held. It raised $5 billion at a $190 billion valuation in August. Anthropic’s potential $1.4 trillion IPO value would exceed that private valuation by more than seven times.

Why does Nvidia’s leadership matter?

The AI industry has also been shaken by the recent revelation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s extramarital affair with a woman whom U.S. officials believe is a spy for China. Given Nvidia’s importance in chips and financing across AI, observers fear a ripple effect if Huang must step down.

Ghodsi rejected that risk assessment. He said: “I think that Jensen is an amazing CEO. He’s built that company for the last many decades. I think he should continue to be the CEO of that company.”

He also said: “I think we will weather through this storm,” adding that the AI revolution is too large to be affected by the revelations around Huang’s affair.

Databricks and Anthropic have now put competing office-AI strategies before enterprise buyers one day apart. The immediate test is whether background autonomy can broaden paying corporate adoption, while Anthropic’s IPO supplies a public-market signal next week.