---
title: "Announcing the Public Preview of Lakeflow Designer"
description: "Databricks announces the Public Preview of Lakeflow Designer, a visual, no-code, AI-native experience for data preparation and analytics built directly into the Databricks platform. It targets analysts, domain experts, and other less technical users with drag-and-drop workflows and natural-language authoring, while representing each transformation as an operator with previews. Genie Code can use Unity Catalog metadata, descriptions, lineage, popularity, and example queries to generate or modify workflows, inspect transformation results, and iterate when needed. Every visual transformation produces production-ready Python code that can be reviewed, versioned in Git, and scheduled through Lakeflow Jobs, while users pay for compute rather than per-user licenses. The preview is available in all workspaces, although an administrator may need to enable Visual data prep in the preview portal."
---

# Announcing the Public Preview of Lakeflow Designer

[Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks) · Jason Messer, Emanuel Zgraggen, V Maharajh, Matt Jones, Tracy Yang · Apr 23, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Databricks announces the Public Preview of Lakeflow Designer, a visual, no-code, AI-native experience for data preparation and analytics built directly into the Databricks platform. It targets analysts, domain experts, and other less technical users with drag-and-drop workflows and natural-language authoring, while representing each transformation as an operator with previews. Genie Code can use Unity Catalog metadata, descriptions, lineage, popularity, and example queries to generate or modify workflows, inspect transformation results, and iterate when needed. Every visual transformation produces production-ready Python code that can be reviewed, versioned in Git, and scheduled through Lakeflow Jobs, while users pay for compute rather than per-user licenses. The preview is available in all workspaces, although an administrator may need to enable Visual data prep in the preview portal.

## Context

The announcement identifies the technical barrier to entry as a major bottleneck in data work. It also describes governance gaps, IT overhead, generic AI suggestions, productionization difficulties, and per-user licensing as tradeoffs of existing self-service data preparation tools.

## Approach / What changed

Lakeflow Designer runs natively on Databricks, keeps data governed by Unity Catalog, and combines a drag-and-drop canvas with natural-language authoring powered by Genie Code. It exposes transformations as visual operators with previews, generates Python code, and supports operationalization through Lakeflow Jobs.

## Takeaways

- Genie Code can use Unity Catalog metadata, lineage, popularity, and example queries to produce more context-aware workflow suggestions than tools limited to schema information.
- Each visual transformation generates production-ready Python code that users can review, version in Git, and integrate into larger production workflows.
- Lakeflow Designer uses compute-based pricing rather than per-user licenses, allowing broader business participation without seat-based access decisions.

**Tags:** [AI](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai), [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/topic/databricks), [Lakeflow](https://yomu.fyi/topic/lakeflow), [Unity Catalog](https://yomu.fyi/topic/unity-catalog)

- Source: [Databricks](https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-public-preview-lakeflow-designer)
- Source URL: https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-public-preview-lakeflow-designer
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-31T03:41:23.602Z

[Read original post](https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-public-preview-lakeflow-designer)