Announcing the winners of the 2026 Databricks Customer Awards

Summary

The 2026 Databricks Customer Awards recognize organizations and leaders using the Databricks Data + AI Platform across eight categories and four regions. The announcement names winners including Applied Materials, Virgin Atlantic, Fonterra Co-operative Group, Telefónica | Vivo, Virtue Foundation, Octopus Energy, Axpo, Atlassian, Wassym Bensaid at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, and Kenan Colson at Lippert. Examples include Applied Materials’ move from a Hadoop-based data lake to a governed lakehouse, with 1,500-plus analysts, more than 100 production machine-learning models and faster pipeline development, while Fonterra centralized data to improve supply-chain and compliance work. Rivian unified vehicle, factory and enterprise data, consolidated legacy systems into Delta and Unity Catalog, and designed for 500–600 petabytes; Lippert deployed AI tools across customer care, finance and HR. The announcement presents data and AI adoption as a cross-functional operating model.

Context

The awards recognize organizations and leaders using the Databricks Data + AI Platform to address operational, analytical and industry-specific challenges across eight categories and four regions.

Approach / What changed

The recognized organizations modernized or unified data foundations, applied governance, analytics and AI to business operations, and deployed use cases including machine learning, natural-language data access, predictive maintenance, customer care automation, supply-chain optimization and financial or HR assistance.

Takeaways

• Applied Materials reported more than 17 million self-service queries, over 60% improved data availability, a 50% reduction in job failure rates and 75% lower maintenance overhead after its platform modernization.
• Rivian increased monthly active platform users from about 250 to nearly 3,860, reduced ADAS pipeline processing from four hours to under 30 minutes, and cut manufacturing data costs by 60%.
• Lippert deployed an AI-enabled Customer Care Super-Agent, a Finance Remittance Bot and an HR Policy Assistant to support customer service, payment processing and employee queries.

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