---
title: "Announcing the winners of the 2026 Databricks Customer Awards"
description: "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."
---

# Announcing the winners of the 2026 Databricks Customer Awards

[Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks) · Sara Steffen · Jun 9, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## 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.

**Tags:** [AI](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai), [Delta Lake](https://yomu.fyi/topic/delta-lake), [Lakehouse](https://yomu.fyi/topic/lakehouse), [Unity Catalog](https://yomu.fyi/topic/unity-catalog)

- Source: [Databricks](https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-winners-2026-databricks-customer-awards)
- Source URL: https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-winners-2026-databricks-customer-awards
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-31T03:31:15.198Z

[Read original post](https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-winners-2026-databricks-customer-awards)