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Databricks Edges Out Cloud Giants in Gartner's Agent-Focused Data Science/ML Report

• By David Ramel
• 06/02/2025

Databricks edged out the "Big 3" cloud giants in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms, which itself mirrors the industry shift to agentic AI, emphasizing autonomous agents that can use tools, data sources, and APIs to perform tasks with minimal human intervention.

Gartner immediately got right to that point in introducing the 2025 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms (DSML), stating: "Data science and machine learning platforms provide software to build, customize and deploy AI models using various techniques. Data science, machine learning and AI leaders need to select platforms with awareness of AI agents enabling autonomous and interactive workflows and applications."

Last year's report mentioned the term "agent" exactly one time, while the term was strewn throughout the new report 26 times.

Here are the quadrant images for each year.

As you can see, the movement among vendors included IBM rising from the Challengers quadrant into Leaders, possibly reflecting stronger performance around hybrid cloud AI and enterprise governance with watsonx. Meanwhile, SAS dropped from Leader to Visionary, perhaps suggesting Gartner now places greater emphasis on cloud-native delivery and agentic AI readiness. All other Leaders -- including Databricks, AWS, Microsoft, Google, Dataiku, Altair, and DataRobot -- retained their positions year-over-year, reinforcing their alignment with Gartner's evolving criteria.

Databricks, however, slipped into the lead ahead of the hyperscalers.

The company itself nodded to the agentic era in a post celebrating its placement, listing agentic AI as one of its three pillars: "AI Agents that reason over your data: Databricks provides the most efficient and secure way to connect your enterprise data to agents. With the AI platform built on the lakehouse, there is no need to duplicate data. This makes it easy to customize AI models with your data."

Gartner is also now using the agentic angle more in its description of leaders: "Leaders in this market have a mature, refined and targeted company and platform strategy that incorporates and leverages GenAI and AI agents to drive their customers' business value. They see opportunities for leveraging agents that other providers may not see or have made significant investments above and beyond standard offerings."

Gartner said the DSML market is increasingly focused on empowering the creation of agentic systems with integrated large language models (LLMs) and GenAI-driven assistants to enhance the data science workflow, noting that in the company's 2024 Analytics and AI Engineering survey, over 50% of respondents reported that AI tools for automated insights and natural language queries are being used in AI development.

"The DSML platform market remains at the forefront of buyers' minds when selecting AI delivery platforms for the enterprise," the research firm said. "The market has grown beyond enabling classical data science and AI techniques to provide a holistic AI platform for innovative generative AI solutions, including retrieval augmented generation and AI agents built by AI engineering teams. Use of GenAI in the enterprise will also require other types of models built with various techniques to be added in a composite fashion, which is a key differentiator for many of the platforms."

While Gartner routinely charges for access to its research, the Magic Quadrant reports are typically provided free in licensed-for-distribution editions from vendors covered. These are quickly available with a simple web search.