AI Functions Power Faster Agentic Analytics and Insights

The rapid growth of the use of AI throughout the modern data stack has transformed how organizations extract insights from their data. With our latest release, we're excited to announce the general availability of AI Functions — a capability that brings the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into SQL execution, making Dremio’s Agentic Lakehouse the leading solution for AI-enhanced agentic analytics.

Key highlights:

• Agentic analytics is the next evolution of business intelligence, where AI agents autonomously execute analytics workflows from data preparation to insight generation.
• True agentic performance begins at the lakehouse, which unifies, governs, and accelerates how data is accessed and analyzed.
• AI Functions enable business users to embed intelligence directly in SQL, eliminating pipelines and unlocking real-time analysis of unstructured data.

Dremio delivers the enterprise foundation for agentic AI insights, combining open lakehouse architecture with native AI execution for faster, governed insights.

Transforming unstructured data into powerful agentic AI insights

Organizations today face an unprecedented challenge: extracting meaningful insights from large volumes of unstructured data that enterprises store. Previously, analyzing customer feedback, processing documents, or synthesizing text data required complex multi-step pipelines, specialized tools, and often manual intervention. AI Functions eliminate these barriers by enabling direct LLM prompting during SQL execution, accelerating time to insight. 

Consider a retail organization analyzing thousands of customer reviews stored in its lakehouse. What once required a dedicated data pipeline to classify sentiment, extract key themes, and summarize feedback can now be accomplished with a single SQL query. This transformation reduces operational complexity while enabling agentic AI insights from unstructured content.

Dremio AI Functions are built for enterprise agentic data analysis

Dremio introduces four purpose-built AI Functions designed to address your most pressing agentic analytics needs:

1. AI_GENERATE: Your swiss army knife for complex data extraction
   • The cornerstone of our AI Functions suite, AI_GENERATE provides flexible, general-purpose processing of unstructured data. This function excels at complex extraction tasks requiring multiple structured fields from source files, enabling you to transform PDFs, documents, and images into queryable data with unprecedented ease.
2. AI_COMPLETE: Intelligent text generation and summarization
   • Specialized for creative text generation and intelligent summarization, AI_COMPLETE returns VARCHAR outputs perfect for generating executive summaries, creating narrative descriptions, or producing contextual explanations of data patterns.
3. AI_CLASSIFY: Streamlined categorization at scale
   • Purpose-built for sentiment analysis and data categorization, AI_CLASSIFY enables rapid classification of text data or unstructured, returning structured VARCHAR results that integrate seamlessly into your analytical workflows.
4. LIST_FILES:  Support for unstructured data processing
   • To fully unlock the potential of AI-powered analytics, we are introducing essential supporting functionality with the LIST_FILES function. This new capability recursively lists files from source directories, enabling batch processing of documents stored in your data lake. 

Real-world application: Transforming documents into AI insights

Let's explore how an organization with thousands of call log PDFs can leverage AI Functions for instant data load and analysis.:

This single query replaces what would traditionally require:

• A document processing pipeline
• OCR capabilities for scanned documents
• Natural language processing models
• ETL jobs to structure the output
• Ongoing pipeline maintenance

And with output schema definition using the WITH SCHEMA clause, the result is a fully structured row that can be used downstream, in joins, CTAS, or any other SQL operation.

Get agent analytics that accelerate business value

AI Functions deliver immediate benefits across the enterprise:

• Reduced time to insight: Transform weeks of data pipeline development into minutes of SQL authoring. Business analysts can now directly query unstructured data without waiting for engineering resources.
• Lower total cost of ownership: Eliminate the need for separate AI infrastructure, specialized tools, and complex pipelines. AI Functions leverage your existing Dremio investment while reducing operational overhead.
• Enhanced data democratization: Enable SQL-savvy analysts to harness AI capabilities without requiring machine learning expertise, broadening access to advanced analytics across your organization.
• Improved compliance and governance: Process sensitive documents within your secure data lakehouse environment, maintaining lineage and access controls throughout the AI-enhanced analytics workflow

Dremio is one of the best agentic analytics tools for AI insights

AI Functions are available now, ready to transform how your organization analyzes unstructured data, whether you're looking to:

• Analyze customer feedback at scale
• Extract insights from financial documents
• Process research papers and technical documentation
• Synthesize information from diverse content sources

Get started today to see how Dremio AI Functions provide the capabilities you need to unlock the full value of your unstructured data.