How MagicOrange Uses Databricks AI/BI Genie to Answer Enterprise IT Finance Questions in Real Time

MagicOrange helps enterprises — particularly those in financial services — understand and optimise their technology spend by correlating IT costs, shared services, and divisional expenses with actual business activities. The company manages terabytes of data per customer, spanning hundreds of billions of rows across all clients, and its value proposition is speed and clarity: when a CFO asks mid-meeting what drove a variance in cloud spend last quarter, MagicOrange's platform should be able to answer without a ticket cycle.

Before AI/BI Genie, that answer often required technical teams to write queries, build a bespoke report, and hand it back. Clients and internal analysts were constrained by pre-built dashboards; anything outside those bounds required engineering. 'Canned reports are boxed in,' as the broader Databricks customer base has found — and at the financial data volumes MagicOrange manages, the cost of that constraint was measured in delayed decisions and analyst hours.

MagicOrange deployed Databricks AI/BI Genie on top of the Databricks platform they were already using for data engineering and analytics pipelines. Genie gives both internal teams and end clients a natural-language interface: users type a question — 'What is the 90-day trend in cloud infrastructure spend for division X?' — and receive an answer grounded in the actual data, with the ability to drill further, exclude cohorts, or have Genie generate the SQL for more granular exploration. Unity Catalog provides the access controls and data governance that enterprise financial data requires, ensuring sensitive cost data stays within the right boundaries. Delta Sharing enables MagicOrange to share data securely with clients without copying or syncing datasets. Databricks SQL serverless compute lets them scale analytics workloads on demand, eliminating the infrastructure provisioning overhead that previously delayed time-to-insight.

The financial outcome is twofold. On the cost side, MagicOrange saved $100K+ annually by adopting AI/BI Genie instead of alternative GenAI analytics tools it had been evaluating. On the value side, clients can now respond to unanticipated financial questions in real time — during a meeting, not a day later. 'With just a few prompts, they can dive into their data, uncover trends and share insights immediately,' said CTO Michael Brennan.

MagicOrange has deployed Genie both for internal data engineering teams — who use it to build pipelines and explore datasets faster — and as a client-facing capability embedded in the platform's financial management interface, making the same self-service model available to enterprise finance teams across their customer base.