How we built Marketing Ops Genie on Databricks AI/BI Genie — and cut time-to-insight from two weeks to two minutes.

The problem: every question waits in a queue

Ask any marketing team how they get answers from data, and you’ll hear the same story. A campaign manager wonders which channel is actually driving return. She files a ticket. An analyst picks it up — after the sprint’s other requests. SQL gets written, a dashboard gets built, and by the time the answer arrives the campaign has already spent another two weeks of budget.

The data was there the whole time. The bottleneck was the interface: the only way to talk to the data was through someone who speaks SQL.

The idea: let marketers talk to the data directly

Databricks AI/BI Genie lets anyone query governed data in natural language — Genie translates the question into SQL, runs it against your lakehouse, and returns the answer with visualizations.

We wrapped it in a custom UI built for one audience: marketers. We call it **Marketing Ops Genie**. It’s a focused chat workspace connected to our campaign performance tables — spend, conversions, revenue, and channel data — with charts rendered inline, right in the conversation.

What it looks like in practice

Why it works

– Governed, not a free-for-all. Genie runs on Unity Catalog-governed gold tables. Marketers query exactly the certified data analysts curated — nothing else.

– Plain English in, evidence out. Every answer shows its source table, row count, and query time, so trust is built into the interface.

– Follow-ups are free. The most valuable questions are the second and third ones. When iteration costs seconds instead of sprints, people actually explore.

– Analysts get their time back. The data team now curates semantics and models instead of servicing one-off pulls.

The impact

– Time-to-insight: ~2 weeks → ~2 minutes

– Ad-hoc analyst tickets from marketing: down sharply, freeing the data team for deeper work

– Budget decisions made with current data, inside the campaign window — not after it

What’s next

We’re expanding the workspace with scheduled insight digests, anomaly alerts (“Paid Social CPA jumped 20% this week”), and write-back actions so an approved budget shift flows straight into the planning tool.

If your go-to-market speed is limited by how fast questions get answered, the fix might not be more dashboards. It might be a conversation.

Talk to us to know more at hello@anchora.com.au

Marketing Ops Genie is built on Databricks AI/BI Genie. Watch the demo video above.