On Monday, Databricks Office has partnered it reached a $5.4 billion revenue run rate, growing 65% year-over-year, of which more than $1.4 billion came from its AI products.

Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi wanted to share these growth numbers because there is a lot of talk about how AI is killing the SaaS business, he told TechCrunch.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, this is SaaS. What’s going to happen to all these companies? What’s AI going to do to all these companies?’ For us, the use is only increasing,” he said.

Sure, he also wants to move Databricks away from the SaaS label, as the private markets value it as an AI company. Databricks on Monday also officially closed its big, previously announced $5 billion raise at a $134 billion valuationand also seized a $2 billion credit facility.

But the company straddles both worlds. Databricks is still known as a cloud data warehouse provider. A data warehouse is where businesses store large amounts of data to analyze for business insights.

Ghodsi called, in particular, an AI product that drives the use of its data warehouse: the LLM user interface named Genie.

Genie is an example of how a SaaS business can be done replace its user interface with natural language. For example, he uses it to ask why warehouse utilization and revenue increase on particular days.

Just a few years ago, such a request required questions to be written in a specific technical language, or had a special report programmed. Now, any product with an LLM interface can be used by anyone, Ghodsi said. Genie is a factor in the company’s usage growth numbers, he said.

The threat of AI in SaaS is not, it seems an AI VC jokingly tweetedthat businesses will ditch their SaaS “systems of record” to replace them with vibe-coded homegrown versions. Systems of record store critical business data, whether it’s in sales, customer support, or finance.

“Why would you move your system of record? You know, it’s hard to move it,” Ghodsi said.

Model makers don’t offer databases to store that data and become systems of record though. Instead, they hope to replace the user interface with natural speech for human use, or APIs or other plug-ins for AI agents.

So the threat to SaaS businesses, says Ghodsi, is that people will no longer spend their careers becoming masters of a particular product: Salesforce specialists, or ServiceNow, or SAP. Once the interface is the only language, the products can be invisible, like the pipe.

“Millions of people around the world are trained in user interfaces. And that’s the biggest moat that businesses have,” warned Ghodsi.

SaaS companies that adopt the new LLM interface can grow, as Databricks did. But it also opens up possibilities for native AI competitors to offer better alternatives to AI and agents.

That’s why Databricks created the Lakebase database designed for agents. He saw early traction. “In the eight months we’ve had it on the market, it’s generated double the revenue of our data warehouse when it was eight months old. Okay, obviously, that’s like comparing babies,” Ghodsi said. “But it’s a little kid twice as big.”

Meanwhile, now that Databricks has closed its big funding round, Ghodsi told us that the company isn’t immediately working on a trend as it is preparing for an IPO.

“Now is not a good time to go public,” Ghodsi said. “I just want to be very well capitalized” if the markets go “south” again like they did in the 2022 recession, when interest rates rose sharply after years of near zero rates. A thick bank account “protects us, gives us many, many years of runway,” he added.