Databricks AI Functions

Official Docs: https://docs.databricks.com/large-language-models/ai-functions Individual function reference: https://docs.databricks.com/sql/language-manual/functions/

Overview

Databricks AI Functions are built-in SQL and PySpark functions that call Foundation Model APIs directly from your data pipelines — no model endpoint setup, no API keys, no boilerplate. They operate on table columns as naturally as UPPER() or LENGTH(), and are optimized for batch inference at scale.

There are three categories:

Function selection rule — always prefer a task-specific function over ai_query:

Prerequisites

• Databricks SQL warehouse (not Classic) or cluster with DBR 15.1+
• DBR 15.4 ML LTS recommended for batch workloads
• DBR 17.1+ required for ai_parse_document
• ai_forecast requires a Pro or Serverless SQL warehouse
• Workspace in a supported AWS/Azure region for batch AI inference
• Models run under Apache 2.0 or LLAMA 3.3 Community License — customers are responsible for compliance

Quick Start

Classify, extract, and score sentiment from a text column in a single query:

SELECT
    ticket_id,
    ticket_text,
    ai_classify(ticket_text, ARRAY('urgent', 'not urgent', 'spam')) AS priority,
    ai_extract(ticket_text, '["product", "error_code", "date"]')     AS entities,
    ai_analyze_sentiment(ticket_text)                                 AS sentiment
FROM support_tickets;

from pyspark.sql.functions import expr

df = spark.table("support_tickets")
df = (
    df.withColumn("priority",  expr("ai_classify(ticket_text, array('urgent', 'not urgent', 'spam'))"))
      .withColumn("entities",  expr("ai_extract(ticket_text, '[\"product\", \"error_code\", \"date\"]')"))
      .withColumn("sentiment", expr("ai_analyze_sentiment(ticket_text)"))
)
# ai_extract returns a VARIANT (fields under :response). Use colon (:) notation — dot returns NULL on a VARIANT.
df.selectExpr("ticket_id", "priority", "sentiment",
              "entities:response:product::string    AS product",
              "entities:response:error_code::string AS error_code",
              "entities:response:date::string       AS date").display()

Common Patterns

Pattern 1: Text Analysis Pipeline

Chain multiple task-specific functions to enrich a text column in one pass:

SELECT
    id,
    content,
    ai_analyze_sentiment(content)               AS sentiment,
    ai_summarize(content, 30)                   AS summary,
    ai_classify(content,
        ARRAY('technical', 'billing', 'other')) AS category,
    ai_fix_grammar(content)                     AS content_clean
FROM raw_feedback;

Pattern 2: PII Redaction Before Storage

from pyspark.sql.functions import expr

df_clean = (
    spark.table("raw_messages")
    .withColumn(
        "message_safe",
        expr("ai_mask(message, array('person', 'email', 'phone', 'address'))")
    )
)
df_clean.write.format("delta").mode("append").saveAsTable("catalog.schema.messages_safe")

Pattern 3: Document Ingestion from a Unity Catalog Volume

Parse PDFs/Office docs, then enrich with task-specific functions:

from pyspark.sql.functions import expr

df = (
    spark.read.format("binaryFile")
    .load("/Volumes/catalog/schema/landing/documents/")
    .withColumn("parsed", expr("ai_parse_document(content)"))
    # ai_parse_document returns a VARIANT — navigate with the colon (:) operator, never dot.
    # Shape: { "document": { "pages": [...], "elements": [...] }, "error_status": ..., "metadata": ... }
    .selectExpr("path",
                "concat_ws('\n', transform(parsed:document:elements, e -> e:content::STRING)) AS text_blocks",
                "parsed:error_status AS parse_error")
    .filter("parse_error IS NULL")
    .withColumn("summary",  expr("ai_summarize(text_blocks, 50)"))
    .withColumn("entities", expr("ai_extract(text_blocks, '[\"date\", \"amount\", \"vendor\"]')"))
)

Pattern 4: Semantic Matching / Deduplication

-- Find near-duplicate company names
SELECT a.id, b.id, ai_similarity(a.name, b.name) AS score
FROM companies a
JOIN companies b ON a.id < b.id
WHERE ai_similarity(a.name, b.name) > 0.85;

Pattern 5: Complex JSON Extraction with ai_query (last resort)

Use only when the output schema has nested arrays or requires multi-step reasoning that no task-specific function handles:

from pyspark.sql.functions import expr, from_json, col

df = (
    spark.table("parsed_documents")
    .withColumn("ai_response", expr("""
        ai_query(
            'databricks-claude-sonnet-4',
            concat('Extract invoice as JSON with nested itens array: ', text_blocks),
            responseFormat => '{"type":"json_object"}',
            failOnError     => false
        )
    """))
    .withColumn("invoice", from_json(
        col("ai_response.response"),
        "STRUCT<numero:STRING, total:DOUBLE, "
        "itens:ARRAY<STRUCT<codigo:STRING, descricao:STRING, qtde:DOUBLE, vlrUnit:DOUBLE>>>"
    ))
)

Pattern 6: Time Series Forecasting

SELECT *
FROM ai_forecast(
    observed  => TABLE(SELECT date, sales FROM daily_sales),
    horizon   => '2026-12-31',
    time_col  => 'date',
    value_col => 'sales'
);
-- Returns: date, sales_forecast, sales_upper, sales_lower

Reference Files

• references/1-task-functions.md — Full syntax, parameters, SQL + PySpark examples for all 9 task-specific functions (ai_analyze_sentiment, ai_classify, ai_extract, ai_fix_grammar, ai_gen, ai_mask, ai_similarity, ai_summarize, ai_translate) and ai_parse_document
• references/2-ai-query.md — ai_query complete reference: all parameters, structured output with responseFormat, multimodal files =>, UDF patterns, and error handling
• references/3-ai-forecast.md — ai_forecast parameters, single-metric, multi-group, multi-metric, and confidence interval patterns
• references/4-document-processing-pipeline.md — End-to-end batch document processing pipeline using AI Functions in a Lakeflow Declarative Pipeline; includes config.yml centralization, function selection logic, custom RAG pipeline (parse → chunk → Vector Search), and DSPy/LangChain guidance for near-real-time variants

Common Issues