About

I'm Ganesh Chand, a technologist. I've been at Databricks since 2016, where I'm a lead architect. I write here to figure out what I actually think about AI and data systems, and to share it with the people building them.

My roots are in data engineering: Scala, Spark, lakehouse architectures, distributed compute. I spent years building pipelines and contributing to open source projects like Delta Lake. That work taught me how systems fail, and how far a design can be from what actually runs in production.

Now I work on agents, and the questions have changed. An agent doesn't just move data. It reads it, decides what to do next, and changes business systems on someone's behalf. So the hard part isn't the demo. It's what lets a company trust it: who it acts for, what it may do, who signs off, and what happens when it crashes halfway through.

Those questions aren't only technical. In July I completed UC Berkeley Executive Education's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Program, which pushed me to think about them the way a CTO or a business leader has to. So I write mainly for people building agentic systems, and sometimes for the leaders deciding whether to trust them. If you're new here, start with What is an enterprise agent?, then the series Agents and the data layer.

The opinions here are my own, not Databricks'. When a post is about a Databricks product, it says so. I write with AI assistance for research, drafting and review; the ideas, judgement and final edits are mine.

When I'm not coding or thinking about AI, you'll find me trekking in the Himalayas.