Dael Williamson, EMEA CTO at Databricks joined the company in 2023 tasked with running Northern Europe, including the Nordics, Benelux, UK and Ireland. Williamson has overseen a time of rapid growth in the UK market, which saw the company move towards a country-first style business model. The company opened a seven-story, 29,885-square-foot office in London’s Fitzrovia in 2024 which serves as its European HQ and is the largest office outside of its San Francisco global headquarters.
Historically, the UK was Databricks’ first presence outside the US. The company’s Amsterdam office followed and serves as an engineering hub for all European operations. From these two largest hubs, the company has continued its expansion outside the US with new offices in Madrid, Milan, expanding existing operations in Amsterdam, Belgrade, and Munich, as well as a new engineering facility in Zagreb. In April 2025, the company also announced a $250m investment to strengthen its R&D operations in India.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
Global economic and geopolitical uncertainties have not deterred the company from accelerating this global expansion. In fact, the AI-first nature of Databricks’ offering has meant it continues to ride a wave of enterprise AI investment.
According to research and analysis company GlobalData, the enterprise AI platforms market is projected to increase from $16.9bn in 2026 to over $59.3bn by 2029—a three fold increase in just three years. This trend reflects the acceleration in AI adoption and broader enterprise investments in intelligent automation, machine learning, and advanced analytics at scale.
Continued expansion in hard times
With this ever increasing market potential, Williamson is sanguine about the wider economic landscape. “There are always uncertainties, economic and political changes, but it’s how you ride through that,” he says. Databricks’ success and rapid growth rate in the UK has been driven largely by the wider business focus on data and AI strategy and how companies have been integrating it into their go to market presence, something that has accelerated of late. “So, we’ve been very resilient,” he adds.
The company’s growth strategy includes building an AI community around the company’s London hub through talent acquisition and bringing partners and customers together. Databricks sits mainly on three hyper-scalers, Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Microsoft, all of which have presences within 10 minutes of the company’s London HQ building.
Williamson welcomes the healthy competition that Databricks has with companies such as Snowflake. “I’m a big fan of competition in any space, because a monopoly of one doesn’t drive innovation,” he says. And though the company partners with the likes of Google, Microsoft and AWS, its Big Tech partners also have their own product stacks that compete with Databricks. “So, you could argue that we compete in some of those areas, but we partner with them on the go to market more than I would say that we compete,” he adds.
One of Databricks’ competitive advantages is that it’s open source, according to Williamson. “We were born open source, and that is a huge thing right now, because while companies want freedom of choice, they don’t want proprietary locking in,” he explains.
For companies looking for a data platform partner, Williamson’s advice is to ensure they carry out a proof of concept. “Make sure you’re testing from a performance perspective, a cost perspective, and you’re not just looking at the now, look at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th year return on investment,” he says.
He also advises a multicloud solution—something that has become more critical in the three years that he’s been in his current role. In times of economic uncertainty, in particular, freedom of choice to change hyperscaler or make a stressed exit becomes even more important. “Customers must make sure they’ve got a fail over to another hyper scaler. Mission critical workloads and use cases cannot risk downtime, because they impact both the revenue side, and reputation and trust,” says Williamson.
No more AI for AI’s sake
Aside from Databricks’ own growth, Williamson has a high level view on how AI adoption can help customers growth their own businesses. He advises customers to properly evaluate why they are implementing AI. When interrogating customers on why they think they need AI solutions, the answer has sometimes been: “because I’m being told we need it, or the board says that we need it, or the CEO says we need it,” he says.
As AI hype is cooling down, the technology is becoming more understood, to Williamson’s relief. “We were seeing people spending an enormous amount of time and money on POCs, and 70% of them would never go into production. Because they didn’t actually know what they really wanted, they got an outcome that they actually didn’t really fully understand, or could actually trust,” he explains.
“We’re now engaged much more resilient conversations with businesses and boards about what they actually want AI to achieve in the company. Is it going to help them to create a USP within the market? And a lot of that comes down to the USP of your personal, private data,” he says adding: “AI is very new. No technology that’s ever come to market has the answer on day one.”
