Ron Gabrisko, Databricks & Magesh Bagavathi, PepsiCo | Databricks Data+AI Summit 2026

In this interview from Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026 in San Francisco, Ron Gabrisko, chief revenue officer of Databricks, joins Magesh Bagavathi, senior vice president and global head of data, analytics and AI at PepsiCo, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier about PepsiCo's seven-year data transformation and the shift to agentic AI at enterprise scale. Bagavathi opens by scoping PepsiCo's data challenge: a $95 billion company operating across 200 countries, managing 1.4 billion consumer occasions a day. He traces the transformation from 10-15% cloud coverage six years ago to 75% today, with the full data backbone now on cloud. By end of 2026, 85% of PepsiCo's data universe will reside in a single standardized lakehouse — 95% cataloged and meeting 99% data quality thresholds — all governed through Unity Catalog. The conversation also explores how PepsiCo is activating that foundation across its 320,000-person workforce. Gabrisko explains how Databricks Genie delivers contextual, ontology-aware insights directly to frontline employees — eliminating the bottleneck of centralized reporting and enabling real-time decisions on product placement, promotions and inventory. Bagavathi details PepsiCo's 40-plus active AI and agentic programs, including PepGPT, its enterprise-wide generative AI tool, and the PepsiConnect B2B platform now serving roughly two million customers in markets like Mexico, Turkey and India. The agentic vision he describes is ambitious: moving from human-in-the-loop oversight toward autonomous execution across supply chain, commercial and finance workflows — powered by a connected ontology and semantic graph layer spanning PepsiCo's 300,000 data pipelines. From governing a complex, multinational data estate to deploying agents that autonomously manage inventory replenishment across six million retail outlets, Bagavathi and Gabrisko outline why companies that did the foundational data work first are now best positioned to lead the AI era. Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/ Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/ Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/ 00:00 - Intro 00:08 - Insights into PepsiCo's Data Strategy and Partnerships 02:51 - Transformative Architecture: Journey to the Cloud and Lakehouse 07:44 - PepsiCo's Organizational Dynamics 10:44 - Edge-speed Execution and AI Programs 13:41 - Revolutionizing Employee Engagement and AI Use 16:07 - Impact of Databricks' Genie and AI Capabilities 19:42 - Guiding the Future: Reflections and Decisions #theCUBE #DatabricksSummit #theCUBEresearch #Databricks #PepsiCo #AI #EnterpriseAI