by Patrick Wendell, Hanlin Tang, Ahmed Bilal, Arnav Singhvi, Ivan Zhou and Harish Gaur

GPT-5.5 is OpenAI's strongest frontier model for agentic enterprise work, complex document reasoning, and long-horizon coding agents. Databricks now supports GPT-5.5 natively, so customers can apply it to their enterprise data with end-to-end governance.

Use GPT-5.5 to power coding workflows in OpenAI's Codex or any coding agent, build agents grounded in enterprise data, add deeper intelligence to document pipelines, and bring data insights into every employee's daily work. All GPT-5.5 usage on Databricks is governed through Unity AI Gateway, giving customers centralized security, cost controls, and observability from day one across agents, queries, and coding workflows.

How Databricks and OpenAI are partnering together

Hear from Databricks Co-founder & VP of Engineering Patrick Wendell and OpenAI CRO Denise Dresser about how the OpenAI - Databricks partnership creates unique value for enterprise customers:

Unity AI Gateway: A unified governance layer for GPT-5.5 and Codex

When enterprises use GPT-5.5 through Databricks, Unity AI Gateway governs both GPT-5.5 model inference and Codex coding workflows through a single control plane. Read more about how Unity AI Gateway governs agentic coding here.

Unity AI Gateway adds enterprise-grade control to GPT-5.5:

1. Permissions and rate limits: Control access per user and group. Prevent runaway costs.
2. Guardrails: Detect PII, block prompt injection, enforce content safety — configurable per endpoint.
3. MCP governance: Audit every agent tool call with full traceability.
4. Automatic failover: Traffic routes to backup models if rate limits are hit.
5. Observability: Every request, whether a model call or a Codex interaction, is logged with identity, tokens, latency, and cost in Delta tables you own.
6. Single bill: One consolidated bill across GPT-5.5, Codex, and all other models/coding tools.

Put GPT-5.5 to work with full enterprise context on Databricks

Ask business questions in natural language with Genie

Genie, Databricks' natural language analytics experience, is powered by multiple frontier LLMs from OpenAI and other model providers.  Business users can securely interact with complex enterprise data in plain English to explore data, answer ad hoc questions, and automate knowledge work that previously took hours or days. Genie’s deep understanding of enterprise data ontology and business semantics coupled with the ever-improving intelligence from frontier models like GPT-5.5 allow everyday business users to bring powerful data insights to their everyday work.

Build custom agents with Agent Bricks

With GPT-5.5's stronger execution and reasoning capabilities, Agent Bricks Custom Agents can now handle more complex multi-step workflows from document analysis pipelines to automating departmental business processes. Developers can build GPT-5.5-powered agents using their preferred tools and frameworks, then deploy them as fully managed, serverless Databricks Apps.

Automate document intelligence pipelines

Chain GPT-5.5 into Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines for GenAI ETL ingesting documents, applying AI transformations like summarization, extraction, or classification, and orchestrating the flow with built-in governance and observability. GPT-5.5's improved document parsing and grounded reasoning make these pipelines more reliable, especially for complex, real-world artifacts such as scanned PDFs, tables, and multi-format data.

Get started today

GPT-5.5 is available now on Databricks across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Here's how to get started:

• Try GPT-5.5 in AI Playground: Compare GPT-5.5 side-by-side with other models. Adjust parameters and export prompts directly into notebooks or SQL.
• Deploy Codex through Unity AI Gateway: Set up a governed Codex endpoint in seconds with built-in security, cost limits, and observability.
• Build GPT-5.5-powered agents with Agent Bricks: Analyze your data, automate complex work, evaluate with custom judges, and deploy at scale.
• Read the Foundation Model API docs: Full API reference for GPT-5.5, including Responses API support.