Databricks tested a stronger model against its multi-step agent on hybrid queries. The stronger model still lost by 21%.

Data teams building AI agents keep running into the same failure mode. Questions that require joining structured data with unstructured content, sales figures alongside customer reviews or citation counts alongside academic papers, break single-turn RAG systems. New research from Databricks puts a number on that failure gap. The company's AI research team tested a multi-step agentic approach against state-of-the-art…