dbt Roundup (Transform) – Newsletter

AI Agents and the Data Lake (W/ Lauren Anderson)

In this episode, Tristan Handy talks with Lauren Anderson, head of Okta's enterprise data platform, about how identity underpins the emerging challenges of AI agents and open data lakes. Lauren explains the need for central governance and a shared semantic layer to manage agent access, ensure security, and streamline data pipelines across a 7,000‑person organization. She outlines the evolving roles of analytics engineers (owning semantics) versus data engineers (ensuring scale and consistency) as AI agents begin to generate more analytical queries, and shares Okta's practical security‑first framework for onboarding data sources and governing agent interactions.