Moving Up the Stack: Analytics Engineering in the Age of Agents
The article argues that analytics engineering must “move up the stack” again, this time leveraging AI agents to automate routine data work. It highlights dbt’s meteoric growth—over three million daily downloads and a billion total downloads—showing how the tool already reshaped the analyst role. New data‑centric agents now power more than half of Hex’s new cells, while dbt’s MCP server usage is climbing 40 % month‑over‑month. The author warns that without embracing these agents, professionals risk obsolescence, but those who adapt can unlock higher‑value, creative tasks.
Agent Skills: Disseminating Expertise
dbt Labs unveiled a suite of eight AI agent skills that automate complex dbt tasks, including a migration from dbt Core 1.10 to Fusion that completed without human intervention. These skills distill hundreds of hours of community expertise into concise...
The Iceberg Ecosystem Today (Anders Swanson)
The data industry is rapidly converging on open standards, and dbt Labs is leading the charge by migrating its entire data stack to an Iceberg‑based lake that supports multiple compute engines. In a recent podcast, Anders Swanson outlined the current...
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...