Fivetran and dbt Labs join forces to tackle the data trust gap for AI agents

The merger announced last October is now official: Fivetran and dbt Labs are operating as a single company. Their unified mission: build open data infrastructure ready for the agentic era.

Why now? The shift toward agentic AI has accelerated dramatically. Agents aren't just experiments at frontier tech firms anymore. They're approving insurance claims, deflecting support tickets, and writing code at enterprise scale—with query volumes growing 10 to 100 times year over year.

But here's the problem: most data infrastructure was designed for humans. Humans are patient. They bring context. They work one task at a time. Agents don't. They run 24/7, issue queries at machine speed, and lack the institutional knowledge a human analyst carries. When they hit undefined metrics or ungoverned data, they confidently produce wrong answers.

According to Gartner, 80% of IT leaders say their enterprise data isn't ready for agentic AI. 70% worry about governance as agents proliferate. The bottleneck has shifted from infrastructure to trust.

Fivetran ensures data is fresh and reliably moved across sources. dbt provides the governed context agents inherit—business logic versioned in code, metrics defined once and tested, lineage traced from source to consumer. Together, they deliver data that agents can trust at scale.

The combined company is also open-sourcing the Rust-based kernel of dbt Fusion under Apache 2.0 with dbt Core v2.0, making faster parsing and consistent execution available to the entire community.

For data practitioners who've been waiting on the sidelines, the message is clear: your moment has arrived.