dbt Labs Delivers Significant Cost Optimization Results and Agentic AI Features, Powered by Fusion

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• USA - English

New capabilities accelerate developer workflows, automatically reduce compute spend, and bring intelligent AI assistance to structured data

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- On the keynote stage at Coalesce 2025, dbt Labs – the leader in standards for AI-ready structured data – showcased the continued evolution of the dbt platform, unveiling cost optimization outcomes and performance enhancements powered by the dbt Fusion engine. dbt Labs also introduced dbt Agents, a suite of intelligent AI assistants built into dbt and made accessible via the remote dbt MCP server, to supercharge development, improve governance and deliver trustworthy AI outcomes. Collectively, these platform updates accelerate development, support cross-platform portability and lay an important foundation for new analytics use cases.

"Open standards and AI are fueling the next era of analytics, and the dbt Fusion engine is the bridge that data teams need to move toward that future," said Tristan Handy, founder and CEO at dbt Labs. "Fusion delivers robust context, tools and error-correction mechanisms for both humans and agents. It is the enabler of next generation, AI-powered data infrastructure."

Fusion, now in Preview for eligible projects on BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake and Redshift, is building on its supercharged developer experience capabilities and enabling customers to dramatically optimize compute spend, eliminate wasted cycles, and focus teams on innovation and faster insights delivery. State-aware orchestration, in Preview for projects running Fusion, instantly allows teams to reduce compute spend by approximately 10% simply by activating the feature. It ensures pipelines only run models that have changed, allowing organizations to reduce unnecessary compute costs, all without rewriting projects or restructuring jobs. Teams can further tune their pipelines by providing specific data freshness requirements, and state-aware orchestration determines the most efficient job execution path to meet those needs. Organizations can expect an additional estimated 15%+ data platform cost savings with these tuned configurations, and in early testing, some organizations have realized over 50% in total savings. This represents a meaningful reduction in customers' spend on data infrastructure.

Fusion is powering more than just smarter orchestration; it is supporting evolving analytics use cases. dbt-powered pipelines can now create and manage Apache Iceberg tables in Snowflake and Databricks, laying the groundwork for easier adoption of open table formats and cross-platform portability. In addition, the dbt VS Code Extension, now in Preview, lets developers run Fusion locally for tighter inner loops and parity with production environments, while dbt Insights, now Generally Available, uses Fusion's language server bringing definitions, lineage, cost, performance, and reliability into one place for faster, smarter decisions.

"The improvements the dbt Fusion engine delivers address many of the pain points we currently face in our dbt development cycle," said James Dorodo, VP of Data Analytics at Bilt Rewards. "It will provide a step function increase in our velocity."

Agentic AI Supports the Evolution of Data Analytics
As the leader in standards for AI-ready structured data, dbt is introducing governed AI agents powered by dbt's uniquely powerful context, to make analytics faster and smarter while preserving quality, trust, and governance. dbt Agents is built directly into the platform and includes:

• Developer agent: Explains logic, flags duplicates, validates, and authors/refactors from prompts in VS Code or dbt Studio for faster, safer shipping.
• Discovery agent: Finds the right datasets and definitions, highlighting trusted sources for faster exploration.
• Observability agent: Monitors jobs, identifies likely root causes, and proposes fixes to reduce manual remediation work.
• Analyst agent: Built into dbt Insights, this agent answers questions about models, jobs, and metrics, dramatically accelerating the insight-generation process.

These agents bring AI into the heart of the Analytics Development Lifecycle, helping teams accelerate outcomes, improve quality, and maintain governance, ensuring AI delivers tangible business impact. This structured context is now universally accessible to AI systems through the remote dbt MCP server, now Generally Available. It runs in the cloud, connecting AI tools to projects in dbt without local setup. Now, dbt's context, tooling, and error-correction is accessible to model providers and IDEs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor for safer, more reliable AI systems.

"dbt is our governance backbone, and MCP exposes that structured context to our chat experience so any NBIM employee can ask questions and get trusted answers. With dbt, Claude, and Snowflake powering our chat experience, adoption is 10× our previous catalog and tickets to core data teams are down," said Øyvind Eraker, Senior Data Engineer at NBIM. "AI only works at our scale when metadata, quality, and governance come first. dbt gives us that foundation."

dbt Labs Deepens OSI Commitment with MetricFlow License Change
dbt Labs also announced that MetricFlow is now fully open source, with an Apache 2.0 license. This reaffirms dbt Labs' commitment to the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) initiative. By standardizing metrics and semantics across tools, organizations can ensure consistent, trusted outcomes across analytics and AI workflows.

"We're thrilled to see the introduction of dbt Agents at this year's Coalesce," said Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. "Tableau and Salesforce believe deeply in making agents as successful as possible for our customers. That is why, along with dbt and others, we joined the OSI to deliver consistent definitions to the agents our customers are building to drive tangible business results."

To learn more about the product innovations unveiled at Coalesce 2025, register now to watch keynotes and select sessions virtually at coalesce.getdbt.com or join the Oct. 28 and 29 live virtual event, focused on how the dbt Fusion engine transforms analytics workflows across dbt Core and the dbt platform.

About dbt Labs
Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help data practitioners create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt is the standard for AI-ready structured data. Powered by the dbt Fusion engine, it unlocks the performance, context, and trust that organizations need to scale analytics in the era of AI. Globally, more than 80,000 data teams use dbt, including those at Siemens, Roche and Condé Nast.

Learn more at getdbt.com, and follow dbt Labs on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

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