Open Data Infrastructure in the age of AI agents

Fivetran + dbt Labs CEO George Fraser and Fivetran + dbt Labs President Tristan Handy sit down with Andreessen Horowitz general partner Martin Casado, one of the leading investors in software and AI infrastructure, to talk about Open Data Infrastructure in the AI era. Martin and his team have invested in dbt, Fivetran, Tabular, Cursor, OpenRouter, and many other companies. They cover why companies like Stripe, Ramp, and DoorDash are building their own AI data analysts, why the real work is the data foundation teams have already built, why MCP is a protocol and not a data architecture, and why to stay composable and open while the stack keeps changing. 🎧 Listen on your favorite app: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4BKMMeVXk4jJnAQSqGSJvE Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-analytics-engineering-podcast/id1574755368 Read the full episode page: https://roundup.getdbt.com/ Chapters: 0:00 Tristan's intro 0:42 Why AI makes great analysts, and why companies are building their own 2:14 Martin: models are data frozen in time, and agents do the spelunking 4:19 Tristan on the long tail of analyst problems 7:59 Ramp's research agent and the flood of latent questions 8:44 George on Fivetran Context, and being wrong by 2x 10:20 The customer support analogy: from 30% to 80% deflection 12:08 Don't compare AI to an impossible standard 13:24 Build or buy? Cortex Analyst, Genie, and doing it yourself 13:47 Tristan: the answer is 80% of the work you've already done 15:39 Martin: in a new transformation, go composable 17:04 The Cursor story: IDE, agents, foundation model, in two years 17:38 Open data infrastructure, and who should care about control 19:51 Security, architecture, and why AI can help enforce it 21:03 Iceberg and the skeleton of an open architecture 21:42 The competing vision: MCP straight to every system of record 23:20 Martin: MCP is a protocol, like HTTP 24:07 Permissions, tokens, and unstructured data 27:05 API tolls, Amazon's seller API, and who controls your data 29:12 Martin's history lesson: Win32, the web, and consumption layers 32:08 What should leaders do first? 33:14 Your data team is your friend 34:06 Productivity, not headcount reduction The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guest suggestions. #analyticsengineering #dbt #aiagents #opendatainfrastructure #dataengineering