#376 Rethinking the Data Stack in the age of AI with Tristan Handy, President of Fivetran + dbt Labs

Across the data and AI industry, infrastructure that once served dashboards and human analysts is being rebuilt to serve autonomous agents instead. That shift changes what "AI-ready data" actually means, pushing teams to rethink documentation, governance, and the semantic layer so agents pull consistent, trusted definitions rather than guessing. Day to day, this shows up as pressure to clean up gold-layer tables, eliminate duplicate metrics, and formalize business logic that used to live only in someone's head. It raises real questions: how clean does data need to be before agents can safely a