Ascend.io Introduces Agentic Analytics Engineering with dbt Core Integration

Engineers can now leverage Ascend’s native orchestration and AI agents to automate their dbt projects at scale.

PALO ALTO, CA, UNITED STATES, December 18, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Ascend.io today announced support for dbt Core on its Agentic Data Engineering platform, enabling analytics engineering teams to add intelligent orchestration and agentic capabilities to their existing dbt workflows.

Ascend is an agentic, unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. With the new dbt Core integration, teams can run their existing dbt projects while gaining access to AI agents that autonomously build, monitor, and maintain data pipelines—introducing what Ascend calls "Agentic Analytics Engineering."

The dbt Core Infrastructure Challenge

Most dbt Core teams manage a patchwork of tools: Airflow or cron for orchestration, custom monitoring scripts, separate ingestion pipelines, and manual incident response workflows. While dbt excels at transformation logic, teams spend the majority of their time managing the infrastructure around it—writing DAGs, debugging failures, and coordinating dependencies across disconnected systems.

"Analytics engineering teams love dbt for good reason—it's become the standard for data transformation," said Sean Knapp, CEO and Founder of Ascend.io. "But they're drowning in operational work around it. We built Ascend to eliminate that burden across the entire data pipeline, so teams using dbt can access those capabilities without starting from scratch."

Ascend eliminates this operational burden through three core capabilities:

1. Agentic Development: Otto, Ascend's AI agent, is designed to assist teams across the entire DataOps lifecycle. It can generate new models or edit existing ones from natural language descriptions, identify slow-running transformations and suggest optimizations, or automatically add data quality tests. Analytics engineers describe what they need; Otto handles implementation, enabling teams to deploy new models up to 13x faster.

2. Intelligent Orchestration: Ascend's automation engine replaces hand-coded Airflow DAGs with intelligent pipeline management. The platform understands dependencies across both dbt models and native Ascend components, triggering runs based on system events (such as upstream pipelines completing) or schedules—whichever makes sense for each pipeline.

3. Agentic Incident Response: When dbt models fail, Otto diagnoses the root cause, suggests fixes, and can implement corrections autonomously. For example, when a source table schema changes and breaks downstream models, Otto detects the failure, traces it to the schema change, updates affected model definitions, and re-runs the pipeline—often before the engineering team knows there was an issue. Teams report spending 50-70% less time on maintenance and incident response, freeing them to focus on delivering business value.

An Upgrade Path, Not a Rip-and-Replace

Unlike point solutions that only orchestrate dbt, Ascend provides an end-to-end platform for modern data operations. Teams can migrate their dbt Core projects to Ascend while gaining unified capabilities for data ingestion, native transformations, orchestration, and observability—all managed by AI agents.
"We're not asking teams to throw away their dbt code," said Knapp. "We're giving them a way to evolve from duct-taped tools to a unified, intelligent platform. Run your dbt models today, build new agentic pipelines tomorrow—all in one place."

Availability

The dbt Core integration is available in private preview. Analytics engineering teams can experience agentic workflows firsthand through Ascend's upcoming hands-on lab for Agentic Analytics Engineering with dbt Core.
To request early access, visit: https://www.ascend.io/use-case/agentic-analytics-engineering-with-dbt-core

About Ascend.io
Ascend.io is on a mission to make data engineering delightful. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud empowers data teams to build, automate, and optimize data pipelines with ease. Combining a powerful metadata core, advanced automation, and integrated AI agents, Ascend eliminates engineering toil, enabling teams to focus on innovation and delivering data faster than ever before. To learn more, visit our website: www.ascend.io

Jennifer Hurn
Ascend.io
email us here

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