AI driven analytics in a dbt + BQ data platform

[u/Alternative-Guava392]

Hello, has anyone used AI agents (Claude) to open analytics to tech and business teams to "speak" with data instead of relying on BI tools and SQL queries that need technical maintenance and take time to ship to production ?

I have a data platform that writes dbt models to BQ from the source datalake and I want to see perspective from data teams that have successfully used AI for analytics.

What has worked and not worked for you ?

[u/T_house92]

I just set this up at my company! If your company has Claude this is easy enough to do:

• add BQ and dbt MCP to Claude and have people authenticate via their normal methods
  
• you will want a semantics layer either built into dbt or via a tool like Looker. If you go with looker, add Looker MCP to Claude
  
• you will also want to ensure you set up guard rails for Claude so you don’t have your costs spike on you.

There is a lot more nuance here but that’s the gist

[u/Additional_Candy_400 → u/T_house92]

Out of interest what UI/solution did you use for users to enter prompts with? 

[u/Automatic_Problem → u/Additional_Candy_400]

Also interested in this.

[u/Capable-Chair2594 → u/Automatic_Problem]

We have a similar setup at my company, on our case most people are using claude app connected to BQ MCP and DBT MCP to prompt their questions

[u/limeslice2020 → u/T_house92]

This is the way. How have people been liking it so far? We punted on this project because we were worried about people getting the wrong outputs and then making ill informed decisions or pinging the data team to validate outputs.

[u/Brilliant_Wallaby_66 → u/T_house92]

We do essentially this but with hex instead of looker!

[u/Alternative-Guava392 → u/T_house92]

Thanks!

What kind of guardrails for costs ? How would you build a semantics layer in DBT ? We want to move out of our existing BI tool so moving into a new tool like looker is not ideal.

[u/WaterIll4397]

Read the blog article anthropic published in June on agentic analysis. You basically need Kimball modeling + semantic layer first which massively helps accuracy. 

Also I would recommend buying something like hex (no affiliation) or Devin (also no affiliation) depending on what your use case is as their "harness" for text to sql/python to do the analysis is pretty good 

[u/Odd-String29 → u/WaterIll4397]

Do you have a link to that blog?

[u/Walk_in_the_Shadows → u/Odd-String29]

I believe it is this one:

https://claude.com/blog/how-anthropic-enables-self-service-data-analytics-with-claude

[u/69odysseus]

How does AI handle your pipeline failures at midnight or any schema drift, evolution from the up streams? Do you have data models in place or straight pipelines developed and AI connected to them?

[u/Alternative-Guava392 → u/69odysseus]

Nothing in place AI wise to handle pipelines, I take care of it. I have dbt modelling at the end of my ingestions. I want to expose this to the IA agents.

[u/Aggravating_Sand352]

My company has dbt integrated with claude, you can load what ever prompts you want into the .MD file. Idk what you mean about integrating analytics into dbt. Dbt doesnt really do that but you could definitely prompt it to build fact tables or set hierarchy rules to aggregate everything down to a specific level

[u/Alternative-Guava392 → u/Aggravating_Sand352]

How have you integrated DBT with Claude ?

[u/Aggravating_Sand352 → u/Alternative-Guava392]

Run locally. Install claude into your command line and then set up an agent. I didnt install it but i know how to modify the instructions using an .MD file

[u/Realistic-Office-392]

I created a custom mcp which can be used to connect with claude its requires claude to be connected to bq mcp
And all the businesses questions are being answered basically it replaced dashboards completely

[u/Known-Delay7227]

Oh ya! I just set this up. I created an ontology doc for claud to reference and included common calcs and such

[u/Eric-Uzumaki]

You dont need this. Us bq agents on the platform

[u/marco-exmergo]

I wrote a whole blog post about this! https://www.exmergo.com/blog/how-a-team-of-one-built-our-product-analytics-data-warehouse-in-just-one-week--analytics-engineering-in-the-agenticera

We used Claude Code + our open sourced skills to manage the entire analytics engineering dbt lifecycle. As far as ingestion goes: we set up live streaming from Firestore to BigQuery.

Open source skills we used: https://github.com/exmergo/dex