How AI is reshaping the way data practitioners work

Sam Ferguson, staff product designer at dbt Labs, joins Faith, Paige, and Ric to talk about what AI is actually changing in the day-to-day work of data practitioners and designers alike.

From inline code comments as agent context to the collapse of build costs in product design, Sam shares how constraints that have long defined both design and data work are starting to reorganize. The group also gets into collaboration, governance, and why a lot of the hardest questions AI is surfacing are ones the data industry has been asking for years.

In this episode:

• Why inline code comments could become one of the most valuable inputs for AI agents working in your dbt project

• The typist analogy: how constraints disappear and roles reorganize around new ones

• What outcome-driven workflows actually mean for data practitioners and how it connects to state-aware orchestration

• Why human attention is becoming the real constraint in a world of infinite answers and infinite features

• How to think about delegating the parts of your job you like least to AI, and protecting the parts that matter most

• Why governance and coherence at scale are the next big challenges as agentic workflows become the norm